Recommended Films that you can use as tools to help you better
your personal relationships.
We are a nation
of movie goers, but the insights popular films can give regarding
interpersonal relationships and family life are often overlooked.
While we are entertained, we can also be educated, because many films
can assist us in rethinking our value systems and how we behave with
our families.
We often use popular
films as teaching tools in our ACD groups to stimulate understanding
of interpersonal relationships, family life, divorce, and marriage.
The descriptions
of the films we cite can be found in a superb website called the
Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
This website is so popular it is visited by more than twelve million
movie lovers every month. The films we recommend are available in
either VHS or DVD formats (IMDB will tell you which format is available).
We are always on the lookout to expand our list of movies-for-teaching,
and you may wish to do so on your own.
Here is a sampling
of our list:
• Affliction
shows the impact of alcoholism and physical abuse on family life
and how it can damage the children, even though the parents never
divorce.
• A
Beautiful Mind provides accurate insights into mental illness
and makes for understanding and compassion.
• The
Great Santini Shows how punitive authoritarian parenting
can destroy children’s self-esteem.
• Ordinary
People includes an excellent demonstration of how a child
psychiatrist helps a depressed, suicide-prone adolescent overcome
his depression.
• Play
It Again, Sam is a very funny Woody Allen comedy about
divorce and self-renewal. The moral is be your authentic self, and
you’ll succeed in relationships. Don’t pretend to be
someone you are not.
• Raisin
in the Sun shows how racial discrimination can destroy
a family’s security.
• Scenes
from a Marriage is a superb examination by Ingmar Bergman
about how a marriage can deteriorate even though on the surface
everything seems fine. Divorce occurs because of the character’s
failure to communicate honestly and their misreading each other’s
motives and feelings.
• Traffic
is an excellent examination of how drugs can destroy the lives of
middle-class children, even though the parents never divorce.
• An
Unmarried Woman depicts self-renewal for a divorced woman
after her husband left her.
• The
Way We Were depicts how divorce can happen when two well-intentioned
people are moving in separate directions because of the different
value systems they hold.