Spoiler Alert: Do not read this Shabbat encouragement unless you have already seen or do not plan to watch the movie “Remarkably Bright Creatures” on Netflix starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman (as well as Marcellus the octopus). The big reveal occurs in the last ten minutes of the movie so if you do watch it I encourage you to be patient, for the movie moves a bit slowly.

Why am I writing a movie review as this week’s encouragement? Because it is encouraging.

The narrative follows two ordinary people but is told through the eyes of a not so ordinary narrator, an omniscient octopus named Marcellus. We enter his thoughts as he discusses his observations of the oceanographic center’s cleaning lady Tova (Sally Field) each evening as she works. He eventually adds to his observations and commentary a young struggling musician Cameron (Lewis Pullman) who is visiting this remote area of the Pacific Northwest in order to find his father. As Tova’s capacity to clean diminishes Cameron is hired as her replacement, and so, the two meet and spend time together so Cameron can be trained by Tova.

Being two very different personality types and generationally separated their interpersonal dynamic is anything but charming. Their relationship is challenging which makes for a good story. Throughout the movie we see Cameron as an angry drifter feeling rejected as a child by a drug using mother, the situation forcing him to be raised by others. All he had of his father was presumably a class ring with his initials. Cameron had been told that his father was a local real estate tycoon only to find out that was not true.

We experience most of the movie learning about Tova, a widow who in many ways had checked out of life after the death of her teenage son Erik years earlier, for she blamed herself for his death. The night it happened they had exchanged angry words and it was unclear if his death had been an accident or suicide.

Most of the movie follows Tova and Cameron’s rocky interactions before either learns the truth of Cameron’s parentage and the circumstances surrounding Erik’s death. (Reveal coming up. Last chance to stop reading . . . )

By the miraculous intervention of the omniscient Marcellus, Cameron and Tova learn that Tova’s son Erik is Cameron’s father making Cameron Tova’s grandson! This knowledge creates life changing viewpoints that suggest Cameron’s life going forward will be quite different than it had been up until then. His being made aware of his father’s death while his mother was pregnant with him gave Cameron her perspective.

Feeling rejected by his mother was the repeating soundtrack in Cameron’s head throughout his life leaving him with a heart filled with anger, loss, rejection, suspicion, a life drifting, seeking. What a different perspective he now had. Rather than thinking he had been rejected by her, he was able to walk in her shoes, a teenager processing the death of the father of her baby and facing a future as a single unwed mother.

These facts do not make her decisions right nor his emotions invalid. Perhaps this knowledge previously would have helped him to look at her actions differently vis-à-vis her relationship with him. Although abandoned, his knowing her situation opened up the ability for a new way for him to process the absence of her love.

Tova had no idea her son even had a girlfriend, let alone that he was to become a teenage father. She had berated herself for years as possibly the cause of his death only made more painful if perhaps by his own hand. To learn his death had nothing to do with her freed her heart from an agony that had been unbearable. The loss was still hard but the new knowledge of its circumstances opened up the ability for a new way for her to process the absence of his love.

After watching this movie so many lessons of life were stirring, ones I want to share, for we all can so easily succumb to falling victim to false conclusions about others with whom we are in relationship. This reality is often due to our insensitivity or lack of knowledge of their personal situations, the hurt we feel causing our lives to become as bereft of joy and misguided as were Tova’s and Cameron’s, not to mention our cultivating unforgiving hearts by our blindness.

We so often interpret another’s actions by how they are felt and not by how they are intended. Especially in interpersonal and familial situations where emotions run high it becomes even more complicated to put ourselves in the other’s shoes. We have these interactions every day and they typically run smoothly for we know the other person. Yet there are times when, being human, we just miss the intent for we’re having a bad day, we’re tired, they’re having a bad day, they’re tired, we/they have no idea what’s really going on in the other’s life and yet we’re to be interacting.

We don’t really know the other person’s story, just as Cameron of his mother and Tova of her son. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps we are to love unconditionally as the model, the goal, while recognizing how hard that it is to do when we feel hurt by another’s actions, words, or lack thereof. Yet that is what this movie brought home to me, a vivid reminder of the challenge and the reality. Seeing the extreme negative impacts on Tova and Cameron of false assumptions about another’s motives really drives home the point, and most poignantly by the most remarkably bright creature I’ve ever seen on the big screen (well the TV screen) – Marcus the octopus.

As he was all-knowing and engineered the big reveal in a completely self sacrificing way I was reminded of Yeshua’s command to us to love one another as He loves us. This charming film was a reminder of the life sapping results of doing otherwise and of the unanticipated joy that awaits when we do as He so lovingly directs.

Shabbat shalom.

Diane