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Delighted to have special Valentine's guest Rene Gutteridge on the blog today talking about Old Fashioned
I loved this movie! Though it is not showing in Canada right now, I was so privileged to watch a preview copy. If you would like to read some of my thoughts on it, please go here
Another note: Old Fashioned is a movie which resonates with the Christian experience and speaks best to the Christian experience. Please keep this in mind if you decide to see it.
The Real
Message Behind Old Fashioned
By Rene
Gutteridge
Years ago, when my husband and
I were first married, we decided to boycott Valentine’s Day. Besides the awful commercialism of it, it
also brought along with it false senses of emotion. In our youth, getting a card or a bear or a chocolate
rose meant we were valued. If those
items were received, it sent us on highs that rivaled certain subsets in
Colorado, and lows if our school lockers remained empty. In our college days, spending Valentine’s Day
alone was cause for consideration of our very existence. Will
anybody ever love me? Am I destined to
spend life alone? Am I worthy for even the
sun to shine upon me?
Then, as a young married couple, it was unclear if a box of chocolates
was sufficient or if it should be diamond earrings. Nobody knew.
Hallmark’s message was pitting itself against Kay Jewelers and it was
just so darn confusing.
For that reason—and the fact
that we had little money—we decided to blow off Valentine’s Day, nobly—if not
naively—choosing to love each other like every day was Valentine’s Day.
The sentiment mentioned above
lasted about a year, until wedded bliss wore off and we mistakenly decided we
could afford a house. Suddenly, our pupils were not heart shaped anymore.
The actual boycott of
Valentine’s Day lasted a full five years, until our firstborn was old enough to
understand what Valentine’s Day meant: gifts of candy that he wasn’t allowed to
normally have. This in fact was its own
lie. He had candy every day—rewarded at
preschool for saying his alphabet, rewarded at home for aiming at the toilet.
Somehow Valentine’s Day had convinced us that this was the only day that candy should
be had, when in fact candy was had whenever we wanted. So Valentine’s Day was not spent gifting each
other, but rather our children, then stealing their candy after they went to
bed because they don’t need all that.
As our kids grew older, Valentine’s Day became a chance to buy them
cool things and win unprecedented favor, according to the Today’s show, until
it turned into the holiday where they expect cool things because of their
belief that they are highly favored. Now
we spend the week of Valentine’s Day lowering everybody’s expectations. “A new iPhone?” they’ll ask. “How about new ear buds,” we reply.
My husband, Sean, and I have
been married 19 years. I can honestly say they’ve gone by in a flash. Our life circumstances in general have had a
lot of different challenges, and in place of romance, we’ve often times
relented to simply trying to survive particularly rough seasons. Some people may rebuff this, scolding us for
not taking the time to date each
other and spend certain anniversaries on Groupon cruises.
But what has been forged
through these fires has been something awfully deeper than date night. Those vows we spoke to each other years ago
have become rock solid. We have found
ourselves on the other side of them, realizing we didn’t just say them, but kept them. You sort of come crawling out of the tar pit
with your backside smoking. You collapse
to the ground, reach for one another with grotesque, black, melty hands and
say, “My gosh, we made it.” You might
smell like a rancid version of sulfur but you’re not leaving the other man
behind.
As you can see, I’m the
picture of romance. The truth is, I’m
not a big fan. The idealist behind
Valentine’s Day—Cupid himself—is sort of where the problems start, and it’s
downhill from there. Not that romance
doesn’t have its place. But when all your feelings begin and end on the shallow
sensibilities of a pudgy man-child in a
diaper, you’ve already shot yourself in the foot with the kind of weapon only
Jennifer Lawrence wields well.
So, when Tyndale asked me to
read Rik Swartzwelder’s script for Old
Fashioned, to see if it was a project I could wrap my enthusiasm around, I
wasn’t thrilled at first. Though Tyndale has a talent for picking worthwhile,
out-of-the-box projects, I assumed from the title that Old Fashioned would be the kind of story that you’d expect from the
genre—the delightful little wrapped chocolate inside a predictable heart-shaped
box.
I opened the script up late
one night, intending to read thirty or so pages just to get a feel for how
romancy this thing was going to get. I figured I’d need a good, stiff espresso
in the morning to push myself through the rest of it. My view is that romance carries you about as
far as a man can reasonably carry a woman without grunting—which is basically just
on the other side of the threshold. Then
you’re dropped with a thud and forced to dust yourself off. Romance as the world has shown us lasts as
long as the heart shaped chocolate box, the one with a measly five
chocolates. You couldn’t spring for the one with twenty?
But Old Fashioned surprised
me. This was not, as people have
presumed, a story about the right way to do romance. “We’re Old Fashioned, you’re not, so we’re
better than you.” Deep within this story
is this amazing gem…the thing that I emotionally collapsed over…the reason that
I wanted to be, I desperately had to
be, a part of this project. The reason
why I read it straight through that night.
The story is about
brokenness. It’s told through the eyes of two characters. By-the-book Clay is the epitome of brokenness
through sin, climbing his way back to forgiveness through rules he’s imposed
upon himself and everyone else. Free-willed
Amber is running from a past and a life that has brought her nothing but grief,
refusing to be caged by anything ever again, including a man.
These two characters find
their way to each other, perplexed by the other’s choice of coping
mechanisms. In the midst of viewing
themselves as virtually unlovable, they find the courage to love anyway. And birthed right there is healing. And from healing, hope. And from hope, love. And from love…date night.
What drew me so much to Old Fashioned was that it was real.
So often we want to idealize romance, and in particular Christian
romance and love. We want to step it out
like an AA program. We want an owner’s
manual as if it were a Buick. We take
Solomon’s book on love and forget the heart- rending stories of the other
lovers of the Bible, whose commitments to one another withstood some of the
harshest, most treacherous and least romantic environments ever recorded.
Old Fashioned will make you squirm, because it reveals two
characters crushed by a broken world, chained to unsightly pasts, clawing their
way to feeling loved again. You’ll
squirm because you’ll see yourself in them.
That’s what hooked my heart. That’s why I cried when I read the script,
and then cried again when I wrote the book and then again when I watched the
movie. There is a line in the book: Be a good steward of your pain. This story sheds all the preconceived notions
and sparkly fairy dust of what worldly and
Christian romance should be, and simply follows two characters along a painful path
of self-discovery right into God’s grace.
At 42, romance looks different
to me than it did when I was 22, and even 32.
The landscape has changed. The
priorities have changes. The definition
has changed. I no longer feel the guilt
of months gone by without date night.
The other day Sean and I went couch shopping. More fun couldn’t have been had. We walked around, plopping our backsides down
on various cushions, trailed closely by sales-associate-by-commission Graham,
who was desperately hoping we’d pick one sooner than later, and something over
five-hundred bucks please. (We could see it in his eyes.) We wandered into the leather and entertainment
section and dreamed about a 60 inch TV in front of leather recliners that had
butt warmers and blue tooth surround sound that filtered through the night-glow
cup holders on each arm.
As we left, Sean quipped, “You
know you’re old when couch shopping is a date!”
And we laughed about that and had Starbucks and reminisced about our
first couch. “Why,” Sean asked, “did we pick out that pattern?” We spent a good half hour trying to remember,
because it was hideous.
After you spend time by book
or movie or both with Clay Walsh and Amber Hewson, you will find yourself
cheering these two on, not because they’ve hands down beat out every romantic
endeavor known to man, but because they crawled out of the tar pit, learned of
their great value apart from one another, and found forgiveness and healing
from their own brokenness, so they could be together.
But let me just warn you
now—this story has managed one of the most romantic endings I’ve ever had the
pleasure of writing. And I gobbled it
down like a box of chocolates. Why?
Because it felt real.
Buy the novelization of Old Fashioned
visit Rene on the web
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