Charlotte Gray (PG-13, 2001)

Cate Blanchett plays Charlotte Gray, a Scottish woman working in London who is recruited to assist the French resistance. The pilot she loves has been shot down over France, and she has some hope that if she gets there, she will be able to find him. Charlotte is brave, smart, highly principled, and well trained. But nothing can prepare her for the reality of being behind enemy lines, the relentlessness of it and the agony of the moral compromises and all-around physical and emotional grubbiness. Charlotte, now under cover as Dominique, a Parisian whose husband is a prisoner of war, hands over the package she has been sent to deliver, only to see her contact captured with its contents. She becomes the housekeeper to a testy old man (the magnificent Michael Gambon of Gosford Park) who lives in a crumbling mansion. She cares for two young Jewish boys who are hiding out there because their parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. And she helps to blow up a German train, delivers messages from Britain (once with tragic consequences), and tries to find out what has happened to her pilot.

CHARLOTTE GRAY is an old-fashioned WWII movie, with gallant heroes and vile bad guys, romantic longing and fabulous 1940s clothes, heartbreaking betrayal and even more heartbreaking loyalty, odious collaborators and valiant resistance fighters, a purse containing both lipstick and a cyanide pill, and characters who are idealists and cynics, sometimes both at once.

It is the kind of movie they mean when they ask why no one makes those kinds of movies any more. One of the most touching moments in the movie is a small act of generosity that Charlotte risks her life to perform. When it seems that nothing can be done to solve a problem, we can sometimes make great contributions with small kindnesses. Charlotte asks, "Can you forgive yourself if you've been part of something terrible but didn't know?" and is answered, "Otherwise what use are you to anyone?" It is worth talking about how we learn when to forgive ourselves.