90 Minutes in Heaven

90 Minutes in Heaven is the best 90 minutes of PowerPoint ever made for a sermon series. Sadly, at my showing the energetic preacher, Don Piper, wasn’t there and so it was shown as a movie. The script is literate and avoids many theological pitfalls, but it also is about 20 minutes too long. As a result, the movie—about Piper’s story of his near-death experience—has moments of excellence but fails at storytelling.

The length would not have mattered if someone had given the actors, other than Dwight Yoakum, a shot of energy. Yoakum, who plays a lawyer so obviously crooked one wonders why Piper’s wife (Kate Bosworth) hired him, simply chews up his lines and shouts them. The lead, Hayden Christensen as Piper, should carry the film, but instead the plot carries Christensen from scene to scene with nearly the same mournful look on his face.

Most of the film (rated PG-13 for intense accident and injury images) has a badly injured Piper lying in a hospital bed, and Christensen lacks the charisma needed to keep interest. Bosworth is better as she tries to deal with insurance, her job, and a depressed spouse, but Christensen saps her energy. Fred Thompson is effective as Piper’s mentor, managing to get both the character and the actor out of the doldrums for the few minutes they are together.

For a film about near-death experience, 90 Minutes has moments when the film itself nearly dies, only to revive as Piper finally reveals to his wife and friends that he spent 90 minutes in heaven and that coming back to the pain of recovery had been hellish. Why had God answered prayer and brought him back? Piper has seen heaven and lived through a painful purgation and so has a unique perspective to give to other people also in pain. He knows the pain can be meaningful because he has seen that this life is not the end.

The trip to heaven is portrayed in a modest manner. Piper says the sights and sounds are indescribable, and the filmmakers take him at his word. He sees people who have died and gone to heaven as he last knew them. Older people appear old to him, though no longer ill. Some have criticized this as implausible: Are we old in heaven? Piper sees them in the “intermediate state” where the righteous dead await the general resurrection. These are disembodied spirits, and he is allowed to “see” them in a way that would smooth his transition to the new life.

What to make of trips to heaven? We shouldn’t make much of them as evidence for the afterlife or as the basis for a theology, but the film does not try to do either. The impressive apologetics moments in the film are the victories of Piper over the problem of his pain. He becomes a better person through suffering, because Jesus uses prayers and the church to help him.

The movie is a near miss. The filmmakers avoided simplistic “lessons,” and some of the scenes are deeply moving. Some editing and a better performance from Christensen and this modest independent film could have been something special. This leaves me hopeful for more films from this company.