The Appeal of Religious Movies
Adam Valen Levinson
Freelance Movie Critic
CRUCIFIXION. Jesus. Buddha. Keanu Reeves. It seems these few words have caught your attention, and our multicultural friends in Hollywood know exactly why. What is it that shapes society as we know it? What finds its way into every field of entertainment, sports, science and politics? What institution contains the most recognizable figures in the entire universe? If you said religion, you gain ten karma points. The film industry knows how universally two-hour installments of good feeling are accepted, and how “documentation” of a sect’s favorite deity will be swallowed whole. But religious movies are not solely serious. See, the movie business caters to what its viewers know, and for 90 % of the United States, that knowledge includes beliefs, prayers, and legendary stories.
The most religiously saturated, and often most controversial religious films are the epics, most recently 2004’s The Passion of the Christ. The Passion deals with Christ’s last day in an unoriginal way, but still manages to reach out to a huge portion of the world. Even in Arabic countries where the prevalent religion is different from that of the Gibson film, meaning is found (even if it is communal anti-semitism). Even though the story is one almost every viewer would know, most are still captivated and touched. Even though similar movies have been made over and over in the past, a stunning $610 million was soaked up at theaters near you. Supposedly, we can see our hero’s suffering, and so be made closer to our faith. These movies let us visualize the stories we may have been told from infancy, and in projecting giant Jesuses onto giant screens, religion begins to take tangible form.
Another epic, made forty eight years earlier (note: this is Jesus’ age at death plus fifteen) tells the story of Moses and his deliverance of the Jews to freedom. I am speaking of course of Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments. This is 1.3 % of America’s Passion, showing a tale of self-understanding and justice in a huge and spectacular way. It is with these grand gestures and 220 minutes of Bar Mitzvah-worthy stories that Charleton Heston (Moses) and his staff blazed the path for every epic ever made. These movies insight within us a feeling of excitement and pride. One might expect Heston to descend Sinai carrying a rifle and the second amendment, but after seeing him proudly holding the ten commandments it is easy to feel exhilarated, even if you did do some coveting the night before. These epics are designed to strengthen the viewers’ faith, or at least summarize seven years of Hebrew/Sunday school in four hours.
However, Moses cannot climb Mount Sinai everyday and Jesus must take a break from the cross, so religion in movies often takes the form of comedy. There is something enticing about treating what some find a serious topic in a lighthearted way, something that lets us explore faith and religion without being grabbed at by conscience-shaking epics. Unquestionably the best religious comedy ever made is Dogma. Being a comedy, Dogma can address subjects that would be seen to be too touchy or controversial in purely serious films. For example, director Kevin Smith answered the untouchable question, what does God look like? with Alanis Morissette. In this movie, serious postulates can be masked with jokes, but Dogma can still leave you wondering if that really is how it all works without offending anyone (with a sense of humor). Another easy to watch God-filled movie is Keeping the Faith, about a best friend rabbi and priest and their relations with a female childhood friend. Keeping the Faith attempts to make a sappy moral statement, that people of all religions can get along, without being sappy. When the priest walks into the bar at the beginning of the film, you might wonder if it’s a joke, but by the end the true meaning is visible. Had the film been serious and ordered its viewers to GET ALONG!, it would have been a flop. The Comedy has the ability to make people see everything in a different light. Almost misleadingly, like South Park or Huck Finn, these movies pull us in with jokes and when we least expect it, we’re hit with something meaningful.
Satire is another approach that lets an audience laugh at their own surroundings. The movie Saved makes fun of fanatical Catholic society by caricaturing Mandy Moore as a bible-toting, anti-Semitic student who plans to rid sin from her school. As the movie takes its course, we begin to see that the sinner is Moore herself, and her lack of tolerance eventually leads to her own lack of acceptance. Lines like “I crashed my van into Jesus!” make a serious social commentary hilarious. In this way, an unwelcoming, intolerant person could leave the theater laughing, but realize two hours later that they were laughing at themselves.
Being in America, most of us are only exposed to Judeo-Christian movies, but there are others. Little Buddha, starring Keanu Reeves, shows parallels between the life of a little American boy, and that of Prince Siddhartha himself. Little Buddha is a welcome change of pace from other religious films as it somewhat explains Buddhism as a whole, instead of exclusively telling a story. Unlike the epics, it is not grandiose with majestic movie music, and unlike a comedy, it is not truly funny. But as we watch Reeves become totally, like, enlightened we are educated and shown new ways to live.
Sometimes religion in the cinema is neither funny nor straightforward. Sometimes it comes in horror form like The Exorcist and sometimes it comes as a musical like Jesus Christ Superstar, but no matter what genre, religious films aim to make a statement that can be understood in all corners of the world.
Written September 16, 2005 for the Friends' Central Focus
