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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

What Is A “Religious” Film Anyway?

Religion's ostensible decline in Hollywood is a function of changes in economics and culture
charlton-heston-as-moses-in-the-ten-commandments

Michael Cieply, writing in The New York Times, tells an anecdote to illustrate Hollywood’s aversion to religious films for a mass market audience:

It was in the mid-1990s, and a good writer, earlier nominated for an Oscar, had an earnest modern-day Christ story about a damaged man in Los Angeles who might or might not be the Messiah. “The Greatest Story Ever Told” meets “Falling Down,” more or less.

We tried it out on Columbia executives, but four minutes into the pitch the studio’s production president ran out to take calls. A remaining vice president nodded off in his seat. “At least I’ve got an anecdote,” the writer muttered.

With a few exceptions that have generally skewed toward humor or horror — the God comedy “Bruce Almighty,” the angel romance “Michael” and the exorcism film “The Rite” come to mind — it has been that way for decades. Major studios suddenly get distracted when anyone suggests tackling serious religious subjects.

Hmmm, I thought. Mid-1990s. I seem to recall that there were films made more or less around that time, with a decidedly similar theme. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another. And another. Is it possible that Cieply’s anecdote of Hollywood indifference is one that could be told about, well, almost any kind of script?

Now, each of the movies I linked to has a distinct sensibility of its own. But that “Christ may be walking among you, where you least-expect to find him” theme is common to all. Only one of them, the Canadian “Jesus of Montreal,” is a small-scale film. The other three were solid mid-budget films aimed at a mass audience, and all of them did well by one measure or another. “The Shawshank Redemption,” which probably did the worst of the bunch in its initial box office, is now widely cited as people’s favorite movies of all time.

Cieply complains that Hollywood used to make films like “The Ten Commandments,” but won’t take that kind of risk anymore. Did he manage to miss “Prince of Egypt,” a book-of-Exodus-based biblical epic put out by DreamWorks in 1998? Or does it not count because it is animated – notwithstanding that animated films have been some of the most successful, both financially and in terms of cultural impact, of the past twenty years.

As Damon Linker points out, films like “The Ten Commandments” are hardly serious takes on religious themes. Have there been many of the latter kinds of films? No – but there never have been, and there certainly weren’t piles of them in the 1950s. Meanwhile, he identifies “The Chosen,” “Shadowlands,” “The End of the Affair” and, especially, “Tree of Life” as serious films about religious questions and living a religiously serious life. If I were making my own list, I’d add the powerful ’90s indie, “Household Saints,” the searchingly skeptical Coen Brothers film, “A Serious Man,” (which, as I’ve noted before, makes a fascinating double-feature with Malick’s “Tree of Life”), and much of the career of Bruce Beresford, with particular emphasis on “Black Robe” and “Tender Mercies,” the latter one of my favorite films of all time. If you add in films that appeal to a spiritually-minded audience without having anything explicitly religious about them, the list is longer. In honor of the passing of Harold Ramis, I’ll mention only one, “Groundhog Day,” the “It’s a Wonderful Life” of this generation.

But Cieply’s dismissive response to two serious films on religious themes reveals that he’s looking for something specific in a religious film. Those are current Oscar nominee “Philomena” and Martin Scorsese’s monumental 1988 drama, “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

“Philomena” is a sweet little film about a sentimental and culturally-sheltered old Irish lady (Judy Dench) searching for the boy she gave up for adoption fifty years ago. The story is told through the eyes of a cynical journalist (Steve Coogan) who agrees to help her on her quest, and in the process uncovers exactly the tale of Catholic corruption and mendacity that he expected to find. But it’s not his story, and the film is only incidentally an exposé of the Catholic church. It’s Philomena’s story, and her story is the story of someone who holds fast to her faith even in the face of real wrong done to her by her church. Our own journey, over the course of the film, follows the journalist’s – we start out condescending to her, to some degree, then feel sympathy, and finally we’re put in our place by her. To read this simply as an “anti-Catholic” film in the vein of “Agnes of God,” as the New York Post did (which is all Cieply tells us about the film) strikes me as willful misreading – unless you define “anti-Catholic” to mean “honest about the sins of the Catholic hierarchy.” (The film is based on a true story.)

Similarly, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” adapted by Paul Schrader from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, is a very searching examination of Jesus’s experience, and specifically the idea that, as Christ is supposed to be fully human, he faced the ultimate temptation from Satan in the form of an offer of a normal, happy human life. It’s not only a serious film about the central Christian myth, it’s one that takes that myth deeply seriously. It’s not a skeptical film in any meaningful sense of the word. But, of course, it was protested by Protestant and Catholic groups who didn’t like its emphasis on the human side of Christ’s dichotomous identity, the notion that temptation was something Jesus actually experienced, in a deep way, a test he didn’t pass easily.

These films are in no sense anti-religious; they are obviously serious; and they clearly deal with religion, religious people, and religious themes – and they take the faith of the religious seriously. But they aren’t necessarily films that will make religious people comfortable – they aren’t obviously flattering to religious sensibilities, and may indeed offend those sensibilities. Is that the standard of what counts as a “religious” film – something pious and flattering to religious believers?

I think so, because Cieply’s complaint seems to be about marketing rather than about substance – he’s interested in films that “appeal to a Christian audience.” As Cieply knows, there is a whole industry of Christian filmmaking out there providing that kind of product. Hollywood is perfectly good at flattering its audience – that’s its standard modus operandi, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Hollywood tried to break into a lucrative niche market. And if it doesn’t, then Christian filmmakers will fill the void – they are already doing so, much as Tyler Perry has done with a different lucrative niche market that Hollywood has had trouble cracking.

But what Cieply seems to want is a variety of mass-market films with a sensibility that flatters a specifically religious audience. The barriers to that, though, aren’t some kind of anti-religious bias in Hollywood, which was likely as secular in the 1950s as it now, and just as focused on the bottom line. It’s changes in film economics – and cultural changes in the larger society.

As Cieply surely knows, there are more movies being made than ever, covering a wider variety of stories and aimed and a more diverse audience. But the studios are making fewer and fewer films, and the ones they are making keep getting bigger. What this has meant is that the middle-budget film is becoming a thing of the past. Films either get made for under $20 million (and usually much less than that), or for more than $100 million. Films in the former category have trouble achieving the epic scale that Cieply clearly wants to see. Films in the latter category have to be essentially immune from box-office failure, which is why we see so many blockbusters based on properties with a pre-existing audience, so many films with the same formulaic story line, and with protagonists and villains that will play everywhere from Johannesburg to Jakarta.

Meanwhile, in the 1950s American culture was broadly but shallowly Christian; it was not the 1850s. Nor was it like today, when there is a much more substantial non-Christian or even anti-Christian segment of the population, while conservative religious groups are much more engaged in active resistance to the culture at large. The 1950s Waco, Texas family in Terence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” for example, is Christian, but not counter-culturally so; their Christianity doesn’t stand out as a fact. This change in American religious demographics has implications for the marketing of a film; you can’t just assume that a mass audience shares common religious assumptions, which means if your film partakes of a certain set of assumptions you risk confusing or alienating part of your audience. Far safer to stick to Oprah-approved spiritual sentiments without much content.

So, on one level, Linker is right that “Hollywood doesn’t have a religion problem. It has a quality problem.” But to the extent that this is true, it is substantially a function of economics.

I think about this question a lot, because one of my scripts, probably the one I’m most attached to, deals very centrally with religious themes, and takes religion quite seriously indeed. It’s substantially inspired by “Tender Mercies” – and if anybody reading this knows Bruce Beresford, please put us in touch. But I worry whether it could get made, precisely because it isn’t exactly flattering; it’s neither a comfortably secular film nor a comfortably feel-good religious or “spiritual” film. It doesn’t obviously fit in a box. And the movie industry likes its boxes. (Also I worry that it just isn’t good enough – but it’s my baby; I believe it is!)

Meanwhile, the more obvious complaint to make about Hollywood with respect to religion is precisely that it goes in a box – that it’s an “issue” rather than being portrayed as simply a part of life for the majority of characters, whereas in fact this is the reality for much of America (though certainly not all of it). Making movies with serious religious themes is hard because making any film is hard, and making anything spiritually serious is hard, so doing both is almost impossible. Including religion as a routine component of character just requires research.

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