Profound questions and tedious answers
THE SHACK Running Time: 2hrs 12 min Starring: Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, Avraham Aviv Alush, Radha Mitchell, Alice Braga, Graham Greene, Tim McGraw, Sumire, Amelie Eve, Megan Charpentier, Gage Munroe, Derek Hamilton Director: Stuart Hazeldine WITH The Shack, a numbingly earnest Easter-season offering, Octavia Spencer joins the ranks of performers who have played God.
Hers is a Supreme Being with none of the winking or bossiness we’ve seen in versions rendered by Morgan Freeman, George Burns, Ralph Richardson and Alanis Morissette, to name a few. The warm, maternal “Papa” portrayed by Spencer is all loving magnanimity – the movie is, like the publishing-phenomenon novel on which it’s based, essentially a theodicy, or defence of God’s goodness.
And given that William Paul Young’s book has sold millions of copies, one can expect an eager flock in cinemas; fans will want to see how the story of a grief-crippled man’s weekend-long encounter with the Almighty translates to the big screen.
For those who come to the material not as devotees, that translation unfolds with a Bible-study-meetsEsalen awkwardness. It’s hard to imagine the feature generating the same word-of-mouth that turned a selfpublished story into a best-seller.
With its sparkly spin on the New Testament, the film will be too New Agey for those who hew closely to doctrine (some conservative Christians have criticised the novel as a work of misguided heresy). But beyond theological debates, the feature is a leaden, belaboured affair.
However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat – in real time.
Hazeldine, whose only previous feature is the 2009 psychological thriller Exam, bungles crucial transitions, especially in the early sequences that shift between past and present to set up the story of Mackenzie Phillips (Sam Worthington).
A married father of three in Oregon, Mack has succumbed to a “great sadness” when he receives a mysterious note inviting him to the mountain shack where his youngest daughter, Missy (Amelie Eve), was murdered after being abducted during a camping trip.
The note is signed “Papa”, as his wife, Nan (Radha Mitchell), likes to call God. Nan, we’re told in the voiceover narration by Mack’s neighbour Willie (Tim McGraw), has a strong and abiding relationship with God – which presumably accounts for her preternatural calm in the direst of circumstances.
From Missy’s precociously discerning questions about God to the constant coaxing of Aaron Zigman’s score, what should be deeply touching is merely forced. McGraw’s voiceover may assure us that “you’ll have to decide for yourself ”. But room for contemplation is nowhere to be found in The Shack. – Hollywood Reporter