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A Brush With Fate (Hallmark TV, 2003)
 | Information at Internet
Movie Database |
| Themes
 | Difficulty Recognizing
Evil - Beauty shows itself to be Evil
 | "A Brush with Fate" traces the history of a "famous"
painting from the 18th century to its present owner. The movie opens when
an art teacher/artist takes a teaching job at a private school. As he goes
to meet several faculty at lunch, he notices a non-descript, plain, middle
aged, very myopic female teacher. He asks his collegues about her. They
explain that she is the literature teacher and that she is a bit
eccentric. Later she comes to the art teacher's
classroom and she proved to be as eccentric as his colleague had warned.
She invites him to her home and introduces him to her father who is
wheelchair bound. He unable to speak because of a series of strokes. She
is unwavingly devoted to him. When the art teacher suggests that she get
additional help for him, she balks. She leads the art teacher to a viewing
room and in it is the famous painting. She tells him that it is by the
famous artist, "Vemeer." This time he balks and tell her that there are
fewer than forty Vemeer paintings extant. That when she shows him all the
research that she has done, hence the story begins as she traces the
history of the painting and the lives of the previous owners. The stories
are rich. Afterwards, the art teacher asks, "how did it come to be in your
possession?" The story continues as she tells
her father's part in it, an officer in the Nazi regime. The father came
and drove a Jewish family from their home. As the foot soldiers were
pushing them out of their home, her father notices the painting. He was so
intrigued by it that he admired it for what seemed like hours, meanwhile a
little Jewish boy had hidden beneath the dinner table. As he finished
admiring the painting, he kindly called the little boy from underneath the
table and asks tenderly, "would you like to go with me?" Then he leads the
little boy by the hand and removes the picture from the wall then they
leave. As the spinster is weaving this tale, she
has the art teacher's rapt attention. He asks, "where did your father take
him?" She told him to the concentration camp. Then she nostagically muses
that her father had only one regret...that he didn't rise higher in rank
in the Nazi regime. Disgusted, the art teacher bounds from the house. She
runs after him and castigates him for his morality. In her tirade she
tells him such devotion to the painting is LOVE. In the middle of the
night she packs up her father, her research and their painting and
disappears. I think this movie makes excellent
sermon illustrations about idolatry and secrets and how they can enslave
us. (Pastor Angela Shannon,
Trinity English Lutheran Church, Ft.
Wayne, Indiana) |
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