The Cinematic Odyssey through Purpose

When you break down what the best films in the cinematic landscape are, their simplest unit of beauty comes from their ability to convey purpose and how well they can translate that to an audience. Sometimes, films transcend simple enjoyment, entertainment, and the cliché action explosions. This unique group of films provide a depiction, or portrayal of what truly gives purpose to life itself.

If you like question eliciting films, and thinking about them far past the time you watch it, I have the film list for you.

If you could switch lives with Warren Buffett, including bank accounts, would you? Intuitively people choose no because of how old he is at 91 years of age, but why? Underneath one’s intuition, it shows the true value of time. There is no amount of money or material commodity that one would trade for decades of their lives, or maybe that is just me. Time is truly what gives life meaning, urgency, and preciousness.

There is no film depiction of this reality better than About Time directed by Richard Curtis, a romantic comedy that shows a young man discovering that he has inherited the ability to travel back in time to places and events in his own life. He finds love, has grief, makes friends, all while trying to fulfill his life with this wild ability. While this film has all the cliché and semantic elements that people tend to love or hate from a mainstream rom-com, it’s underlying message cuts too deep to not love. Through fixing mistakes, rewriting wrongs, and helping loved ones, he finds out that the best way to cherish the time he has is by acting as if he can’t go back, and not using his ability at all. The film really evokes the thought, if you live in a world where you can’t go back in time, why don't you act like it?

There are so many options to fill one's time with purpose and meaning. For me, it is really to the goals that one sets, the aspirations individuals dream of, and the things someone sets out to do that really dictate how to live life. In the film, Free Solo directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, and Jimmy Chin, it captures the journey of Free Soloist Climber, Alex Honald, and the realization of his dream to climb El Capitan. A climb that has never been attempted without rope and equipment, the film takes the viewer into the mind of Alex, his motivations, his past, the complexity of the task, and his ascent of the 3,000 foot rock face. Many interviewers question Alex why he risks his life climbing without a rope, and it is answered in the documentary when his mother says, “ when he's free soloing is when he feels the most alive, the most everything, the most, he feels the most.”

Why doesn’t everyone pursue with a passion the things that make them “feel the most”? When someone pursues perfection, excellence, and dedications in the field that they love; there is nothing more inspiring than that. This film has the unique ability to make me feel like a lazy bum, while simultaneously inspiring me to conquer the world, and there is something about that odd duality that I really cherish.

Those two films really play with the idealism in my heart, and maybe yours. Sometimes though, it is the films that ground us, the films that make you sit in sadness, sorrow and hurt, that really shift one's perspective. The film, American Sniper directed by Clint Eastwood, depicts the adult life of Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle through his recruitment, deployment, and post military life. This is one of those films that makes you sit there and bear at least part of the hurt that the characters feel. It is an immense perspective shifter when it comes to understanding people in the military, individuals with mental health issues, and the overall unpredictability of life. I think one of the most sobering things about joy is that it only really has meaning when it is juxtaposed with sorrow and misery.

These films begin to scratch the surface in uncovering the totality of life, and the purpose that comes with it.