c. 1997 Religion News Service
(Bob Campbell is the film critic for the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger.)
UNDATED _ An astronaut seeking links to eternity. The Dalai Lama, twice over. A foul-mouthed Virgin Mary. A preacher claiming sanctuary in heaven from his crimes on Earth.
These are some of the oddly assorted visions of grace and transcendence offered in recent and upcoming movies.
In “Contact,” Jodie Foster orbits to the shores of heaven. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Seven Years in Tibet” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun” search for the secret of inner peace in Tibetan Buddhism. On shakier ground, Sinead O’Connor’s sly Madonna manifests herself to a troubled Irish lad in Neil Jordan’s sure-to-be-controversial “The Butcher Boy.” Robert Duvall walks a Pentecostal tightrope between salvation and damnation in “The Apostle.”
These five films represent two major strains in filmmaking dealing in religious themes. Those strains, in turn, represent two sides of an age-old debate about the use of faith: Is it meant to comfort or to challenge?
All these films express deep yearnings, but in at least two of them that yearning is merely for reassurance.
There has long been a cry for films to provide spiritual sustenance and religious illumination. But when filmmakers have strayed from the orthodox Christian path, they’ve paid for their departures. Born-again Christians lambasted “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Conservative Catholics sought to excommunicate “Priest.”
Hollywood has been happiest with golf-playing priests (“Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s”); funky angels (“It’s a Wonderful Life,”); and miracle-prone martyrs (“The Robe,” etc.) Reassurance is the dream factory’s stock in trade.
“Seven Years in Tibet” and “Contact,” in their separate ways, continue that tradition of complacency. Shaping their God to the mood of the moment, they soothe audiences with no-fault, no-risk generalities about the meaning of life.
The second film strain, favored by European auteurs and independents, walks a darker path. These films address the reasons for suffering, the nature of evil, the duality of human desire and the hope of transcendence. “The Butcher Boy” and “The Apostle” belong to this disquieting tradition.
Jordan and Duvall may be in for a rough ride. The more uncompromising a film’s vision, the less consolation it provides. Battles of the spirit are lonely and particular in a way that eludes Hollywood’s formulas for redemption. True religious dramas are dramas of doubt. True spirituality acknowledges the mystery of existence without ringing in angels and fairies (“Fairy Tale”).
America’s first serious religious films were Thomas Ince’s “Civilization” (1915) and D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916). Both enlisted Jesus in the cause of peace, and both were shunted aside when the United States entered World War I.
Before long, Cecil B. DeMille, aping the early Italian directors, launched the sin-and-spectacle cycle with “King of Kings.” It was widely noted that a biblical title offered a license for violence and voluptuousness.
Critic David Thomson coldly observes: “Whenever Hollywood does Christ … the result is not just ridiculous and tedious and embarrassing and about as atmospheric as a paper cup. It is also the complete expurgation, elimination and eradication of any hint of the spirit.”
In the 1980s and 1990s there has been a return to the lazy religiosity of the ’50s in such upbeat fables as “The Natural” and “Angels in the Outfield.” The Reagan years saw God reinstalled as America’s personal coach and principal cheerleader.
Perhaps the most genuinely religious U.S. film of recent years, however, was the seemingly secular “Schindler’s List,” which examined the possibility of everyday sainthood in the presence of absolute evil.
For mainstream Hollywood, spirituality serves the needs of the moment. Transcendence is a weekend tour, salvation an entitlement. In this prosperous yet slightly guilty age, the message we want to hear from God is: “I’m OK, you’re OK.”
Among the new films, “The Apostle” and “The Butcher Boy” pass on less reassuring bulletins. Miracles come cheap in movies, but moral dilemmas linger after the images fade. As the novelist Wallace Stegner once wrote, it’s so much more difficult to find a way through life than a way beyond it.
MJP END CAMPBELL
