Film picks

WHEN DIRECTOR John Ford asked a young Henry Fonda to play Abraham Lincoln in the film Young Mr. Lincoln, Fonda protested that he could not possibly take on the role of such a major figure. Ford responded: "You are not playing the Great Emancipator. You are playing a young jackleg lawyer from Springfield."

Director Catherine Hardwicke may have thought of Ford when she gave Keisha Castle-Hughes and Oscar Isaac their roles as teenage Mary and Joseph in the restrained and reverent The Nativity Story. This retelling of the classic Christmas story stands out as the best film of the year.

The Nativity Story covers the familiar: Mary's unexpected pregnancy, Joseph's frustrated response, the couple's journey to Bethlehem, Herod's anger, the Magi, sleeping shepherds and finally the birth in a cave. But in Hardwicke's hands the familiar becomes fresh again.

The Christmas card tableau evokes every nativity performance we have ever seen. But there is no triteness, sentimentality or forced piety in it because we have met this couple in the grimy reality of their village, in the crowded streets of Jerusalem and on the rocky paths to Bethlehem. We know that they are carrying out a difficult assignment, and that their hardest work is still ahead: they have to raise this infant to adulthood.

The Nativity Story delivers unexpected moments that inform and inspire. The three wise men, for example, provide the film with bits of gentle humor. In a sly moment as they leave Bethlehem, they pause to look toward Jerusalem lying across the valley and recall that Herod is waiting for their report. They look at one another and agree to go home another way. You can almost hear them chuckle as they turn their camels eastward.

Earlier, before he has heard from an angel why Mary is with child, an angry and humiliated Joseph refuses to denounce Mary and grant the villagers the right to stone her. We see the measure of the man in his loyalty to this young girl.

In another moving moment, the first shepherd to reach the manger cave is the old man the young couple met earlier on their journey into Bethlehem. A few days earlier, he had offered them the hospitality of his fire when Mary was cold and tired. When he is awakened with the message of "good tidings," he stumbles, half asleep, to the place where the brightest of the stars illuminates the cave. There, in utter awe, he reaches out to touch the child.

Babel also has a biblical theme. The film's title comes from that unwise decision by an ancient people who wanted to build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. Yahweh disapproves and, by giving humankind many different languages, drives them into isolation from one another. Must the isolation be permanent?

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu doesn't think so. He brings together people speaking different languages with stories that interconnect, beginning with an accidental shooting in a rural area of Morocco. The film moves to the story of a Tokyo teenager, then to another story in Southern California and Mexico.

The connections between the people in Babel are neither strained nor contrived. They are, from Inarritu's perspective, a series of events that reveal that we must be our brother's and sister's keeper: a bullet fired from a hill in Morocco impacts both a mother on the road below and a mother who is babysitting in Southern California.

In A Prairie Home Companion, based on Garrison Keillor's radio program, Keillor and director Robert Altman take the familiar radio format and use it to reflect on death. Altman died at age 81 a few months after the film's release, which heightens its poignancy. He had recently revealed that he had a heart transplant in the mid-1990s. He was also suffering from cancer which was not known by his film production company. But because of concerns about his health, the company hired experienced director Paul Thomas Anderson to stand by, just in case.

Also standing by is the character called the "dangerous woman" (Virginia Madsen), dressed in white and "waiting for someone" during the radio broadcast. Is she waiting for the cast member who dies backstage? Or for the young cast member obsessed with suicide? Whatever her motive, this mysterious angel has a good attitude toward death, saying at one point: "There is no tragedy in the death of an old man. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care."

That line may have come from Keillor, who wrote the script. But I would like to think that it came from Altman. It's unlikely that he saw his own impending death as a tragedy. He was still working, surrounded by old and new friends who were relishing their time with him. Not a bad way to close a satisfying career.

Little Miss Sunshine, in contrast to PHC, is the work of newcomers, the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris; it's also the first feature-length script by Michael Arndt. Little Miss Sunshine takes risks with its story of six members of the Hoover family who say and do such outlandish things that you, and certainly your Aunt Maude, would be shocked if you were not already laughing at the film's brilliant insights.