Miracles From Heaven

I’ve always been fascinated by the similarities between going to the movies and going to church. Both are held in special buildings set aside just for their specific purpose, both involve large groups of people coming together at appointed times, facing the same direction, and receiving a message. Church and movies both tell us stories intended to shape how we think and feel about the world. Both have the potential to be uplifting and joyous. In both places, I usually wish the people sitting near me would just shut up. 

There have been intersections between film and faith since the very beginning of movies, and one of the latest developments is the popularity of evangelical Christian movies on the big screen. In the last ten years or so, films like Fireproof, Facing the Giants, God’s Not Dead, and Courageous have transitioned from the home viewing market and select screenings in churches to the local multiplex. Audiences are making evangelical cinema an economically viable film genre in America.

Of course, critiquing any religiously-based film can be tricky business because it’s never “just a movie.” Viewers often feel polarized for reasons that go beyond the effectiveness of the cinematography, acting, or writing of the film. The movies represent how they feel about evangelical Christianity – for better or for worse, and sometimes the film itself gets lost because criticism of the movie feels like criticism of the belief. 

 

Last week, I screened Miracles from Heaven, a film based on the true story of a 10 year old Texan girl named Anna Beam. In the film, Anna is sudden stricken with a digestive disorder. Her body can’t process anything she eats or drinks and so she goes from being healthy and happy to being fed through tubes and being in constant pain. Her family stands behind her and does everything possible to help, but her condition is incurable and only gets worse. Devout Christians that they are, her family prays for Anna to be healed but as things continue to worsen, her mother, played by Jennifer Garner, loses her faith, leaves her church, and becomes embittered toward God.

Then, on a visit home from the hospital, Anna, in an effort to be normal, climbs her favorite old tree. Once up there, she falls into its hollow center, dropping thirty feet, and is unconscious for hours until rescuers can pull her out. They find that, not only does she have no injuries to speak of, but she suddenly has no symptoms of her disorder whatsoever. Later, Anna confides that while unconscious in the tree, her spirit left her body and went to Heaven where she met God and he told her that she would be healed upon her return. The film ends with footage of the real healthy and normal Anna and her family, even showing Anna visiting the very tree she fell into six years ago. 

Miracles from Heaven isn’t a bad film. It just isn’t a particularly compelling one. It asks nothing of its audience other than to be moved by the pain and then triumph of a charismatic young girl. But beyond that, the film feels more like a commercial. It’s all surface gloss and not much substance. The cinematography is uniformly sunlit and golden, and the characters are all decent but utterly predicable. Given the prickliness and difficulty of faith and of the questions raised in the film, we are let off the hook far too easily. Garner’s character’s faith comes back because she gets what she wants. Questions about why Anna is healed and not other people who suffer more are essentially ignored.

Miracles from Heaven is like going to church and the movies at the same time. For some viewers, that’s the perfect combination, but for me, I couldn’t make the leap of faith between seeing it and actually enjoying it.