A Gigantic Problem

November 27, 2006 by djackson.

Not long ago, I posted in this space a review of the movie “Facing the Giants,” then withdrew it upon advice of counsel.  It was a little harsh, even for me.  I mean, I said it was the dumbest movie since “E.T.”, even including “Gigli.”  But this would also cover “Glitter” and any film with Kevin Costner and on more mature consideration doubt I can make that case.

If you haven’t heard, the movie was produced by the good folks at the Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.  The pastor, Michael Gatt, led the congregation to found “Sherwood Pictures” as a part of his conviction that SBC can “reach the world from Albany, Georgia.”  And I’m sure it can.  But not this way.

The plot concerns the fortunes and misfortunes of the Shiloh Academy Eagles and their coach Grant Taylor.  Coach Taylor has posted six straight losing seasons and watched his team drop the first three contests of his seventh campaign.  His house stinks, his car dies, his wife isn’t pregnant, and the booster club wants his head sharing space with John the Baptist’s.  After an all-night chalk-talk with the Almighty he assembles his team and tells them that from here on in its praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-pigskin.  Predictably the Eagles run the table straight into the state championship game, he roots the dead rat out of his drywall, a pleased parent gives him a new truck, his DNA finally does a victory dance in the estrogen endzone, and he gets a raise instead of a pink-slip.

All right, its corny.  But so were all sixty-seven sequels of “The Mighty Ducks.”  And all right, between the clumsy acting and heavy-handed preaching it feels like a Frankenstein pastiche of “Walker Texas Ranger” and “The 700 Club.”  And yes, the characters are such cardboard cut-outs of sermon points that one expects the players’ jersies to have Roman numerals or alliterating letters instead of regular digits.  But for all that it isn’t a lot worse than propaganda pieces like “Runaway Jury” or the current flick about Robert Kennedy.

So why did this movie upset and - it took me a while to realize this - embarrass me so badly?  That mystery deepens when I consider that, for the most part, I agree with the film’s message.  Okay, not the trust-the-Lord-and-win thing.  I played high school football, and I loved Jesus, and we went out every Friday night and got our heads kicked in.  Still, the movie seeks to share the gospel in which I stand and by which I am saved.  So what’s my problem?

And I think I may have figured it out.  It is precisely because I buy the movie’s premise that I would rather not see it on the silver screen.  At one point a teacher at the school informs the coach that one of his players has “accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.”  Mulling over that line, I realized that I reacted against having something so intimate trotted out by a bad actor as propaganda in a movie theater.  C. S. Lewis once wrote something similar about family affection.  “To produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move.  It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.”  The intimate truths of the Christian faith, and the homely language in which we Baptists (being a people close to the soil as we are) have clothed them do very well indeed in their place - in the pulpit or the prayer closet or quiet conversation between close friends.  But splatter them in technicolor at the local metroplex and they seem suddenly pitiful.  Perhaps one reason God protected the sacred space of ancient Israel was not just that it was too glorious for his people to behold, but also too intimate for the gentiles to appreciate. 

Which is why I think that, as a piece of evangelism, this movie is a bust.  Conservative Christians can use it to groove their stroke, deepening the synaptic patterns of belief they hold dear.  Unbelievers, I’m convinced, will notice the ham-fisted symbolism (care to guess the name of the scrawny kicker sent in at the last second to boot the winning field goal against the “Giants”?) and wooden dialogue and go away with another reason to sneer at the saints.  They’ll say the movie wasn’t any good; the truth will be in some ways the opposite:  they weren’t able to appreciate the good in it.

When reviews of C. S. Lewis’ space novels first appeared, he was delighted to find that very few critics even noticed the underlying Christian symbolism.  He figured that pop culture evangelism was more of a black-ops kind of thing than a charge up San Juan hill.  Maybe the makers of “Facing the Giants” could benefit from pondering that notion.

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