Where script meets scripture: Recent films take a leap of faith

stone-robert-deniro-edward-norton.JPGRobert DeNiro and Edward Norton in "Stone," a tale of redemption in which a meth-head arsonist suddenly hears the voice of the divine. Despite profanity, sex and violence, it's been well-received by the faithful, Norton said.

The New Testament warns about trying to serve two masters. But lately Hollywood’s ordered up a rewrite.

Moviemakers, you see, would prefer to have it both ways. And so multiplexes have been crowded with films that wrestle with spiritual questions even while battling for box-office attention.

These aren't tiny indies, either, like the evangelical films that sprang up after "The Passion of the Christ̶; in 2004. Nor are these holy terrors like "The Last Exorcism" and "Paranormal Activity 2," a subgenre that's replaced Freddy and Jason with demons from hell.

No, these are the mainstream pictures — Woody Allen character studies like "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,"; audience-friendly dramas like "Secretariat" and "Get Low" — which occasionally forgo the laughs and thrills to touch on mortality and faith.

And these are big star-driven pictures like "Stone"; and "Hereafter," movies genuinely devoted to exploring subjects like spiritual awakenings and the possibility of an afterlife.

Faith-based film fans used to be seen as a niche audience.

Now, in Hollywood, they’re just seen as the audience.

Faith in America is complicated — and ripe with irony.

According to the recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 86 percent of Americans believe in God or a “higher power.” Yet that fervor is built on shaky doctrinal ground.

Only 55 percent of Catholics were able to answer questions about a central tenet of their own religion; for Protestants, that number fell to 19 percent. (The best informed, interestingly, were atheists and agnostics.)

It’s a paradox that suggests Americans are concerned with spiritual matters yet turned off by traditional teachers — a situation that gives moviemakers an opening.

“I think audiences are often smarter than they’re given credit for,” says Edward Norton, who co-stars in “Stone.” “And I think they’re often drawn to films that raise genuine questions about our lives that demand a real ponder.”

That hunger continues to inspire independent films, made by and for believers who, says Steven Greydanus of decentfilms.com, “often feel that Hollywood is against their values.” But, the Bloomfield-based writer continues, “too often Christian filmmakers pay more attention to the message than the moviemaking. They haven’t learned to put stories and characters first.”

And that’s where the new Hollywood movies have come in, with slicker, more sophisticated entertainment.

"These are not the '' films, preaching to the choir," Hollywood.com box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian says of the new crop. "They're not beating people over the head. If people come out of them saying, 'That was a terrific film about faith,' fine. But mostly they want people coming out saying, 'That was a terrific film.' "

Parables and popcorn

Sometimes the subject of faith enters a movie whether the director wants it to or not. Sometimes it refuses to come in no matter how insistently he beckons.

Woody Allen, for example, is the secular cynic who once cracked, “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.”

Yet the urge to believe in something greater is still a large part of his “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.”

The title refers to a fortuneteller’s cheap prediction, of course, but also in a way to Death, that most persistent of suitors. Indeed the film’s desperate characters do anything to avoid thinking about mortality: starting new business projects or taking younger lovers.

Helena, however, an older woman abandoned by her husband, turns to fortunetellers and New Age teachings. An immediate true believer, she’s met with the disdain quick converts often get — that it’s superstitious nonsense, that she’s wasting her money on charlatans.

Yet while you’d expect Allen to make her a figure of fun, surprisingly faith conquers all, and Helena — the only character who looks beyond worldly pleasures for satisfaction — is the only one who ends the film at peace. It’s as if the film is saying it almost doesn’t matter what you believe — belief itself can heal.

While "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" seems to show a filmmaker talking about these issues in spite of himself, "Secretariat" reveals one failing despite his best efforts. Its director, Randall Wallace, has spoken of his own beliefs; screenwriter Mike Rich did "The Nativity Story."

Yet the sermonizing "Secretariat" limps along like a horse with a lame leg. Passages from the Book of Job serve as awkward bookends; in the middle, everything stops for a gospel song. It's obvious, but unconvincing; if there is a genuine prayer here, it's only the studio's hope that they somehow replicate the sports-and-spirituality success of last year's "The Blind Side."

Although "Secretariat" has drawn some raves — particularly from the conservative-Christian Movieguide.org — it's taken some knocks, too (including one hyperbolic Salon.com critic who compared it to Nazi propaganda). Audiences, meanwhile, have merely shrugged; the film opened in third place.

"It's very tricky, appealing to people on both sides of the pew," says Dergarabedian. "You can't just shift gears in the middle, and start delivering a sermon. The secular audience starts getting uncomfortable and the faith-based audience knows it's being pandered to."

Not Preaching to the choir

If some movies back into issues of good and evil — or try, awkwardly, to detour into them — perhaps the most interesting movies are the ones that face them head-on.

Earlier this year in "Get Low,"; for example, director Aaron Schneider told the story of an ornery hermit who decides to have his funeral service while he's still alive. Based on a true tale of the Depression, the movie could have played as a gentle comedy (and, indeed, features a deadpan Bill Murray as the undertaker).

Yet it takes very seriously its story of lifelong guilt and possible redemption, and a great deal of that credit can go to star Robert Duvall. Few American actors have such a genuine empathy for small-town values; “The Apostle,” which he directed, is one of the few movies to see Pentecostalism as something more than just a morass of frauds and bigots.

Meanwhile death — and what comes next — is the entire point of "Hereafter,"; Clint Eastwood's latest drama. It's a startling change of pace for the filmmaker; while previously he sent dozens of characters to their graves, here he stops to ask where they actually went.

hereafter-matt-damon.JPGBryce Dallas Howard and Matt Damon star in "Hereafter." an exploration into the realm of death and the afterlife.

The legend remains typically taciturn about his own views. “I’ve talked to people who claim to have had near-death experiences and they paint a similar picture, but I don’t know,” Eastwood said at a recent film-festival press conference. “I mean, I just haven’t been there. And I don’t intend to go there before my time. You just think of what it must be like, and you have to do it in your imagination. Does it exist? I don’t know.”

But Eastwood is being coy. His film clearly shows a life after death (even if it looks, disappointingly, like a typical Hollywood dream sequence). Is it a godly paradise? That the film doesn’t address. But that part of us lives on is something the film endorses — and that the aged director, like Allen, surely finds comforting.

Provocative and profane

Other movies are even more single-minded — and more daring. Directed by John Curran, “Stone” is about nothing less than a road-to-Damascus moment, in which a meth-head arsonist suddenly hears the small, still voice of the divine.

“Stone” faces a singular hurdle, though, because while it’s the year’s most provocative meditation on belief, it’s also its most profane, tinged with sex and violence. Will it prove to be too worldly for a faith-based audience? Too metaphysical for fans expecting a hard-boiled prison picture?

“We’ve shown this to communities of faith, and had a really enthused response,” says Norton, who’s been working tirelessly promoting the picture. “I expected the opposite, frankly, and I was pleasantly surprised. Still, a lot of them thought they weren’t going to be able to recommend it because of the sexual component. I thought that was a shame, but it was a real concern they had.”

Apparently, a redemption fable is one thing; showing the nasty details of the road to redemption is something else.

“Chasing the Christian audience with an R or even a hard PG-13 movie, that’s really rough,” says Dergarabedian. “Pictures like ‘Stone’ or ‘Hereafter’ or last year’s ‘The Lovely Bones,’ they’re all films about faith, but they’re not necessarily films that a typical faith-based audience is going to get into.”

But Greydanus — who also reviews for the National Catholic Register, and recommends pictures from “The Social Network” to “Inception” — says he hopes both the faith-based audience and film-based Hollywood will look beyond their rigid preconceptions.

“There is a Christian subculture that is interested in spirituality but doesn’t identify with the Moral Majority or Ted Baehr’s Movieguide and does go to some R-rated movies,” he says. “Just as there are unchurched Americans who are still curious about spirituality.”

And the one faith that may yet draw them together is the belief in the simple magic of good movies.

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