While at first blush The Lost and Found Family might appear to be just another simple drama for America’s faith community, it is a lot more (you can read the synopsis here). The first time through, I didn’t give it a lot of credit and I think I had my guard up. Since I had a review copy and needed to return it, I gave it another watch and I loved it the second time around. Why? Well, it is an honest story of compassion and acceptance and an ode to how messy love and community can be and how worthwhile it is to get over ourselves and really learn to embrace life in all its uncertainty.
The only reason The Lost and Found Family ended up in my DVD-player at all is because I am friends with Ellen Bry. The film is inconsistent with my general watching habits. It is a “heartwarming and inspirational family drama” which is code for being Christian. Because I love Ellen, I gave it two watches with my mom — my family — and have to say that while I liked it well enough the first time around, I really enjoyed it the second time.
The story is simple. When Ester Hobbes, played by Ellen Bry, loses her universe-of-one, the man of her dreams, suddenly and unexpectedly to a sudden heart attack, she receives an inheritance unbefitting her position in Chicago society. Unbeknownst to Ester, her husband had made some terrible investments and, though about to turn the corner back to success, was pretty much broke when he passed, leaving his wife destitute — almost.
What Ester’s husband had done, however, was buy a shabby property in Jackson, Georgia, in her name — a boarding house that would require her to acquire residency in the house before she could force these boarders out and sell the house for a pretty penny. So, even before she packs up and heads to Georgia, she puts the building on sale. As a reward, when she arrives with some luggage and a duffel of dolls, Ester is not only shunned but blamed by just about everyone with such verbal abuse that even I was shocked and appalled.
I really have to hand it to actors Lucas Till and Jessica Luza for being such brats in the roles of the two insufferable teens, Justin and Teri — they really got under my skin — I personally wanted to wash their mouths out with soap and Ester handled the whole thing a lot better than I, that’s for sure, especially against a house full of actors who did an excellent job at being both hateful and hate-able. Well, everybody finds themselves in the same boat in the end. What are they going to do about it? This is when the movie starts getting good.
My mother Barbara, 72, explained why she liked the movie the second time: “the first time around, I was so shaken by the situation and by how rude everyone was to each other in the first twenty-minutes that I never recovered. The second time, I knew that everything was going to turn our alright so I let myself enjoy the sophisticated details of the movie.”
So, once we waded through the slow bits and the rough bits, the movie unfolded into quite a spiritually-sophisticated movie that, while mentioning the Bible in a couple scenes, spent more time modeling moral and right behavior than preaching it. The moral of the tale, in my humble estimation, is that the Bible is only words until we make it come alive in our mission and ministry, that what we say has a lot less to do with our happiness, with our love, and with our family than what we do: for ourselves, for our family, for others, and for our community.
This sort of engaged compassion is hard, doubly so when you’re not related, trebly so when you’re under duress. What this movie shows, also, is that even a deep knowledge of the Bible, an overwhelming faith in God, is not enough unless you’re willing to slog through God’s creation, slog through the messiness that is hurt and fear and insecurity, slog through who’s kin and who’s not, and then get to a place where everyone lowers their guns and takes a step back.
While this isn’t a preachy movie it does espouse authentic Christian values: turning the other cheek, responding to hate with love, loving your enemy. While these bratty kids are certainly not lepers, they have been banished into the less desirable part of town, into a boarding home, the foster children of two over-wrought foster parents who are doing the best they can with what they have — and have, before Ester arrives, lost sight of why they started a boarding house and why they even became foster parents at all.
In terms of story-telling and the reliability of the narrator, I noticed that the point of view of the film is very subjective — all from Ester’s fancy Chicago upper-crust point of view. In my opinion, the movie is told from her point of view, which is from the point of view of someone who comes from a very neat, contained life where even her remaining “children” are literal dolls (she lost a son, something she reveals later).
From this, she is dropped into a “squalid” and wild flop house, which is, from her point of view, full of lives as chaotic and dismal as any she could imagine, rife with rat traps and paper plates. Through her eyes, you see something completely broken and abandoned, completely worth killing, worth letting die. What Ester doesn’t see is the love. She can’t recognize the love because it was disguised in dysfunction.
None of this would work without the friend Ellen Bry, who is able to act as the glue of this crazy little story. She could have played Ester like Mary Poppins or like Deborah Kerr in The King And I, but like everyone else in that household, they were all so tired, worn out, and just in need of some understanding. Even though I may be biased, Ellen’s portrayal of Ester as calm and imbued with grace is the right way — and only Ellen could have pulled it off.
The movie is ultimately about compassion and acceptance: putting down your shield, your armor, and your broad sword. It is about taking a leap of faith. The two sides, Ester and the family, both profess of having faith. The family professes to be a family of faith but they’re realizing how maybe their faith has waned because they have become too embroiled in everyday life to remember why they all started all of this in the first place.
