The Last Word is a movie from 2017, starring Shirley MacLaine and Amanda Seyfried, that almost nobody saw or liked very much. It grossed $2.9 million (according to Wikipedia) and has a 40% approval (according to Rotten Tomatoes). It gets an average score of 4.9 out of 10. It is not widely considered a masterpiece of modern cinema.

But what does that mean, really? I wonder if those 40% absolutely LOVE it, if it’s their favorite movie? Or if it changed the lives of those who paid to see it in a theater? What if you watched it on Netflix, like I did, and it changed yours? Then, does it really matter how much money it makes or what kind of score it gets?

Episode 7 of the Star Wars saga (The Last Jedi) is often inexplicably considered the worst. Many, many Star Wars fans loudly hate it. And they’re all wrong. It’s fantastic and it would be impossible for me to care less what its Rotten Tomatoes score is (incidentally, critics give it a 91% while the audience rates it at 41%). These reviews can be interesting, but hopefully have no bearing on your own enjoyment. If it is meaningful to you, but not critics in Cleveland or college kids in Portland, it is still meaningful to you. You decide, not a legion of internet trolls. Or not even your friends.

Anyway. The movie is about an aging super-successful woman who hires a local obituary screenwriter to write her pre-death obituary. As it turns out, it’s not a great life to be remembered, so they start a journey to re-make her life into one better memorialized. As I write it, it sounds underwhelming, like one you’ve seen a thousand times. You know exactly what’s going to happen, there really isn’t anything new here. There were lots of Lifetime-esque tropes and eye-rolling dialogue.

BUT the journalist is writing a collection of essays that she lets no one read, afraid of any rejection. There’s a love interest (of course) that she keeps at arm’s length. She lives a safe unfulfilling life. The subject of the obit is a battle axe, terrible to everyone, ostracizing her family and everyone unlucky enough to have ever come across her path. Neither connects, truly, with anyone until they do with each other. One learns the joy of relationship while the other begins to find her own identity and is freed by that newfound authenticity.

Maybe we can relate, right? How many of us struggle to be ourselves, constantly choosing between vulnerable honesty and our carefully curated images? How about trust, and the fear of rejection & abandonment?

This movie was nothing special unless it was, to you. It would probably fit the description of a “guilty pleasure,” if you believe in that sort of nonsense. We’re all affected by different things at different times, sometimes it’s through a classic award-winning beloved film or a throwaway song on side 2 of a bad album. A commercial storyline or jingle can work as a sledgehammer, opening our hearts to truth. I think the best compliment any artist could ever receive is connection, that their work landed and moved even one person in the audience.

The “dumb” movie that bombed at the box office and in reviews, that I really loved, moved me and no critical score can diminish its beauty to me.

Of course, I think we’re all artists, too, and connection is the purpose of our greatest work, our lives. I also happen to think that anything we do that doesn’t move us closer to each other is opportunity squandered. We’re all looking for those sweet moments that help us feel less alone, even loved, and when we find them, they move us closer to our original divine design. That’s why they feel so right & natural, and anything else is so uncomfortable. It takes an overwhelming amount of courage to engage with our lives, and it’s possible that a movie with terrible reviews can give it to us.