Movie: Faith

 

Seeing the movie-poster-like image for this movie Faith on Amazon, and reading the blurb for it on the Amazon page, my thought was that I would be watching a pretty typical Christian movie. I’ll admit that I was surprised at what the movie was really like, and with a few caveats it was a nice surprise.

Summary

It’s not a complicated story. A farmer loses his teenage son to what seems to have been a drug and alcohol overdose suicide, and everything falls apart around him. Some people close to him try to help, but real solutions and answers are never to be found..

Cringe

Very little. The movie keeps a good level of realism throughout, and either avoids easy answer, or seems to show that the easy answers just aren’t working.

Acting

Not bad. There is no hysterical over-acting. The actor for the main character keeps him very grounded as a man who does not easily show his feelings.

Not Easy

This isn’t an easy movie to analyze, perhaps because it’s not a very typical movie, and certainly not a typical Christian movie.

There are essentially four main characters in this movie: the farmer, his wife, his father who lives a bit away but travels to seem him, and the pastor of his church. I’ll focus here on the pastor and father, and how they relate to the farmer.

In many ways, they are both shown to be good characters. They obviously care about the farmer after the son’s death. The pastor is there immediately after the son’s death, trying to comfort the farmer and his wife. The father shows up a bit later, but when he learns what happened, he makes a trip that is obviously difficult for him to be there for his son (the farmer’s wife has left to be her own parents at this time).

So, right at first, these two characters are put in a mostly good light.

But as the movie goes along, there is a change, and a subtle one. I’m not sure how much time goes by in the movie, though there were a few things said that hinted that it was a few weeks. The farmer has been missing services at the church, not to mention doing some other stupid stuff, so finally the pastor and father have an intervention with the farmer. Their basic message is essentially “Get back into church”, although I wonder if there wasn’t also a subtext under that, “Get back to normal”.

So, he does. With his father, he goes to the church. It’s a small-town charismatic church, complete with speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and a pastor more concerned with what he feels like God is saying than with what God has actually said in the Bible. The farmer gets involved, he goes down to the front, the pastor lays a hand on his head, and he goes to the floor. And while the usual kind of madness of such sermons is going on all around him, the farmer stares up at the ceiling, and it’s plain that he feels nothing. He says all the right things to his father, he goes through all the motions for the pastor, and it’s all empty to him.

And that’s pretty much where the movie ends.

What Is This Movie About?

So, what kind of movie is this?

Is it a Christian movie? Is it some kind of anti-Christian movie? Is it a movie that is Christian while also being critical of some aspects of the church? It’s not the typical fare in Christian movies, but nor is it what I would expect in the more virulent anti-Christian or ex-Christian type of story.

Did the farmer give up on his faith? I can’t say for sure. Did he keep his faith? Again, I’m not sure.

This isn’t a preachy movie, and that could be good as well a bad. There is no point where a character tells the viewer the overall message of the movie. There is some good that could be said for that. Still, when the viewer is told to just draw their own conclusions from a story, there is the chance that the viewer may draw a very wrong and even morally offensive conclusion from it.

Most stories don’t go that route. There are often clear divides between the good guys and bad guys. There is a lot of good to be said for this demarcation. Stories are meant to convey messages, to tell the viewer or the reader or the listener something. For all that, let’s say, a villain like The Joker may want to say that he and Batman are so very much alike and have so much in common, we know that even though those similarities may be true, there are even greater differences, and these differences are why those two characters are constantly at war with each other.

Does that make what Faith does wrong? No. If anything, it makes for a fascinating movie and a different kind of ending. But it can lead to a movie like this having a potentially confusing ending. It’s a risk, but if that’s the kind of movie you want to make, then fine.

Where Is Jesus?

Once again, we have a movie that could be considered Christian while also ignoring the Christ that is the reality behind Christian.

Conclusion

There is some stuff in this movie that the normal Christian movie viewer will not like, outside of the almost agnostic nature of the story's end. There is some language, especially in the first few minutes. There is a bedroom scene between the farmer and his wife. The farmer gets pretty heavily into alcohol. I’m not one who thinks Christians should never drink alcohol, but the farmer’s drinking was too much and for bad reasons. To be fair, I don’t think the movie was trying to glamourize his drinking, but was only showing him going downhill in his grief.

Understand that this isn’t a typical Christian movie, which is mostly good but with a bit of questionable stuff, too. Still, I think I can recommend it. But expect to watch a movie that is not light and fluffy, that will not offer cheap and silly answers, and that will make you think.