Leap of Faith.

If Hoffa is fundamentally dishonest, Leap of Faith is even worse: basically stupid. It begins promisingly enough with the Reverend Jonas Nightengale, a phony evangelist traveling with his entourage in a New Age caravan, outsmarting a state trooper who starts to give him a well-earned speeding-ticket. Jonas uses a combination of state-of-the-art technology and old-style intuition and soft-soap to befriend and disarm the cop. This leads us to further (secular) revelations of how computers, intercoms, and surveillance devices are used to bamboozle a crowd at a tent revival meeting with Jonas's talent for healing. The Nightengale Crusade bogs down in the small Kansas town of Rustwater, now experiencing a year-old drought. Its staunch sheriff, Will, is not fooled by Jonas, and tries to protect the town from being mulcted. This is where Jane, Jonas's business manager and probable mistress (though that aspect of the relationship is curiously glossed over), comes in to vamp Will-one of her jobs is to neutralize such potential threats, though she mainly assists Jonas in the mind games with which he gulls the all too gullible populace.

When not working hard at fleecing the hayseeds with rigged miracles, Jonas relaxes by trying to seduce Marva, the pretty but tough-minded waitress at the local hash house. As she doesn't succumb to direct attack, he charms her crippled younger brother, Boyd, with his secular savoy on top of his preaching and healing skills. While the rubes  are being robbed blind with bogus cures and fake tears shed by the enormous polychrome wood Christ, hanging crucified right above Jonas when he is preaching (a bedizened song-and-dance routine that combines the artistic glitter of Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson with the best of both Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggart), two authentic miracles do take place.

The hard-as-nails yet infinitely womanly Jane finds herself sincerely falling for Sheriff Will, whose virile good looks and amorous zeal are enhanced by his breeding flocks of butterflies that settle like a benison on bystanders, and affect the love-starved young woman more deeply than the water turned to wine did the wedding guests at Cana. At the same time, Marva, to remove the scales from her brother's eyes, challenges Jonas to perform a genuine, nonhysterical miracle and make Boyd shed his crutches. She hopes to cure the townsfolk with this failed cure; but God works in mysterious ways, and Jonas, without so much as one butterfly, performs an even greater miracle. Not only is Boyd made whole, but Jonas, crooked to the core, is made holy as well. Thereupon miracles are (note my choice of word) showered upon parched Rustwater and the movie audience. The screenplay proves every bit as dishonest as Nightengale before God chose to speak through him. But perhaps the scriptwriter, Janus Cercone, assumed that her wretched scenario will also be transformed by divine grace into an instrument of faith. Might Janet Maslin's rave review in the New York Times constitute proof thereof?.

This Janus Cercone, whose first name is pronounced "Janice," went from being a classical violinist at Skidmore College to rock-and-roll band leader and songwriter, thence to director of East Coast publicity for A&M records, doing road publicity for bigname bands. By another leap of faith, she turned popular lyricist and studio back-up singer for the likes of Bette Midlet, Peter Allen, and Nazareth. Then she moved to Los Angeles and married the film producer Michael Manheim. He made her take Syd Field's celebrated course in screenwriting and sold her student script, Knockout, the moment it was finished, to Weintraub Entertainment, then produced her second, Leap of Faith, himself. I don't know exactly when Janice became Janus, a more suitable name for a two-faced woman, but one thing I do know: the true story of Janus Cercone would make far better viewing than Leap of Faith.

For the record, Richard Pearce has directed competently, and Steve Martin (Jonas-or is it Janus?) and Debra Winger (Jane or, again, Janus?) do their best by their scurvy roles. With even less to go on, Lolita Davidovich (Marva), Liam Neeson (Will), and Lukas Haas (Boyd) do nicely, thanks to faces the camera likes to cozy up to. The gospel chorus with which Jonas travels provides a number of black singers and actors with a chance to sound off enthusiastically, and is the film's most attractive feature. But Leap of Faith is poor stuff compared to a documentary such as Marjoe, which did not Janus-facedly pretend to unmask charlatanism while purveying sanctimonious pieties of its own. I would, however, advise prospective female screenwriters to marry prosperous producers; taking courses with Syd Field is optional.