Episode 14: How I Love You, You Are the One

This week’s episode is Vera Farmiga’s 2011 debut feature Higher Ground, a beautiful comedy-drama new to Sam and Alissa, recommended by friend, colleague, and coreligionist Justin Chang, the film critic for the LA Times. Justin reviewed the movie for Variety when he and Sam worked there together; Sam, Alissa, and Justin all more or less lived in this movie as kids, which is surprising since Sam grew up in a white Presbyterian church in the South, Alissa grew up in a white non-denominational church in New York, and Justin grew up in a Chinese Baptist church in California.

We talk about a lot of evangelical cultural stuff, but most of it ought to be legible to anybody who likes the movies; one name that may not be familiar to our non-religious listeners is Keith Green, a Christian singer-songwriter who died very young but wrote a huge number of songs that are sung in churches by people like us who grew up in churches like our parents.

Our episode art on the website is a stained-glass window in All Saints’ Church of Tudley, a 12th-century Anglican church in the county of Kent, in England, whose windows are designed by Marc Chagall. The photograph is by Klaus D. Peter, who made it freely available on Wikimedia, and has our gratitude. Chagall was commissioned to design the windows on the church as a memorial to Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, who died at sea in 1963 when she was 21, by her parents Henry and Rosemary. When Chagall arrived for the dedication of the east window in 1967, he declared that he would do the rest of the windows in the church, as well. He did, and the last were installed in 1985 shortly before his death. They can be seen here.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Higher Ground is copyright 2011 Sony Pictures Classics, and brief audio excerpts are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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