Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day Nov 2023-Jan 2024

Every morning I read scripture assigned for the day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

NovemberScott Robinson of Philadelphia put me off with his twee spelling of "Renaissance Faires" in his r&eacut;sum&eacut;, (not to mention what one thinks of Renaissance fairs per se). But he drew me into his meditations, first by laying down his defenses, then by making thoughtful use of scripture and experience.

Robinson owns a set of character flaws that I can identify with. Responding to the parable of the weeds, he writes, "I wish I weren't so defensive. I'm confident God didn't plant that." Nor did God plant his envy, his quick temper, and his need for approval. We may assume that the burning of weeds is an image for God's punishment of infidels, but it's more meaningful to imagine that God rips and burns the weeds in us so that we may grow into our true nature.

Much to his own surprise, Robinson wept in church at the parable of the mustard seed. Why? He had been lashing out at his family in his impatience with rehabilitation following surgery; the parable convicted him of expecting instant results from a tiny seed. When Robinson reviews some hard times in his life, such as when he had to sleep in a barn or bathe in the sink of a public restroom, I could buy in, especially when he admitted, "But I could always call my family and return home." We can all count on God, he says, but we should remember that Jesus at Gethsemane did not call his Father for a bailout.

In one meditation, Robinson imagines how others see him. He is separated from his wife, he once exploded at a pharmacist's mistake, he didn't honor a trans person's pronouns: so much for his faith, they must be thinking. He sorrowfully concludes with a quote attributed to St. Francis, "Remember that you may be all the Gospel your neighbor will ever read."

Robinson doesn't like verses that impute violence to Jesus, such as the swords that shoot from the divine mouth in Revelation 19. Like Robinson, a young woman he knew in seminary downplayed such verses, her reaction to her upbringing in a macho fundamentalist church. But she recognized that the "flower power" Jesus is good only for people of her socio-economic status, shielded from hunger and violence. Justice needs a Jesus who wields a sword. For November 11, Robinson selects a line from Psalm 16, He broke the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword, and the weapons of battle and introduces the saint honored on that date, Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier turned Bishop. Robinson tells us that Martin gave up weapons to use his moral clout to save prisoners from torture and execution, even the heretics.

Robinson applies Micah's words to us: Hear this, you who build Jerusalem with wrong (Micah 3.9-10). Robinson writes,

They all seem like isolated decisions. A church locks the doors, keeping out desperate hurricane refugees. A community makes it harder for people of color to vote or bans books by and about them in our libraries. We allow the income gap between rich and poor to grow ever wider. ...We proclaim ourselves a Christian nation so often that it doesn't seem possible that God could be looking upon us with anger.

Robinson puts a happy twist on parables of the kingdom. In one parable, the kingdom of heaven is like the treasure that a man finds; another begins The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. The merchant gives up everything he has to buy the pearl of great price. Robinson writes, "In the previous parable, the man is enriched by finding the kingdom. In the second, the kingdom is enriched by finding us. We are the pearl of great value. It is for us that God gives everything." In the bottom line, we're asked, "Have you thought of yourself as the pearl God seeks? How does imagining yourself as the treasure in the field shape your relationship with God?" Let's think on that.

DecemberAptly named Christine Woodside often draws on her experiences outdoors in New England. She is a writer, editor, wife, and mother in Connecticut. Something I'd like to emulate in her theological reflections is her knack for finding a deeper lesson inside an obvious one.

Her very first story responds to Jesus, Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant (Mt 20.26). She remembers working at a restaurant where the boss joined the guys who unloaded deliveries at the back. That's a good example of the scripture. But there's more: she knows what the boss did only because a co-worker told her about the boss's joining the crew. The co-worker was not religious, but he's the one who taught her what Jesus meant.

Keep alert (Mk 13.33) reminds Woodside of a night in her childhood when her mother was sewing in the basement and ran upstairs to get some cloth. She found a door open to the outside and bolted it before going to bed. In the light of morning, the family realized that burglars had entered the house and must've heard her footsteps on the stairs and fled. So, like the teaching of Jesus, we should keep alert. But also, sometimes, you have to "run up the stairs without fear."

Hiking and running up steep hills a lot, Woodside naturally thinks of those activities when she reads 2 Peter 1.3, 5-7 instructs us support your faith with self-control and endurance. She feels the exercise prepares her for service. Bring me to Your holy hill gives Woodside an opportunity to turn the usual lesson on its head: such an experience does stay with us forever, in the decisions you learn from on the way, and in the gratitude for returning to home, running water, and a loving family.

Woodside loves weather, Through horrific scenes of Revelation, she sees the presence of God (21.3-4): The house of God is among mortals... God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Our consciousness of God should be like Woodside's consciousness of weather: it's more to her than the (in)convenient background to human activity. She remains acutely aware and appreciative.

January 2024The author of January's meditations has attended my church with her husband, our bishop. She's Beth-Sarah Wright, an author and speaker. Her response to Psalm 22 (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) was to quote Romans 8:26-67, about "the Spirit intercedes for us with wordless sighs." The assurance that you don't have to be able to speak what you pray comforted my sister. Wright offers Psalm 139 as an antidote to feelings that we're not good enough. When Jesus asks Philip how they'll feed 5000, it is to "test" the apostle; Wright tells how she once failed such a test by declining an offer to speak. Her father told her, "Always say yes and figure out how to do it later. God has already put inside you what is needed to accomplish the task."

Bradley Cooper's Maestro: A Star is Torn

As Leonard Bernstein went out to the maestro's podium unrehearsed and came back a world-famous conductor, so I went into Maestro a fan of Leonard Bernstein and came back a fan of Bradley Cooper. He co-wrote the screenplay with John Singer, directed the movie, acted the title role, and conducted a real-live orchestra.

By choosing to start where so many biopics end, when the artist becomes a star, Cooper turns a Hollywood cliché on its head. He's telling us that the artist's stardom is not the story.

The focus instead is established in a prologue, when Bernstein (Cooper convincing as Lenny ca. 1990) tells an interviewer, "I still see her sometimes." She is the actress Felicia Montealegre, his wife, who died of lung cancer in 1978.

When Felicia (played by Carey Mulligan) meets him at a party, he has already composed symphonic works and he's at work on a Broadway musical. She enters her relationship with him open-eyed. She knows that he is promiscuous in loves -- of music, theatre, young men, intoxicants, and cigarettes. She knows, and wants to encourage his artistic growth, as he encourages hers. Can such a marriage work? That's the question behind the rest of the film.

One of Cooper's choices was to film this very public couple's story in black and white until the point in their marriage when color TV became a thing.

A TV interview in the Bernstein home reveals how the marriage is going in 1957: not well. Felicia tells newsman Edward R. Murrow that "it's hard" to raise three children while your husband's in concert halls around the world, on Broadway writing West Side Story, in a TV studio producing an educational series. She says she scarcely has time to be an actress. The subtext is, "It's not working," audible in Carrie Mulligan's tense voice through her forced smile. To a question about conducting v. composing, Lenny says one career is public and "extroverted," while composing opens up a "grand inner life." The subtext is, you're there alone -- no wife, no children. Cooper, as Lenny, makes clear that Lenny hadn't quite realized how torn their relationship and his life are until that very moment. After a pause, he laughs that such a life can make you "schizophrenic."

Another of Cooper's choices was to make Bernstein's own music the soundtrack to his life. Seems obvious, but so effective. Lenny's exuberant, jazzy music from both the ballet Fancy Free and its spinoff musical comedy On the Town is used for a scene of Lenny and Felicia watching a rehearsal that morphs into a fantasy as they join the dancers. Lenny and his longtime lover, splitting up for the sake of appearances, kiss in Central Park for the last time to the accompaniment of "To What You Said," Bernstein's setting of Walt Whitman's poem about the end of a relationship with a "comrade" outside "the customary loves and friendships." In another scene, Felicia cries to see her husband at his best, teaching a chorus of young singers his anthem from Candide, "Make Our Garden Grow." At the gala premier of his Mass, while his music wreaths Kennedy Center with overlapping iterations of his melody for the phrase Laude, laudate -- praising God -- Bernstein grasps hands with his latest boy toy, ignoring Felicia at his other side.

A climactic confrontation takes place in their New York apartment during the Thanksgiving Parade. The family's guests can be heard outside the door, the parade can be heard and seen outside the window, while Felicia and Lenny talk over each other in waves of recrimination. I may be wrong, but I remember that Cooper filmed (and performed) it in a single continuous shot, like a prize fight with several rounds.

Cooper's most daring choice was to take six minutes of the movie to show him as Lenny conducting Mahler's Resurrection symphony in Ely Cathedral, England. No dialogue, no cuts to other locations, only the building ecstasy in Mahler's finale, the intense concentration of the orchestra players, the beatific expressions of the singers, and Lenny's full-body immersion in the music -- leaping, breathing the words, sweating, crying. We cry, too, it's so beautiful. Felicia is there, too, also crying. They embrace: it's an artistic consummation, partly resolving the long line of their story.

There is the sad coda of her cancer. For two of the most moving scenes in the film, Cooper chose to have no dialogue. Lenny, holding Felicia in her sickbed, simply breathes with her. Another scene, Lenny leaves the family in one room, closes the door and grabs a pillow to muffle his own wailing and weeping.

[Read my reflection on the composer whose face, name and music I knew before I was five, and about our phone conversation when I was around 30. See Lentennial: Bernstein at 100 (11/2018) That article includes links to my reviews of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts that featured LB's music. I've also blogged in appreciation of two people in Bernstein's life who appear in the movie at the party where Felicia meets Lenny. They are playwright-lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, doing "Carried Away," a song they wrote with Lenny for themselves to sing in the musical comedy On the Town. Comden and Green are lovingly remembered in my blogpost Make Someone Happy (11/2006)]

Mom's Feminist Marriage

Frances Smoot ca. 1970

When Dad retired, he complained that just going to the bank, the store, and the post office had taken him all morning. Mom quipped, "Try it with three small children in the car." Thus Mom described her life as a wife and mother in the 1960s.

So Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique (1963) spoke to her. Friedan begins her book with a survey of the best selling women's magazines. In 1960, a year of startling changes in politics, culture, and technology, McCall's and Woman's Day contained no mention of the world beyond the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Women, now largely college-educated, were dependent on their men and spending their days on trivial chores.

But household chores are sacred, women were told, not trivial. The "feminine mystique" was the party line that women, with their mysterious child-bearing powers, were "closer to nature" than men, to be cherished and protected from the harsh realities of the working-day world. (The hit TV sitcom Bewitched embodied the myth of the mystique, as a super-powered wife stays home doing chores while her husband goes to work, so that he can have what he calls a "normal family." Made explicit, the feminine mystique was ridiculous.)

Years later, Mom remembered how she drove with Friedan's book to a signing in downtown Pittsburgh. "But when I got to the front of the line, I saw how ugly she was and thought, no wonder her husband left her!" Mom dropped out of line.

Still, within a couple of years, Mom was changing her life. When my big sister was in elementary school, Mom became President of the PTA. She was also elected chairwoman of the local chapter of the Republican party [I remember being fascinated by the gavel that she brought home.]

So she was a community leader when Dad told her he'd taken a new job in Chicago and we'd be moving. "And you didn't even ask me?" she said. Decades later, Dad was still abashed about that. "She went along with it that time," he said, "but I never made that mistake again."

In that same conversation with my parents, they were astounded that I didn't remember Mom's Day Off. Saturdays, Dad fed us breakfast, supervised cartoon-watching, and took us on excursions to the garden center and hardware store, while she dressed up and drove away to no-one-knows where. Mom told me that her Saturdays probably saved their marriage.

In the 1970s, Mom went back to work as a teacher at Holy Innocents Episcopal School. (She'd taught sixth grade one semester before her first child started to show.) Dad encouraged her to get her Master's in Education. Laughing, they told me that he even wrote some of her papers. She became the team leader for 3rd grade and created the school's summer program, which she directed for two decades. Mom also became an entrepreneur. With friends, she purchased properties to rent or resell. She managed a pool of writing tutors that she called “The Write Connection.” When she was called forward at an all-school faculty meeting to be honored at her retirement for her 33 years of service, she astonished the crowd by doing a handspring.

Super-powered indeed.

[See my page Family Corner for much more about Mom, Dad, and their families. See my Dementia Diary about the downs and occasional ups in Mom's life since she moved alone to a retirement home near me. See also Bewitched Craft for more ways that the sitcom reflected its time.]

Dementia Diary: Mom at 89

In the photos below, Mom receives a necklace given by her mother to Mom's cousin Pat. When my sister and I visited Pat this month, she gave us the necklace for Mom to have. It made a great birthday present when Mom turned 89 a few days later.

These days, Mom appears to be engaged in anything I say with her Visiting Angel Laura. Sometimes she comments. Although her speech consists largely of half-words and non-sequiturs, her tone and expression clue us in on whether she's expressing a concern, recounting an amusing anecdote, or making a tart comment.

She didn't say much of anything during my visit Friday. I stood beside her wheelchair holding her hand while Laura chatted with me. With her free hand, Mom felt my arm and sometimes leaned in to kiss it.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward DxD Aug-Oct 2023 - Faith is a Body Thing

Every morning I read scripture assigned for that day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

AugustFr. Allen W. Farabee of Florida found so many life lessons and life questions in the scriptures for August that I'll just list highlights.

• The "hillside picnic" in Mark 6, when the crowd is anxious about having enough food, reminds Farabee of grocery-store raids at the start of COVID. For most of us, food insecurity was a frightening new experience. "In the end, the crowd is asked to sit down, and they are served -- and all eat are filled."
• "The first words spoken by a person to God in the Bible express fear" (Adam: I heard you...and I was afraid.) Stepping into the boat from the surface of the lake, Jesus says, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." Farabee comments: "In the end, it is all we want to hear."
• In the Greek marketplace, Paul speaks the language of the Athenians. Farabee asks, "Where are you called to proclaim the Good News? In what ways will you need to 'speak the language?'" (I reflected that this blog is my way of doing that -- as I find God in the books and movies and musicals of secular artists.)
• God emptied himself and took the form of a slave, in Phil.2.5-7; those who want to save their life will lose it, in Mark 8.35. Farabee comments, "I don't think such a premise can be debated. It is unprovable. But this reversal is the way of life. So says Jesus. And I believe him." That's pretty close to being the only creed we need.
• Most of our sins are not as gross as David's murderous determination to rape Uriah's wife Bathsheba, but sin still "distorts our lives." To illustrate, Farabee tells how he broke a date in 6th grade when a more attractive girl asked him to the dance. Life went on, he said, "but my soul has never forgotten. Nor should it." Yet God still used even David, and God is still at work in us.
• Psalm 88 ends without hope. Farabee recalls a time when he served a congregation that rejected him, when he "could have prayed Psalm 88 over and over." He reassures us, "Don't skip over the darkness. God is still there."
• "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink...?" Jesus asks James and John. Seeing that everyone is able to be killed, Farabee asks just what "able" means in this context? Are we "able?"
• I never noticed what Farabee points out, that the Prayer Book schedules readings that celebrate the goodness of creation for Saturdays. "Our faith begins in the goodness of creation -- or it will lead us nowhere."
• The broken pieces of rejected pottery outside an artisan's studio seemed wasteful to Farabee, until he saw the finished products inside. This gives a different spin on Mark 12.10 (a quote from Psalm 118). The stone that the builders rejected could have been a first draft, a model, for something much better. "Trust God to turn waste into glory."
• Psalm 140.10 prays for hot coals to fall upon the enemy. Farabee says, we've wished that too. "Come on. Admit it. We get hurt or offended or maligned... and the bitter impulses of our souls bubble to the surface, searing out better selves." But remember another verse for the same day, 143.10, "Teach me to do what pleases you, for you are my God."

At the end of August, Farabee responds to Mark 14.17, Jesus coming to dinner with the twelve on what will be a night of betrayal. "If you remember," Farabee writes, "we began this month scattered on the hillside, hungry... worried there would not be enough." How fitting that we end with Jesus, friends, Passover bread and wine, signifying the promise of God's kingdom. Farabee's last words to us are: "Try to remember Jesus each time you break bread, feed the hungry, and share what you have."

SeptemberJodi Belcher holds a doctor of divinity degree from Duke and continues to live and teach in Durham. What stood out to me in her morning meditations was her emphasis on the body in our scriptures. Belcher tells us how, as a teenager, she got the impression that faith was purely spiritual and the body was bad. I can identify.

She finds physicality in prayer, as when Jacob "wrestles" all night with his inner demon, and Jesus is praying apart from his friends and "falling apart" with tears at Gethsemane. In the sweeping grandeur of the Exodus story, Belcher notices "grace notes of earth and flesh" when Moses and the Lord "find each other": the flock, the bare feet, the sacred ground, and a couple of basic questions, "Who am I? Who are you?" For Belcher, the familiar phrase "faith without works is dead" is telling us "faith is a body thing," not a spiritual feeling or intellectual belief, and mostly involves "welcoming and caring for bodies, our own and our neighbor's." transition to social ills - "wages cry out" in James 5.4 -- which I read after hearing a piece on "true price of immigration"

Other familiar scriptures are more comforting or more urgent when taken as physical realities, not metaphors. "I am with you," the Lord repeats three times to Jacob (Gen 28.15). Picturing Psalm 23, Belcher wonders how "goodness shall follow me all the days of my life," since she imagines the Shepherd leading us from the front. Is goodness perhaps something we leave behind wherever we go? When Paul assures the Philippians that God "will transform the body of our humiliation [to] be conformed to the body of His glory," Belcher isn't sure what Paul is imagining (and I bet Paul wasn't, either), but at least the apostle is telling us that our bodies are worth resurrecting. Again, God derides Jonah for mourning the withering of a shrub while thinking that God wouldn't care about the destruction of Nineveh, where there are 20,000 human bodies "besides many animals." (Belcher comments that the story doesn't say that love is more important than justice, but that justice can go beyond punishment and oppression.)

When Matthew takes Jesus to his home for dinner, Belcher notes how often Jesus's ministry involves just "sitting with" people who are usually avoided. I saw a demonstration of that when I played piano for a communion service that my church offered at a retirement home. After the last hymn, a woman asked me if I could play "You'll Never Walk Alone" because her sister used to sing it, and "she's being pulled off life support in Florida right now, as we speak." She wept. Mother Pat noticed, and simply sat with her and listened to her. (Meanwhile, I did find the song's chord chart on my phone and played it on the piano, softly).

Anger makes us "liable to judgment" in Matthew 5.22, but anger may also be a physical alarm in response to an injustice or a crack in a relationship. Take care of those when you feel anger, Belcher advises us.

On the same day that Belcher reflects on James 5.4, "wages cry out," I heard a story on NPR about "the true price of immigration." When we figure how underpayment of immigrant men, women, and children for their labor keeps down prices for goods and services, while we save taxpayers' money by cutting immigrants off from such services as English lessons and medical benefits, the thought that wages cry out makes a strong physical image for injustice.

OctoberThe writer for October, Kathryn Nishibayashi, fourth-generation member of St. Mary's in LA and graduate of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, spent 12 years teaching elementary school. I'm grateful to her for reinterpreting the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) as her analogy for teaching. In a few students, now grown and still connected with her, she sees how "the seeds" she had sown took root and helped them to "grow into the people God has made them to be." But, like me, she will never know for most of her students what took, and what didn't. "The gift God gives us is not a certainty in the outcome but the honor of laboring together in the field."

Cycling Istanbul

 ←← | ← ||

Me & Amir biking in Istanbul, virtually.

Before Amir blew past me on a bike trail in Powder Springs GA, I had nothing personal to write about Istanbul. With this selfie and a fist bump, he literally handed me the personal connection I needed.

As I exerted myself to keep up with Amir, my average speed rose higher than it'd been all summer (hernia, surgery). When he relaxed his cadence, I came up alongside him to request that he not slow down.

Unlike me, Amir's a big guy, outgoing, and I soon learned that he is new to Atlanta, works cyber security for Delta and has been to Istanbul on business this year. When I reached my quota of miles for the day, we snapped a selfie, and then he took off after a pair of riders who'd passed us a minute earlier.

Without Amir, my only connection to Istanbul would be the classic crime novel that begins there, Murder on the Orient Express, and screen adaptations that I've loved. For the BBC's version, actor-director David Suchet added a prologue to the Istanbul chapter that punches up questions of law, punishment, and justice raised by the novel. He adds faith to the mix. Here's a link to What Mr. Suchet Saw: Christ in Christie. 

When I met Amir on October 2, I'd covered 300 of the 557 miles to Istanbul from my previous virtual stop in Kiev.  I gave up some riding time in October to COVID and a trip with my sister to Illinois for a visit with our oldest living relative, Cousin Pat.  I finished the last 16 miles today.  [To see my stops in other places, including San Francisco, Quebec, and Dublin, use the arrows at the top of this post and below.]

Miles YTD 2901 || 2nd World Tour Total 16,436 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA

←← | ← || Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

From Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party to A Haunting in Venice

(left) The edition I purchased in Ireland, 1977; the cast of the movie, 2023.

 

This is not a doctoral thesis, just a game I played to keep up my interest in Agatha Christie's 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, nominal inspiration for A Haunting in Venice, directed by its star actor Kenneth Branagh. I kept a mental inventory of bits from the novel that went into the movie -- which otherwise has nothing to do with the book.

The premise for the book is pretty good, with some promise of atmosphere. During a community Halloween party at the home of Rowena Drake, a small town's most prominent church lady, an awkward girl has been found dead, head submerged in the tub where kids had bobbed for apples minutes before. The teaser is that the girl had boasted loudly about having once seen a murder "years" before, only she hadn't recognized that it was murder at the time. Hercule Poirot, called into the case by his friend Ariadne Oliver, suspects that someone who overheard the girl has killed her to protect their own secret.

But, as Agatha Christie's novels go, Hallowe'en Party seems pretty tired. The murder has already happened when the novel begins, so forget about rich Halloween atmosphere. The dialogue is freighted with red herrings as people speculate about every disturbance of the past few years that the girl might have witnessed -- most of these dismissed out of hand after we've gone through the tedium of reading about them. An inordinate amount of dialogue contains phrases to the effect, nowadays, (young people, parents, legal officials) are too (coddled and immoral, too indulgent, too merciful) and the murderer is probably (one of the insane people -- addicts, probably -- that indulgent policies have allowed to roam among us). The only thing to stand out here is that the town's foreigner -- Olga Seminoff, nursemaid -- gets some respect, not always the case in Dame Agatha's books.

The movie, on the other hand, goes the other direction, more atmosphere than story. Does Venice even celebrate Halloween? A voiceover narrator says that Venice adopted the holiday from American soldiers recently stationed there at the end of World War II. Poirot is staying in Venice, retired from detective work, when his friend Ariadne Oliver invites him to help her "crack" a local seer's seance routine. The movie makers have fun with dark water, visions of the dead, crashing objects, cobwebs and skulls in tunnels, a legend of orphans left to die in the dungeon during the Plague.

I think the movie's creators also had fun picking little bits of Christie's novel to justify their claim to have "adapted" it. Here's what I picked up:

• Big picture: a Halloween party for kids at the home of a socialite named Rowena Drake.  In the novel, she is a widow whose wealthy mother-in-law died suddenly over a year before.  In the movie, she is an opera singer who hasn't sung since her grown daughter drowned in the canal the previous year.
• Ariadne Oliver, mystery novelist, is present. Her supposed love of apples is referenced several times in both stories. She invites Poirot to get involved.
• An intelligent 11-year-old boy named Leopold knows secrets about the adults in the room.
• A nursemaid named Olga Seminoff is under suspicion.
• A pair of teenagers (both of them boys in the novel, a brother and sister in the movie) rig up some ghostly special effects. The ghostly effects include sightings of spirits in mirrors.
• Someone's head is forced underwater in the tub of bobbing apples. 

For me, the best parts of both the movie and the book are those where Poirot goes on a tear, separating false claims and false theories from what must be true.   Branagh's Poirot goes moping through much of the movie, feeling a bit ill, he says, seeing things that he can't possibly be seeing -- so the moments of clarity were welcome.  

The role of the medium was built up to be a larger-than-life character, one that Michelle Yeoh inhabits with no room to spare.  Young Leopold is another scene-stealer. 

Branagh's other two Christies, based on much stronger novels, made sharper, stronger films; but I do enjoy seeing the grand structure he and his writer Michael Green have fabricated from a few clues left by Dame Agatha.

[See my Crime Fiction page for a curated list of my reflections on other Christie books and movies, including a biography of her and a memoir by the actor who portrayed Poirot for decades, David Suchet.]