Take posits two separate characters—a working-class mom and a gambling addict down on his luck—and intersects their lives at the point of tragic circumstances. Seven years later, Ana (Minnie Driver) and Saul (Jeremy Renner) meet again, just before Saul is about to be executed for having kidnapped and killed Ana's seven-year-old son Jess (Bobby Coleman). The film ambitiously attempts to tell four separate story lines at once: the hours of Ana's and Saul's individual lives preceding the crime as well as before Saul's execution.
Although Take received supportive reviews from the Hollywood Reporter and Variety when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in spring 2007, the film was later lambasted by most critics as being simultaneously predictable yet confusing and amateurishly packed with cinematic clichés. Granted—there is enough crosscutting to make one dizzy; there's no rest from the ever-present atmospheric soundtrack; and while the acting is notable, the script doesn't grant the characters enough dimensionality to make the intent behind their actions immediately apparent or fully plausible.
However, the film's basic thesis—that returning to a painful past is sometimes the only way to let it go completely—holds up, and Oliver's portrayal of the criminal as not just human but worthy of forgiveness is refreshingly forward-thinking.
The Concept of Restorative Justice
When Ana arrives at the prison to witness Saul's execution, she insists upon speaking with him, which a warden strongly advises against. But Ana doesn't back down, and soon she is escorted to a room where Saul sits, handcuffed to a table. They spend merely a few moments together, yet what transpires within that brief amount of time is irreplaceable. Ana is able to express her grief to her perpetrator, and Saul is able to apologize.
This sort of confrontation between perpetrators and crime victims is taking place globally within supervised conditions under the term restorative justice. In the April 30, 2007 edition of NPR's Talk of the Nation, founder of the Justice and Reconciliation Project Lisa Rea explained that by establishing contact between victim and offender, restorative justice helps to "bring an offender . . . to the point of remorse" and encourages him or her to consider the "effect [he or she] had on a real human being." It also assists the victim with a way to be heard by the offender and thus gain a sense of empowerment in regard to the crime.
In an interview with Film School Rejects online, Oliver says he didn't find out about restorative justice until after he'd written the first draft of the script. But he states that the basic "principles" of the idea "are certainly amplified in the film." He also presents research statistics associated with the success of restorative justice before the end credits.
Take and Forgiveness
"In Take, I wanted to explore how far the heart could go with . . . resentment before it would fold in on itself," Oliver says in an April 2007 contribution to the Huffington Post called "How Long Can an Individual Sustain Hatred?" "I wanted to examine the idea of forgiveness as a mechanism of survival—having nothing to do with whether someone deserves it and everything to do with our own need to forgive."
Take poignantly demonstrates this virtuous objective. En route to the execution, Ana is intent on expressing her hatred of Saul to his face, not to mention her anticipated satisfaction at seeing him suffer. But once she and Saul are finally in the same room together, her aggression transforms into empathy with Saul's apology, and she forgives him. She also does not stay to witness his execution. With their shared offerings, the characters provide each other with both emotional emancipation and redemption.
Take and Christianity
Oliver has not conveyed to the press that he had any particular religious agenda in the making of his film. Nevertheless, the story's emphasis on forgiveness combined with both overt and subtle religious overtones unmistakably invoke the teachings of Christ in the New Testament. Saul of course was the Jewish name of Saint Paul before he converted to Christianity, and the Saul of the film spends his last hours resisting a priest's assertion that he believe in God, only to consider changing his mind at the last minute—right before Ana's entrance.
Saul is generally depicted as a Christlike figure, sacrificed in the name of so-called justice. At the end of the film when he is injected with the toxic substance that will end his life, his body is strapped against a gurney, his arms outstretched and his feet together. He is lit from above and gazes upward into the light as if toward heaven, and his body and the gurney etch a bright white glowing cross against a sterile greenish-blue background.
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