“Oh, the horror.” No, this is not an homage to Francis Ford Coppola and “Apocalypes Now”; it’s the reaction of New York Times film reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis to the pro-life movie “October Baby.” On the verge of mild hysteria, Catsoulis writes:
More slickly packaged than most faith-based fare, “October Baby” gussies up its anti-abortion message with gauzy cinematography and more emo music than an entire season of “Grey’s Anatomy.” But not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women’s health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.
Catsoulis is a bridled leftist; she makes her sympathies clear but seems to make sporadic efforts at even- handedness. Witness her review of “The Iron Lady,” the biopic of Margaret Thatcher starring Meryl Streep:
[T]his demeaning biopic of Margaret Thatcher reduces one of the 20th century’s most important political figures to a bossy, intractable scold . . . Watching it, you would never know she was a strong-willed beacon for many young British women who aspired to more than housekeeping and child-rearing: Even when we loathed her policies, we could not help but long for her spine.
But the leftist venom sometimes does occasionally burst forth, as when she vilified Ben Stein’s documentary “Expelled” as “an unprincipled propaganda piece … One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time …”
So what do “Expelled,” a documentary that championed Intelligent Design, and “October Baby,” a film that decries abortion, have in common?
Religious faith. That’s what makes leftists like Catsoulis crazy. What they see as attempts at inculcating guilt and fear are, in reality, attempts to forward a message about the goodness of faith. The left may attempt to play movies like “October Baby” as a war on women, but in reality, the reviewers have declared a war on religion.