Millions (2004): A Christmas(ish) Film for the Family
The backdrop for Millions is a country about to change its currency. Money, however, is of no interest to the seven year old Damian Cunningham, who views it as just a thing, and things change. One minute something’s there, and you can cuddle up to it. The next minute it’s gone, like a Matleser.
Or a Mom.
In one early scene, the Cunningham family is moving house. We see the father standing on the sill of a door looking into the house that he and his two boys have emptied. Faintly we hear past memories. A woman is laughing. The father and children are playing. The loss the family has experienced, in the death of the man’s wife, is apparent on his face.
New faces in a new school, Damian’s older brother Anthony coaches Damian on making the right first impression. Keep off the weird stuff, Anthony warns, referring, perhaps, to Damian’s eccentric interests. It’s too late, however. One scene previous, we’ve experienced Damian contributing to a classroom conversation about admired persons. Students are identifying different soccer players, and the teacher, looking for persons other than athletes, finds in Damian an obliging response:
[Teacher] Damian? [Damian] St. Roch, sir. [Teacher] Who’s he play for? [Damian] No one, sir. He’s a Saint. [Teacher] Oh, well, that’s better. Go on. [Damian] He was so worried that he might say something bad that he said nothing at all for 20 years. [Teacher] We could do with a couple like him in this class. Thank you, Damian. [Damian] I like a lot of the virgin martyrs too. Like St. Agatha. She ripped her own eyes out so she wouldn’t have to marry this man. [Class]: Ew… [Damian] Or St. Catherine of Alexandria. They tried to kill her by crushing her to death on a wheel, but she made the wheel explode and all the splinters killed people in the crowd. [Class]: Ew…
Damian’s intimacy with Catholic heroes stems not simply from his having read about them, but also from his conversations with such persons, and his experiencing of them in his company. It catches the viewer by surprise when we see Clare of Assisi, for example, joining Damian in a hermitage he has constructed from cardboard boxes. The experience is short-lived, however, as a backpack filled with cash falls from apparently nowhere and crushes his hermitage.
Millions unfolds by exploring the ways in which each boy wants to spend the money. Nine year old Anthony, described as having “a good heart” but just not knowing “where it is,” wants to invest the money in real estate and increase its value, while Damian wants to distribute it among the poor.
Damian buys dozens of birds and frees them into the wild. Encountering Francis of Assisi, Damian asks: “You did this, didn’t you?” to which Francis responds that it was his own first act as a saint. When Damian asks what Francis did next, the saint from Assisi responds that he washed a leper. This confuses Damian and Francis tells him “you could just help the poor Damian.”
And he does. In fact, Damian and Nicholas of Myra do some work together, when they fill with cash the mail-box of Damian’s neighbors. The Ugandan Martyrs bring Damian up to date with the crisis in Africa, informing Damian that because so many persons cannot afford clean water, diseases are rampant, while a rough-spoken Peter the Apostle drops in and advises Damian that when he is sending money to charities, he should not tick off the box which allows those charities to pass along his information to other like-minded organizations. You’ll be besieged, man. Damian seems not to care.
Damian just wants to be good, and as much as he loves those who appear to him, there’s really only one saint he wants to see. Clare hasn’t seen Damian’s mother Maureen, but then again, Clare tells Damian, it is infinite up there. Absolutely bloody infinite. Joseph the Worker hasn’t heard of Maureen either, and asking Damian whether Maureen was a virgin martyr just confuses the boy. Damian has to repeat the name “Maureen” to Nicholas:
[Damian] St. Maureen. She’s new. [Nicholas] What did she do? [Damian] Skin care. She worked on the make-up counter at Self-Ridges. [Nicholas] Doesn’t ring a bell but then I don’t get out much.Millions is a touching story with lots of laughs. Based on the novel Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce, and adapted to screen by Danny Boyle, Millions celebrates the goodness of faith and the beauty of innocence, as well as the power that exists in love to transform those who experience it. Encouraged is the beautiful vision of God that Damian holds, even if Millions recognizes that, as we get older, such a vision will be harder to maintain. As Wordsworth once wrote:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore; — Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I can see no more.It does not mean, however, that what we once saw we didn’t really see, or won’t ever see again.
K.
Kelly Wilson is a Seminarian for the Archdiocese of Winnipeg. Besides Vox-Nova he writes at his blog Musings (where this post first appeared on 8 November).
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MILLIONS is one of those wonderful little films that sticks with you forever even though, try as you will, just a few years later you can’t remember what it’s called. Thanks for jogging my memory!
Anne, thanks for the comment. I haven’t perfected the art of a movie reaction, and therefore these sorts of posts are significantly less read than one’s about gay rights or dead heroes. All the same, I am glad you enjoyed Millions. I did also…
Kelly:
We watched this movie a few years ago on recommendation by Netflix, and it’s a definite 5-star. Since most of the money in the story enters by way of obviously evil people committing an obviously evil deed, the story says much about relationships between evil, innocence and redemption.
Glad you liked it, Frank. It’s not a terribly well known film even though it is directed by Danny Boyle who is fairly well known…