“I know that lying down on the wet
grass is not a normal thing to do … Truth is, uh, I’ve been even more strange
than usual lately, haven’t I? It’s God. I have ten thousand engagements of
state today, but I would prefer to spend the day getting a wet arse, studying dandelions
and marvelling at bloody spiders’ webs … I think [God] found me. Do you
have any idea how inconvenient that is, how idiotic it will sound? I’ve a
political career glittering ahead of me, and in my heart I want spiders’ webs.”
Amazing Grace (2006)
1)
Amazing Grace (2006)
Amazing Grace isn’t a Christian film. It’s a historical
biopic and a political drama.
 |
| A portrait of William Wilberforce by a German artist called Anton Hickel, apparently. |
The film is set in the eighteenth
century and follows the career of William Wilberforce and the progress of the
abolitionist movement. It’s basically a story about a bunch of young radicals
with a righteous cause trying to change the world against seemingly impossible
odds; you know how it’s going to end, but that supplies half the fun of getting
there. Please don’t be put off by the trailer,1 which you can
immediately tell was made by Americans,2 and also behaves as if the
whole film were nothing more than an origin story for John Newton’s famous hymn;
in reality it’s far more than that. The story is great, the acting is great (the
most well-known stars of the film include Michael Gambon as Charles Fox, Toby
Jones as the Duke of Clarence, and a before-he-was-famous Benedict Cumberbatch
as Pitt the Younger), the aesthetics are great (who doesn’t love a good period
costume?3), and the scripting is just so on point: every line is
both purposeful and pleasing. The portion I quoted above is quite good, of
course, but my favourite line has to be when the Duke of Clarence, speaking in
Parliament, describes revolution as a ‘pox’, and Wilberforce answers with, “I
bow to my honourable friend’s superior knowledge and experience in all matters
regarding the pox.”
2)
Les Miserables (2012)
Les Miserables isn’t a Christian film. It’s a somewhat
dark and depressing sung-through musical.
I once came home from a really
convicting Bible study in a really intense mood and found my housemates
watching Les Mis. Having joined them, I suspect that I may have slightly
weirded them out by periodically yelling at Javert for having such terrible
theology. But of course, Javert having terrible theology is kind of the whole
point. Jean Valjean, on the one hand, understands the gospel: he knows what it
is to receive grace, to be blessed without having done anything at all to
deserve it, and to live life differently as a result. Javert, on the other
hand, cannot even begin to cope with the idea of receiving something he can’t
pay the giver back for. His idea of justice has no room for mercy, and so he accepts
no mercy himself.
It’s a really moving story (well,
except for the love story between Marius and Cosette, which I have absolutely
no time for): soaring hope and searing tragedy collapse in on top of each other,
and through it all, Jean Valjean is a hero you can really root for. And then of
course there’s the music. Do you hear the people sing? Yes, I do, and it’s
frankly sensational.4
3)
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
The Prince of Egypt isn’t a Christian film. It’s an
animated musical hailing from the Renaissance era of American animation5
and based, like so many others of its genre, on a well-known traditional story.
The animation is gorgeous: the
splitting of the Red Sea is a particular highlight, though there are plenty of
stunning visuals throughout the rest of the picture as well, and we also see
DreamWorks developing its own unique style, distinct from Disney’s, which
colours it as rather a shame that we didn’t get more two-dimensional work from
the studio before the rise of CGI. And that soundtrack, gosh, it’s spine-chillingly
good. ‘Deliver Us’ and ‘Playing with the Big Boys Now’ and ‘The Plagues’ – all brilliant.6
The only thing that ruins it slightly is how theologically clumsy – scratch that,
downright wrong – the lyrics of ‘When You Believe’ are. Who knows what
miracles you can achieve when you believe somehow you will? Ahem – I think
it was God that did the miracles, O Fictionalised Miriam.
The film takes some artistic licence
with the original version of the story, as you’d expect from a piece of this
genre, so it’s very important not to let it muddy your knowledge of what
actually happened: for instance, Moses was in fact raised by his own mother as
his wet-nurse, and he doesn’t ever seem to have been ignorant of his Hebrew
origins. Plus, the entire brotherly-conflict narrative on which the film hangs
is completely invented.7 But I hasten to stress that that’s not a problem.
I expect the creators of an essentially fictional film to be more interested in
good filmmaking than in strict adherence to the source material. I want them
to be more interested in good filmmaking than in strict adherence to the source
material. Because, as obvious as it sounds, otherwise they’re probably not
going to make a very good film, are they?
4)
Ben Hur (1959)
Ben Hur isn’t a Christian film. It’s an
epic. A proper epic from the era of proper epics, when films came with an
overture and an interval and a sense of genuine grandeur.
 |
| The 1959 film was not, of course, the novel’s first outing as a live-action adaptation. This is a poster for the 1899 Broadway production of the story. |
The extremely popular book that the
film was based on is called Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but at least
in this version of the film, Jesus is really only a background character. And
you never see his face, which I really appreciated as a decision: first off,
artistically, it’s more impactful, and second, I’m a bit of a puritan when it
comes to the second commandment, and so anything that attempts to actually
depict Jesus makes me uncomfortable to say the least.8 In Ben Hur,
you don’t really see Jesus, you don’t really hear him, and you have to
interpret what he’s like from how other people react to him, which I’d say is
basically as good as you’re going to get in terms of plausible ways of
portraying the ineffably excellent Lord of the universe in the limited and
fallible medium of film.
But as I say, the film’s not even
about him. It’s about Judah Ben Hur, who goes through an absolute rollercoaster
of life experiences that make for some really dramatic (and properly epic)
scenes, including a harrowing sea-battle, and of course the famous chariot
race, made all the more compelling when you realise that it was all achieved
without modern special effects: they are actually driving those
chariots, and, fun fact (and sort of a spoiler, I’ll warn you), the bit where Judah
gets thrown right over the front of his chariot was a total accident that some
lucky cameraman managed to catch.9 It’s also about Judah’s childhood-best-friend-turned-sworn-arch-enemy
Messala. And it’s about finding out that vengeance isn’t what you needed to
make everything better after all.
There’s a nice hint at the
gospel in the paralleling of the scene where Jesus gives Ben Hur a drink of
water when he’s practically dying of thirst while being marched to work as a
galley slave, and the one where Ben Hur tries to give Jesus a drink of water
when he’s being marched to the cross, but is prevented. Jesus is the spring of
living water, and he gives us life, and there’s no possibility of ever
giving him something he needs in return.10 But as I say, it’s only a
hint. You have to know the gospel already to find it.
5)
Luther (2003)
Luther isn’t a Christian film. It’s another
historical biopic.
If you’re looking for a balanced and
objective portrayal of Martin Luther, Luther isn’t the place to get it. The
film turns him into an almost undiluted hero, and of course sweeps On the
Jews and Their Lies and his other antisemitic work entirely under the
carpet.11 But if you’re looking for a blooming good film, well, you’ve
got one.12 Luther is a story about a man who starts a
revolution almost accidentally, and then finds that revolution spiralling out
of his control. It’s about how deep people will go in corruption and falsehood
and abuse of the weak in order to hold onto their power, and it’s about how
they can nonetheless never succeed in silencing the truth. It’s beautifully
scripted and acted. And I suppose it does actually articulate the substance of
the gospel once or twice. Perhaps it really is a Christian film after all.
To be fair, I never specified any
criteria for what counts as a Christian film and what doesn’t. Maybe, when it
comes down to it, I don’t believe there’s actually any such thing as a
Christian film. The point of a film is to tell a story. Some films tell stories
that align more closely with a Christian worldview than others. But if a film
makes it its mission to privilege the perpetuation of a Christian message over the
creation of a compelling piece of cinema, I’m not sure that makes it a
Christian film. I think probably, as I also alluded to under The Prince of
Egypt above, it just makes it a bad one.
The point of a film is to tell a
story. It isn’t to tell the truth. The Prince of Egypt’s artistic
licence, Luther’s whitewashing of its title character – they’d be crimes
in a courtroom, but in cinema they’re just part and parcel of the process, because
each film is telling a particular story, and in that story, there isn’t room
for everything that’s true. If you want to communicate a message to someone –
if there’s something important that you want her to know – you don’t make a
film about it. You just tell her, plainly. You make a film, on the other hand,
because you want to tell a story. There’ll be messages somewhere in there, sure
– I stand by what I’ve previously argued, that all fiction inevitably encourages
its audience to buy into a particular set of ideas13 – but they’ll
be subtler. There’ll be different ways of reading the thing, different possible
emphases. People will be able to draw out all sorts of headcanons and theories
and wild implications. Just look at me ravaging the world of secular cinema for
analogies by which to better understand God and the gospel.
And that’s the role that I think
films can have in the Christian imagination. We can watch them, ‘read’ them,
analyse them, critique them, map aspects of them onto the truth of the gospel and
note the divergences, find those hints of the gospel and extrapolate them, and
in doing so, develop new ways of reflecting on the hope that we have – and maybe
new ways of communicating it to others. But the point is not that the motion
picture in front of us is a ‘Christian film’, but that, as Christians, we take
the gospel wherever we go. We take it into the cinema, and the theatre, and the
library, and the virtual world; we carry it in every encounter, every
conversation, every moment of private thought; and we don’t engage with
anything without engaging the gospel too. The point is not that such-and-such
is a ‘Christian film’; the point, adelphoi, is that you, or I, or whichever
brother or sister of ours it is, is watching it as a Christian.14
Footnotes
1 You can watch it here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Cv5P9H9qU,
but I wouldn’t bother if I were you.
2 I hasten to reassure my American
friends that I don’t at all mean to imply that all things made by Americans are
bad; what I’m getting at is that there’s a particular American mode of making
film trailers that basically treats the audience as if they’re stupid and won’t
understand what’s happening if there’s any deviation from the expected format.
By way of evidence, I submit to you the following Blimey Cow video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g--WPsnqoHA,
and as a case-study, the British trailer for The Pirates! In an Adventure,
with Scientists, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOFLtsDvbw,
as compared to the American one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzddJ-yxaqY.
You’ll spot that they also renamed the film The Pirates! Band of Misfits for
the US market. It’s just depressing.
3 People who are into period costume
are fun to follow on YouTube and Instagram. I have recently started following
Zach Pinsent, Bernadette Banner, and Karolina Zebrowska. Here’s Ms. Zebrowska’s
video ‘100 Years of Beauty – Poland’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrEPujmWufU,
which is literally one of my favourite things on the Internet.
4 Fancy a rewatch of the ‘One Day
More’ scene? Of course you do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv-BxH3SVS8.
5 The Disney Renaissance refers to
the period between 1989 and 1999, when Disney went back to producing films
based on well-known traditional stories, and did extraordinarily well out of
it. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that when DreamWorks Animation came on
the scene in 1994, they tried the same tack, and it’s for that reason that I
don’t mind lumping their stuff together with Disney’s in a broader Renaissance
of American animation.
6 This scene though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJleW4TCQM0.
Chills.
7 Don’t take my word for it: check
out the story for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+2&version=ESVUK.
8 You have J. I. Packer to thank for
persuading me round to this view a few years ago in his excellent Knowing
God: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/1782/knowing-god.
9 Here’s the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frE9rXnaHpE.
10 That’s John 7 I’m alluding to
there: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+7&version=ESVUK.
Or alternatively John 4, but John 7 seems to me to be less regularly taught, so
I thought I’d send you there first.
11 I think Adam4d probably captures
the sentiment best: https://adam4d.com/hang-with-martin-luther/.
Mind you, I gather Luther was pretty antisemitic during his earlier career as
well. Christian antisemitism, I tend to feel, is one of those things that’s kind
of so inherently ludicrous – I mean, we literally worship a Jew, where
is the logic here?! – that it would be laughable if it hadn’t proved itself so
terrifyingly potent over the centuries.
12 You can actually get the whole
thing on YouTube, so that’s nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAACMptKD-c.
13 Check out ‘The Disorientating
Nature of La La Land and Life’, under July 2018 in the box on the right,
if you want to see me make that case.
14 And before I go, a tip of the hat
to Scripts for helping me out with those Amazing Grace quotations: https://www.scripts.com/script.php?id=amazing_grace_2638&p=4.
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