Spiritual pride is a great theme, central to Fred Zinnemann's marvelous 1959 movie The Nun's Story in which Audrey Hepburn's Sister Luke is disappointed when her knowledge and skills aren't put to what she feels would be their best use. It's always hard to accept movie stars as dedicated nuns precisely because they're stars; The Nun's Story is able to use this because Sister Luke's delicate dilemma is wanting to be the very best nun in her order, which constitutes pride, which disqualifies her from the top honors, so she castigates herself to be humbler, and hence better, but must be careful not to congratulate herself for the effort or look for success. The movie brilliantly brings out the A-student egotism of this unrelenting, literal-minded young woman. Sister Luke can't laugh but her situation is profoundly comic: she's trying to stand out in a hierarchical institution the point of which is to humble her in the service of the Lord, to annihilate her ego as a way of ensuring her salvation. Hepburn's luminous eyes shine out from under her compulsively buckled brow as Sister Luke moves toward renunciation; she will finally feel calmly humble only in failure.

Jack's story is, of course, much farther down the social scale than Sister Luke's--he loses a job as a caddy at a country club because the clubmembers are uncomfortable with the tattoo on his neck--and not surprisingly that makes his situation worse. Spiritual pride is the only pride Jack has left; when it's gone he's beyond consolation. And of course the lower depths are no barrier to the work required for naturalism, which is all about actual details as you'd find them in the real world. Jack's story would have been wonderful shot in sequence by itself.

Especially if Jack's wife Marianne (Melissa Leo) had been developed more. What we get is that while she is better off with a law-abiding and sober husband, he's still headstrong in a way that makes her life barely manageable. Having to sneak a beer in the kitchen during a party is nothing compared to his bewildering insistence on turning himself in to the police after he's accidentally run over a man and his two little girls with the truck Jesus gave him.

Meanwhile, the dead man's wife Cristina (Naomi Watts) approves the donation of his heart and it ends up in Paul (Sean Penn), a gravely ill man whose wife is trying to get pregnant by him before he dies. The transplant actually brings about their separation and Paul tries to rediscover his identity by finding the protected name of the donor and working his way into her life. Since the accident Cristina has headed back to the heavy partying she had stopped when she got married, but when she finds out who Paul is she insists that he help her kill Jack in order to get her life back on track.