Hollywood, Religion, and the Real World
by Chris Herlinger

For some religious movie goers it was the year of JESUS CAMP, THE NATIVITY STORY, and END OF THE SPEAR.

But for a number of observers of film and the spiritual zeitgeist, the year-long season that culminates in the Oscars on February 25 was less about the overt religiosity and religious themes in these films than a continued swing to pessimism and a rather gray-hued type of moral reflection.

"I can't think of a hopeful one in the bunch," Roy Anker, a professor of English at Calvin College in Michigan, said of the current crop of films in contention for the Oscars or which created an "Oscar buzz."

Robert Johnston, a professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, concurred. He said at least two broad themes animated a number of films this past year: the reality of evil and responding to "the other" in our midst. These spiritual and ethical themes were more powerfully expressed, he believes, in overtly nonreligious films, such as BABEL and CHILDREN OF MEN.

To be sure, there were films that focused sharply on religious themes: the reality of tradition-bound religious beliefs in Hindu India (WATER), ongoing debates about religion and sexuality (the documentary THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO and the dramatization of a young man's experience in an "ex-gay" ministry, SAVE ME, both shown at the Sundance Film Festival), and the pernicious effects of the sexual abuse scandal of the Roman Catholic Church (the documentary DELIVER US FROM EVIL). The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Office for Film and Broadcasting, in issuing its annual list of top 10 movies, described 2006 as a year that offered "a surfeit of superior films … with solid moral underpinnings." BABEL, UNITED 93, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA all made the list.

Not everything was serious, of course. Johnston recalled a small but telling moment in the stock car racing comedy TALLADEGA NIGHTS -- Ricky Bobby's prayer to Baby Jesus. There was no better example of the fact that in 2006, spiritual and religious asides did not have to be explained or overly pondered, he said.

"Religion and spirituality," Johnston said, "have entered our post-secular world [so deeply] that they're not now seen as either discordant or as offensive." If anything, they are a balm -- welcome, relished and celebrated.

To Lynn Schofield Clark, who teaches at the University of Denver and is director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media, 2006 was a year in which the spirituality of transcendence proved less prominent in film than a "God of the here and now."

"It was not a year for a 'touched by an angel' God," Clark said, noting that the spiritual dimension portrayed in films was about real, concrete human struggles on Earth, whether they were the problems of living in a globalized world (BABEL) or the growing awareness "that we're in deep trouble and we need better solutions than what we've come up with." A perfect example of that was AN INCONVIENENT TRUTH, the documentary focusing on Al Gore's environmental activism which has proven to be something of a quiet hit on the church-religious-education circuit.

For religious conservatives, the pessimism of 2006 contained little that was redeemable. Phil Boatwright, who writes on film for Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention's news service, noted that four of the films nominated for best picture (THE DEPARTED, BABEL, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA) are R-rated and in his view "featured either cynicism, political correctness, crudity, a countless amount of obscenity, or material that borders on pornographic."

"The artistic and technical merits achieved by directors Scorsese, Eastwood and the rest cannot be denied, but the perspective of these four R-rated films can thwart most any filmgoer's spiritual development," he wrote recently.

The evangelical magazine CHRISTIANITY TODAY had a slightly different take on 2006, nominating 10 films as "most redeemable of the year." Topping the list: THE NATIVITY STORY, which its panel of film viewers praised in particular for taking a fresh view of Joseph "in ways like never before," providing a much-needed look at "a righteous man." Other movies that made the CHRISTIANITY TODAY list included CHILDREN OF MEN, CHARLOTTE'S WEB, THE SECOND CHANCE, and THE NEW WORLD.

What of documentaries? Sharon Pucker Rivo, executive director of the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, said she was heartened that despite the increasing difficulty of finding funding -- "it's not a thriving business," she said -- fine documentaries continue to be made. One making the rounds at a number of Jewish film festivals and expected to go into wider release later this year is YIPPEE, filmmaker Paul Mazursky's first-person account of his journey to a small Ukrainian town with a group of Hasidic Jews.

Rivo also praised the sizable crop of Iraq documentaries, such as MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY and IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS, which provided often startling "on the ground" glimpses of the combustible fusion of war, politics, and religion.

The Iraq war, she said, "should be the number-one topic for American filmmakers right now." But it isn't, she suggested, because it is not perceived "as great entertainment. It's not diversion. It's the real world."

The "real world," of course, is a painful, difficult place, and what Clark called "real bleakness" and a "feeling of hopelessness" in a number of films Anker described as "a continuation, a rather marked tendency to get serious and grim about the human circumstance," noting that CHILDREN OF MEN, BABEL and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA continued a long arc of somber films, including 2006 Oscar nominees CRASH, CAPOTE, and SYRIANA.