Uncertainty principles

When The Washington Post ran a piece on May 12 by chief film critic Ann Hornaday titled “The Rise of Christian Movies for the Rest of Us,” I had to sit up and take notice. She started out with some of the same criticisms of evangelical films that I’ve voiced—namely that they tend to lack realism while gorging on sentiment. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed when she began trotting out jabs as simplistic and unimaginative (“God’s Not Dumb”) as the movies she was panning.

It’s like when someone bad-mouths the family member you’ve been complaining about for ages. You can say negative things about the family member, because, at the end of the day, it’s your sister or brother and you love them even when they’re driving you crazy. But some stranger? Someone who isn’t motivated by a desire to see that brother or sister rise to his or her potential? Well, then it feels like fighting words.

The problem is none of the movies Hornaday applauds for their complex, nuanced approach to some aspect of Christianity were directed (with the possible exception of the famously reclusive Terrence Malick) by professing Christians. And as we’ve seen with several high-profile biblical flops in recent years, that faith perspective (or lack of it) matters. A lot.

I was most intrigued by Hornaday’s praise of recent indie release The Confirmation. She lauds the PG-13 rated drama because, in phrasing she borrows from author Barbara Brown Taylor, it “prizes holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty.”

After viewing it, I can agree with most of her description, though what she calls “holy” ignorance, I would call simply ignorance—there’s nothing set apart by God in the main character’s inability to render a verdict on the validity of the Bible or Christ as the Son of God. (And I’ll restrain myself from going on a rant about the tendency of some writerly sophisticates to attach the word holy to expressly unholy things with the aim of muddying the conversation and affording themselves some kind of religious cred.)

The acting and pacing in The Confirmation are superb, gently bringing us into empathy with out-of-work, alcoholic carpenter Walt (Clive Owen), who finds everything going wrong during the weekend his ex-wife (Maria Bello) entrusts him with custody of their 9-year-old son. As his car breaks down, his toolbox is stolen, and an eviction order locks him out of his house, he begins to form a bond with his son through shared suffering—a suffering peopled with fellow fallen souls who ring absolutely authentic. Sadly, the movie isn’t able to bring the same sense of authenticity to those characters who profess belief.

“These things that they tell you,” Walt tells his son of his ex-wife’s rather uptight churchgoing ways, “they might be true, they might not be true.” “And what do you think?” asks his son. Walt responds, “I think I don’t know. And no matter what they say, neither do they.” Later Walt undermines the meaning and purpose of Communion by advising his son that it’s OK to participate in it even if he doesn’t believe in Jesus because it will make his mother happy and “it won’t hurt you.”

This isn’t cast as well-meaning but misguided advice. Rather, the message of The Confirmation is clear—doubt, embodied by the character of the father, is far more noble and courageous than faith, embodied by the character of the mother.

This lack of surety in Christ, in any sense of that word, is what, to Hornaday and many other secular critics, makes the story laudable as a Christian film. You get the sense that she would rule out The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Brothers Karamazov, and Paradise Lost as great works of art because they commit that great postmodern crime of conviction in their explicitly biblical worldview.

That’s not to say that doubt can’t be a part of a Christian’s character arc. But movies like The Confirmation elevate characters whose default reality is skepticism. Rarely have I witnessed earnest treatment of a character who possesses a sincere faith that’s worked out in daily, mind-renewing spiritual disciplines, occasionally beset by doubt.

I take no issue with Hornaday’s idea of what a “good” Christian movie should be: that it should “[invite] viewers into a much bigger picture, to wrestle with their own sense of purpose and spiritual understanding.” Nor that it should be “intellectually complex, carefully crafted, and morally engaged.” I just think she betrays a misguided secular elitism in thinking these things are best (indeed only!) achieved in stories built upon the shifting sands of spiritual uncertainty.