Might actually be able to preach beyond the choir
|||MIRACLES FROM HEAVEN
DIRECTOR: Patricia Riggen
CAST: Jennifer Garner, Martin Henderson, Kylie Rogers, Eugenio Derbez, Queen Latifah and Brighton Sharbino
CLASSIFICATION: PG
RUNNING TIME: 109 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Sheri Linden
The inspirational memoir, Miracles From Heaven, transfers to the big screen as a crowd-pleasing drama, one whose subject is faith and gratitude. The tone is frequently more searching than self-satisfied, and the harrowing medical crisis that drives the family story gives it the non-religious urgency to preach beyond the choir. So too does Garner’s down-to-earth lead performance as Christy Beam, a ferociously dedicated mom doing her best to keep it together in trying circumstances.
Churchy but not too churchy, with only a couple of outright mentions of Jesus and just a soupçon of condescension toward those who Don’t Believe, this is, in some ways, basic New Age-friendly self-help delivered through a high-stakes narrative.
Director Riggen casts the visions of awe in a pastel palette that reflects a child’s point of view. Most effective, there’s the partly animated climactic sequence that expresses a young girl’s experience of heaven.
That girl is Anna Beam, a wise-beyond-her-years 10-year-old Texan who’s exceptionally well played by Rogers. As her parents, Garner and Henderson have the all-American air of a former homecoming king and queen who are devoted to their three girls. Kevin has just opened a veterinary clinic, leaving them financially strapped and Christy stressed about it, while he only shrugs his sturdy trust-in-God shoulders. What he calls his faith others would classify as what-me-worry? nonchalance, and it’s easy to understand why Christy loses her faith for a while, especially after Anna, their middle daughter, becomes desperately ill.
But Christy never loses her sense of purpose or tenacity. She refuses to accept glib diagnoses of lactose intolerance and acid reflux for Anna, who’s in constant pain, her stomach distended. Pushing for real answers, she gets them, and they’re devastating: Anna has a rare and incurable intestinal disorder that makes it impossible to digest food.
Garner’s fury is a force of nature but never over the top. Refusing to sit on the months-long waiting list of Dr Nurko (Derbez), a leading specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, Christy flies cross-country with Anna, where the kindness of strangers – and an experimental drug – offer hope.
Though Rogers must deliver some of the smuggest and most cringeworthy lines, her performance is emotionally compelling. And it’s hard to imagine another Hollywood star who would be as persuasive as Texas native Garner is in this change-of-pace role.
That Christy’s spiritual well-being rests on her return to church is one of the key places where the film’s potentially broad appeal narrows. Beam and the filmmakers interpret Anna’s sudden recovery, when it arrives, as proof of God, and they emphasise the inadequacy of science to explain.
Among those who trust reason over faith, they’re not likely to change any minds, but they could touch a few hearts. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Heaven is for Real or The Odd Life of Timothy Green, you will like this.
