A lapse of faith
Story of doomed romance lacks nuance and reality
A greeting card can’t adequately convey any depth or personal experience. No doubt, some great writers write them, and there are readers, indeed, who are moved by them. They convey feelings and ideas in a generic and uncomplicated way. If they offend, it’s for the same reason they exist: they are universal. Greeting cards are, foremost, a mass-produced corporate product that offer a shortcut to something almost real.
A movie like I Still Believe, a true-faith story of a Christian rock star’s doomed romance, is the cinematic equivalent of a greeting card. It deals with big ideas like love, faith and even death, but it’s stripped of any subtlety. Even though the film is based on the story of Jeremy Camp (here played by K.J. Apa, a.k.a. sexy Riverdale Archie) and his star-crossed romance with Melissa Henning (Britt Robertson), it never strikes a complicated or ugly note. In service of a big-screen faith message, all of life’s messy contradictions are ironed out and erased. The reality of life and death, it seems, has no place in this true story.
Everything in the film seems filtered through a glowing goldlight and actor’s faces, even in the grips of pain and suffering, are airbrushed and effervescent. I Still Believe has all the tropes of the faith-movie complex: a grand and perfect tragedy, wholesome families and sexless romances. Every American home has a clean, new flag and talent effortlessly leads to success. The songs have a varnished quality as each is perfectly polished and ultimately interchangeable one from the other. Sight unseen, the movie’s beats are painfully predictable. Even in the shmaltzy realm of the terminal romance genre, I Still Believe hits a particularly artificial note.
All the film’s dialogue can be broken down into three categories: I love yous, God and witless banter. Few sentences run by that don’t cycle back to the film’s religious message. The cast is led around in circles by the movie’s limited and unimaginative view of love and faith.
The cast, nonetheless, does their best. As the terminally hopeful Melissa, Robertson brings an infectious bubbliness to her manic-pixie-god-girl. Gary Sinise plays the Christian version of the Call Me by Your Name dad with the aw-shucks attitude of a former pastor. Shania Twain shows up in a musical and doesn’t so much as look in the direction of a guitar. They all slip easily into variations of the same personality type, impossibly devoted children of God.
As the film’s aspiring Christian rock star, however, Apa brings subversive sex appeal. Though he has a square jaw and boyish charm, he evades the wholesomeness the film demands. You watch him and can’t believe that his desires are rooted in the light of heaven, rather than the carnality of the earth.
He has to fight against his charisma to convey the airy spiritual love the movie desperately tries to push. Yet, this brash earthiness might be the most exciting part of the film.
The nail in the coffin for I Still Believe, however, has to be the way its corporate faith message cheapens the ideas and emotions it tries desperately to portray. The way the movie sanitizes death and renders each moment into faith-affirming vignettes robs it of its humanity and transcendence.
There’s no real talking around the fact that the film ultimately feels like a money grab, selling prepackaged miracles.