Taking a chance on love.

Aside from preadolescent males (who find them icky in the extreme), I suspect that nearly everyone else on the planet has a soft spot in his or her heart for a good love story. Certainly romantic comedies such as last year's "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Four Weddings and a Funeral" delight and amuse us with their stories of fumbling, sometimes foolish, and yet often endearing lovers, and we soon find our hearts conspiring with them, hoping against hope for that magical ending when everything dissolves into roses and violins.

And yet even though these tales of enchanted evenings and spotting strangers across a crowded room (or continent) are sweetly delicious and sometimes intoxicating, most of us know (or remember on the way back to the parking lot) that love is more than winning a prize and sailing off into the sunset. Maybe that's why it's sometimes refreshing to curl up with a movie offering a slightly different, perhaps more thoughtful, take on why love is so important to us and what its presence or absence does to us.

Although there wre certainly other thoughtful films about love in the past year, I found myself particularly struck by four: "The Remains of the Day," "Shadowlands," "The Piano," and "Like Water for Chocolate." In the first two, the central characters (both played by Anthony Hopkins) are men on the verge of love, attracted mothlike to its flame, but terrified by its fierce demands. For love would have them stretch beyond the safe comfort of their solitary castles and settled routines, giving up the tight reins they hold on their lives and embracing the awful risk of pain and loss. Love would enlarge and redeem them, but only after they've surrendered their comfort and safety. In the second set of films, the central characters are women who hear love's call as an invitation to become creative, even artistic, as they tap into the wellspring of love within themselves. Their love will be redemptive as well, but first it must be awakened and allowed to live.

In "The Remains of the Day," Hopkins plays Mr. Stevens, the chief butler of pre-World War II Darlington Castle and a man who appears at first glance to have found a deep contentment and sense of well-being in the perfectly ordered career of service in his lordship's manor. Safely ensconced behind the battlements of his master's estate, our Mr. Stevens thrives as the majordomo of a highly structured household, whose sharply defined roles and rules allow its small army of servants to function with a smooth precision any Swiss watchmaker would envy. Whether holding court at the servant's dinner table or overseeing the detailed preparations for an international conference, Stevens exudes the good humor and satisfaction of a man well suited to his life and task.

And yet for all of this contentment, Stevens is a tragic figure, a man whose heart is not so much mean spirited as a size or two too small. He is a frightened child afraid of letting go of the costumes and customs that provide for him such reassuring predictability, a man unwilling to risk stepping outside of protocol and doing his own thinking, feeling, or living. In some profound way, the orderliness of Stevens' routines and relationships have become a safe haven to which he retreats from the messiness and ambiguity of life--a retreat that diminishes him as a person.

For when his own father, an aging under-butler in the same household, falls seriously ill and tries on his deathbed to express feelings of loss and affection, Stevens is completely incapable of any sort of intimate exchange. And later, when the older man dies, there is something pathetic about Stevens' inability to acknowledge or express the grief he so clearly feels. He is trapped in the security blanket of his role.

Of course the central tragedy of the film is Stevens' failure to take the risk of expressing his love for Miss Kenton (played by Emma Thompson), Darlington's housekeeper and a woman of considerable warmth and wit, whose deepening affection for Stevens seems to offer his last best chance for redemption. She waits patiently for years, hoping to wear down the defenses of his aloof propriety and draw him into a loving relationship. But in the end, Stevens cannot take the leap, or the risk, and so a tragic sense of "what might have been" hangs over a life that goes on, but never quite flourishes.

In "Shadowlands," Hopkins is cast as the late Oxford don and scholar, C.S. Lewis (known as Jack to his brother and friends), a popular lecturer on the theological circuit and an even more successful author of fantasy books for children and the young at heart. Jack is a more intriguing and complex character than Stevens; his children's books and lectures on pain reveal a breadth of intellect and imagination far superior to Lord Darlington's head butler. Nonetheless, we soon recognize that Lewis uses these very gifts to construct the defenses of his own castle--a citadel built of logical premises and reasoned argument as fascinating ideas. And within the dry, clean, well-lit space of this intellectual universe, Jack has cast himself as an answer man -- a teacher who instructs students and lectures audiences from on high, and a scholar who fences playfully, but never seriously, with his colleagues. For all of this talk about suffering and his wonderfully imaginative tales, Jack has distanced himself from all the mess and ambiguity of real life. There are no risks, no losses, and not much pain in the well-ordered world of Clive Staples Lewis.

But as Robert Frost said, "Something there is that does not love a wall," and in "Shadowlands" Joy Gresham (played by Debra Winger) is a divorced American poet who tumbles furiously into the life of Jack and his brother, Warnie. Articulate, blunt, and impassioned, Joy refuses to color within the lines of Jack's carefully demarcated life, freely expressing her own mind and deepening affection for him, and repeatedly demanding that he take similar risks.

While Lewis is fascinated by Joy, he is also terrified of the anguish of real love and tries desperately to compartmentalize their friendship within the ordered structure of his life. But when Joy is diagnosed with cancer, Jack recognizes the folly of his cowardice and chooses to risk the suffering of the damned to be with her. In the months that follow, Lewis knows both exquisite joy and searing pain, and in Joy's death he and her son, Douglas, share an aching grief. Jack, unlike Stevens, is not haunted by regret, for haivng chosen to love was a pearl worth the price.

In "The Piano," Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is a woman hemmed in by forces within and without. Wrapped since childhood in a self-imposed shroud of silence, Ada's voice is doubly constrained by men--a Scottish father who has sent her halfway around the globe as a mail-order bride; a land-hungry husband (Sam Neill) who sells her beloved piano for 80 wretched acres; and a roguish settler (Harvey Keitel) who would exhort sexual favors in exchange for the instrument's ivory keys. The men in Ada's life treat her as a piece of furniture and then complain that she does not create music in their lives. And yet in spite of the stony and indifferent silence that seeks to engulf her, Ada refuses to be reduced to a hapless victim or an object of someone else's desire.

She will not meet their expectations or fulfill their needs--in spite of her muteness she is no pet. Through her fierce emotional resistance and the haunting power of her music, she compels both her husband and her "student" to recognize her as a force to whom they must consent. As a creative, artistic presence leaving her own mark on the land and the people around her, she demands attention. And when her student recognizes this and surrenders his cruel advantage over her, he discovers a friend and lover of untapped passion and creativity, a beloved who would risk her life for him.

For in this Jane Campion film, love is not a mere tonic for loneliness, and the beloved not some prize filling an aching inner void. Instead, every person has a unique and creative gift to love, and real love is honoring and celebrating that talent in ourselves and others. Ada refuses to be diminished or deformed by the disregard of others, and when she finds a partner capable of entering into real love, the full artistry of her soul blossoms into a symphony of musical voices.

Finally, in Laura Esquivel's novel, Like Water for Chocolate--that was later made into a film by the same name--Tita is a young Mexican woman unlucky enough to be born last in a family where custom dictates that the youngest daughter forsake marriage in order to care for her aging, and in this case domineering, mother. Tita's bad fortune multiplies when her own suitor, Pedro, consents to wed her older sister, Rosaura, on the premise that this will allow him to live under the same roof as his beloved. To say that Pedro's plan is flawed is an understatement. Tita now finds herself in the company of her despotic mother, a jealous and begrudging sister, and an extremely foolish and frustrated lover. It is a household not even Cinderella would envy.

And yet Tita, though in a different way from Ada, is also an artist, and her love will not be completely frustrated by the control or bumbling of others. Through the magical realism of Esquivel's story, Tita finds in her cooking a powerful expression of her love, a sort of sensual sacrament through which she not only fills her guests' stomachs, but also stirs their hearts and touches their souls. In the power of her meals, Tita confronts and resists her mother's controlling power and works her own sort of justice against the cruelty of her sister, reminding us that genuine love does not tolerate subjegation or abuse and offers fierce resistance to injustice. Like the magical banquet in "Babette's Feast", Tita's meals are not mere sentiment but evoke love's vibrant creativity and artistic power.

In the end, the four films reminded me of what seem two fairly simple truths about love. First, love calls us to reach out to others, and it is not possible to do this without putting ourselves at risk, primarily because in love we are the gift we offer. It is always scary to take these risks but failing to take them doesn't just deprive us of a beloved--it diminishes us as persons, rendering us pale, bloodless dwarfs. Second, love, however we express it, is a creative gift that wells up within us, the grateful and passionate celebration of our uniqueness and God's unbelievable love for us. By choosing to love, we each have the capacity to be artists in a universe that badly needs our gifts. Not a bad fate.