Our longing for simplicity knows no bounds, and with every terrorist strike, every hardliner that comes to office in the Middle East, each new corporate buyout or Supreme Court justice nomination, that longing deepens. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could neatly divide the world into realms of shadow and circles of light, if the most difficult acts of character judgment played more like a decision between eating crap or ice cream?

It ain’t that simple.

As I see it, the problem is largely one of over-generalization. A lot of Christians assume that because a divine, eternal perspective eventually separates the redeemed sinner and the not-yet-redeemed sinner, that similar, more visible divides must govern the material world. If absolutes exist at all, then they must exist everywhere.

And then, what began as an opinion quickly becomes a prescription.

Which is kinda fun when you’re talking about movies, literature, and sports. It’s less amusing when considering national or international politics, and downright destructive when you’re talking about individual people.

I have a problem with humanity’s random, aggressive application of words like “wrong” and “evil.” I believe that admitting to and considering the circumstances surrounding someone else’s actions before casting judgment is not evidence of a bleeding, but an open, heart.

And it’s the kind of patient attention Christ calls us to when He says, “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44), a command we’re quick to forget when we turn on the evening news.

It’s also the kind of perspective adapted by Mimi Leder in The Peacemaker (1997), a pre-9/11 film about a terrorist act in New York. I’d like to think that the film’s depth has little to do with the director’s sex, but let’s just say that while a number of directors today can create action movies as kinetic as Leder’s, few (and most are male) attempt to imbue them with as much nuance.

In this movie, you do have heroes and villains, but Leder blurs the lines as much as she can without erasing moral distinctions. She encourages us to empathize with and, yes, even love the “bad” guys. On the one hand, you have a couple government agents trying to prevent the murder of thousands by tracking down some would-be terrorists who have stolen a nuclear weapon. Clearly, we are supposed to identify with Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe and Dr. Julia Kelly, played by beautiful duo George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Leder also, however, takes us inside the experience and mind of Dimitri Vertikoff, a piano teacher and reluctant politician who decides to end his life in an act of vengeance against a country he holds responsible for providing weapons to those who recently killed his family. His is an act of anger laced with sorrow, a desperate move by a man whose emotional equilibrium vanished with the lives of his wife and daughter. As he instructs one of his students during a final lesson, “changing a single note can change joy to sorrow.” He finds another attentive audience when the heroes discover an explanatory videotape Dimitri had meant to be found after his death, a recording in which he tries to explain his actions and debunk the viewers’ inevitable conclusion that he was a monster. The moving choral music the score brings to this particular scene is yet another device Leder uses to make us seriously consider Dimitri’s perspective, without quite justifying it.

There’s another, less obvious way in which Leder exhibits a compassion for adversary and protagonist alike, and it constitutes a most radical move in this high-action adventure flick. She makes us feel the loss of every character that dies. Violence has a higher cost in this movie than in virtually any other I’ve seen, and it has nothing to do with the body-count.

For instance, following a fast-paced scene in which Kelly watches the execution of one of Devoe’s friends and the consequent deaths of the perpetrators at Devoe’s hands, Leder cuts to a hotel room where the two heroes are decompressing. Instead of jumping to the next action beat or strategy session, the camera lingers over survivors mourning their losses (instead of celebrating their escape). Kelly, whom Leder has established as a very capable and strong heroine, is weeping over the bloodshed she’s just witnessed, and even the gruff Devoe is in a funk as he considers the now fatherless young daughter of his deceased friend. In this scene and others, Leder makes death as horrible and memorable as possible by personalizing it. She preempts our exhilaration at the destruction on screen by adding small details that make each fatality a tragedy, even that of peripheral characters. Doomed soldiers resting in the innocence of sleep, a mother nursing her infant, a peasant couple living a simple life out in the country, a bystander on a busy sidewalk in New York, a man attending a christening with his family—all get struck down by man’s impatient preference for action over words.

Which is what it all really comes down to, isn’t it? We slot our fellows into facile moral and political categories because we can’t be bothered to sit down and talk with them. It’s far easier to ignore, refuse, ostracize, or even kill someone if they no longer register as fully human.