The celluloid of things hoped for
A FAITH-AFFIRMING STORY THAT DELIVERS MIRACLES — AND MAKES THE BIBLE INTO A SELF-HELP TRACT
It might give itself away before you’ve even finished reading the title, but Miracles From Heaven at least separates itself from its more blinkered Christian brethren by focusing more on the journey than the deliverance. Now, sure, based on a faith- affirming bestselling “true” story, it’s still the kind of movie where a husband reacts with more shock at the notion that his wife might be losing her faith than the news that his daughter has an incurable and slowly fatal disease. And it certainly gets in a few smug licks on the lot of unbelievers — “They’ll come around when they come around,” our healed moppet eventually shrugs. But on balance this is as much a movie about a mother’s grief and how that shakes her as it is about putting trust in the G-man.
It may not be God’s hand on the heartstrings, but that doesn’t mean they’re not tugged hard. Christy Beam ( Jennifer Garner) is living a blessed life in sunny Texas, her only serious worries outside the raising of her three beautiful daughters is her husband’s veterinary clinic, which has tied up most of their home equity. ( Someone who has not yet “come around” might point out that God sure does choose a lot of photogenically down-home white upper- middle- class types to reveal himself/grant book deals to, but anyway.) This idyll is shattered when middle daughter Anna (Kylie Rogers) is diagnosed with an extremely rare condition that keeps her intestines from absorbing food, leaving her in constant pain and slowly dying.
Most of saving Anna is left to Christy’s devices: she refuses to let doctors wave away her concerns, all but harasses a Bostonarea specialist into taking on Anna’s case and does her best to hold the family together while she crumbles from within. The deck is so stacked in her sympathetic favour that Garner doesn’t have to do much more than emote while her girl wails in pain or a team of church busybodies tut-tut about her family’s probable sins. To her credit, though, she does capture some of the tremendous hurt and the blessed feeling when it gets inexplicably taken away, which goes a long way toward making the miracle feel genuinely cathartic.
Of course, once that happens, she delivers a speech about how the TRUE miracles are the everyday niceties of human beings, which I suppose carries some weight when you’ve witnessed your daughter’s GI tract start working all because she talked to God about it. It kind of reduces all those questions of faith to a self- help book — like the Bible’s original subtitle was Chicken Soup for the Eternal Soul — but then that is sort of the purpose of all this spiritual feel-goodery. ΩΩ