Vitus

Vitus, a Swiss movie, hit the big screen in 2007. It won a Swiss film award that year.

I'd never heard of it. One website said upon release, its box office was $28,092; another said its US box office was $186,492.

It is about an intelligent child prodigy, Vitus, who is controlled when she realizes she has a real wunderkind on her hands. Her control goes too far and he decides he wants to be an ordinary kid. He uses his intelligence "being ordinary" to find his way to autonomy.

Spiritually, this is one of the best movies, among a very, very few, I have ever seen.

It is a heart warmer, but it goes far beyond that. A heart warmer may produce warm fuzzy feelings, but it doesn't produce the feeling of sheer joy and vitality that we all seek although we may have given up on it. A worked-for achievement does that. My spirit soared seeing this movie. In fact, I thought I would burst. My soul heard the music of its possibility. My mind was spinning.

Vitus is the healthy ego. He may go through rough times, but his spirit and intelligence is unable to bend to the dictates of society around him.

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, she describes this feeling. "She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."

Yes, deliverance. I got it.