Slipping on the Orange Peel.

Catching Light

Looking for God in the Movies

Roy M. Anker

Eerdmans, $20, 432 pp.

I have to work hard to be fair to this book because it was not written for the likes of me. No film critics or movie buffs read books to discover that movies can touch the soul. They savor the details of the movies they love while trying to figure out how those details add up to a work of art. That remarkable films, like all works of art, can touch the spirit is taken for granted.

Roy Anker is certainly capable of savoring cinematic details, but he is more concerned with marshaling them. For him, great movie scenes, images, moments, are the exhibits that he sets before his readers to prove the power of film "to catch light"--to render the divine visible to the human eye. Anker, a teacher at Calvin College in Michigan, developed a film course to teach "flocks of Calvinist youth, who had been forbidden to watch movies just a few years before," and this book is the weighty byproduct of that brief course.

Catching Light is divided into four sections. Part one, "Darkness Visible," examines movies that explore the depths of evil: The Godfather trilogy, Chinatown, The Deer Hunter. In the second section, "The Light Shines in the Darkness," the author considers films in which God's grace glimmers for the near-damned or spiritually exhausted: Tender Mercies, Places in the Heart, The Mission, Babette's Feast. "Fables of Light" pays tribute to supposedly light entertainments that are also religious allegories--the fantasies of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and Richard Donner's Superman. The films considered in "Found"--Grand Canyon, American Beauty, and Blue--have protagonists who catch a glimpse of God's light but "lack a ready frame of reference or prism that will help make sense of it all"--religion or, at least, a religious sense.

Anker is at his best in the last section. In each of the three films discussed, the "catching light" experience is so subtly felt by the (mostly nonbelieving) characters and so subtly conveyed by the filmmakers, that Anker's close readings pay off.

By contrast, his account of entertainments such as The Godfather trilogy and Chinatown seems laborious and naive. Do even novice moviegoers need to be told that Michael Corleone loses his soul by slaughtering his enemies and that Francis Ford Coppola demonstrates this by cross-cutting between mob hits and a child's baptism? Or that "good intentions do not excuse treachery and barbarism"? Anker does try to zero in on subtler aspects, but when he informs us that a fruit motif in The Godfather (Brando shopping for fruit just before he is shot, Brando using an orange peel to amuse his grandson) echoes "the eating of the apple, the first violation of the creational goodness that was meant to pervade the entirety of life," I'm reminded of why I usually stay away from let's-find-God-at-the-movies books that, sooner or later, always impose fatuous symbolism on well-crafted, tangy realism.

A chapter subtitled "Metaphysical Evil in Chinatown" is even worse. There is nothing metaphysical in Roman Polanski's thriller. All the evil in it stems from old-fashioned greed and lust (even if the latter manifests itself as incest), and the results are land grabbing, fraud, and murder. John Huston's enjoyable hamming as the villain, Noah Cross, delights with its sinister avuncular smiles and arched eyebrows, but this character apparently gives Anker such jimjams that he loses control of his argument. For example, we're told that "in this Chinatown world the operations of the worst evil are not hidden and tidy but shameless and all-devouring," while on the next page we learn that the "brilliant twist in Chinatown" is that "the face of the evil it depicts is not at all obvious or conspicuously scary but is, rather, respectable and very disarming." It doesn't do much good to have a disarming face when your evil operations are not hidden, does it? And Anker believes that the evil in Chinatown "fundamentally revises almost everything we think we know about the way the world is." Gulp! Before we saw Chinatown, we didn't know that evil exists in high places? or that it often puts on a smiling face? or that degenerates sometimes rape their daughters?

That is what most of this book suffers from: hyperbole unleashed. Let Don Corleone suck on an orange peel and it's Garden-of-Eden time. Let E.T. put his elongated finger on little Elliott's forehead and we must hear from Matthew 28:20. Should Luke Skywalker strive after the Force, then we must recall Paul's letters to the Ephesians. To mitigate whatever wariness his "Calvinist youth" feel about the movies, the author hammers away. See! These movies you've been told to avoid can actually contain God. But they don't dare display God and his works openly for fear of not making money. "It is no less amazing that if many viewers, religious and secular alike, had been told beforehand that Superman was a Jesus story ... most would not have bothered to go see it." Yeah, those Jesus movies are death at the box office. Mr. Anker, meet Mr. Gibson.

I don't mean to say that Anker is a pious philistine. Every page of this substantial book makes it clear that the light of God appears at the movies only when the filmmakers are artists enough to catch that light. The chapters on Tender Mercies and Grand Canyon are probably the most thorough analyses those movies have received to date, and the author is relentless in revealing how their creators worked. He notes that the two principal characters of Tender Mercies are photographed as being "dwarfed by that vast sky and the broad empty land ... on fifteen different occasions." Fifteen! He has counted them, and I'm ready to believe he ran Tender Mercies through his DVD player fifteen times to make sure he got the number right.

So it's not scholarly thoroughness or aesthetic awareness that's missing from this book. Yet something vital is absent. Here is Anker describing the lovely closing moments of Places in the Heart, when the dead Sheriff Royce miraculously appears at a church service, passes the Communion tray to the equally dead Wiley, the boy who accidentally killed Royce, and wishes him the peace of the Lord: "At the moment of that exchange, the words of the hymn emphasize the nature and consequence of the event: 'The joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.' This is, after all, what human life is for, this culmination of fellowship, reconciliation, and delight in the fullness of God's blessing. After this exchange between the murdered and the murderer, they both stare directly and soberly into the camera as it, in its habitual reflex in this movie, simply grazes back for a few seconds until the screen fades to black."

Good. That describes the scene plainly enough, and it tells you what the point of the scene is. But does it make you want to see the movie? Now here is Arlene Croce (in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book) describing an utterly frivolous moment, the singing of "Cheek to Cheek," in an utterly frivolous movie, Top Hat:

    Astaire's face is peculiarly beautiful when he sings; the strain of
    his features when he hits the difficult notes ... gives him an
    intense look of romantic ardor. And Rogers is perhaps never more
    beautiful than when she's just listening; she never takes her eyes
    off him and throughout this scene I don't think she changes her
    expression once. The modesty of the effect makes her look like an
    angel: such a compliant, unasking attitude, handsome beyond
    expectation in such a fierce woman.

Nothing religious there, right, despite the angel simile? Yet which of the two excerpts conveys a glimpse of grace? Croce's description is a work of art to set beside the art of Astaire and Rogers. Describing singing, the prose sings. Croce conveys the feeling we always receive when we watch human beings become, however temporarily, larger than life normally permits them to be. God is somewhere within this lady in satin, within this playboy in a tuxedo, and God is somewhere in Croce's words. Anker's description is bare bones, which is perfectly all right, but then he starts exhorting. However hard you seek God in art, cheerleading drives him away.

But I have hopes for Anker. All through Catching Light, there are sidebars containing filmographies, tips about which DVDs have the most goodies, inside stories of filmmaking, historical backgrounds, cast lists, Academy Award nominations, etc. I found these sidebars the most interesting passages in the book, and it lifted my spirit to discover in them that Roy Anker is a movie nut. I think he should consider letting the movie nut inside him take over when he writes his next book.

Richard Alleva reviews movies for Commonweal.