Sunday, June 2, 2019

Twist of Faith (Lighthouse Pictures, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Pride and Prejudice Atlanta Lifetime showed something even better: Twist of Faith, which I had seen on their schedule and assumed from the title would be about a corrupt minister who ends up in a murder plot. In fact, it was considerably deeper and richer than just another formula Lifetime thriller — indeed, it wasn’t a thriller at all but a romantic drama centered around the unlikely match-up of a man and a woman from almost totally different backgrounds. The woman is Nina Jones (Toni Braxton, whom I’ve never been that big a fan of as a singer but who’s turned out here and in her other Lifetime credit, Faith Under Fire — in which she played a real-life heroine who managed to talk a shooter out of massacring students and staff at the school where she worked — to be a very powerful and insightful actress), native of a small town in Alabama where she’s raising a 10-year-old son, Asher (Nathaniel James Porvin), as a single parent. She has the help of her uncle Moe (Mykelti Williamson), whom she lives with and who’s sort of an éminence noir in her life. It’s not clear how the three make their living, though Nina and Moe both seem to be employed by the local Black church, and at one point we see Moe shoot a rabbit and turn it into that night’s family dinner. Nina is also the star of her church’s gospel choir (well, she is being played by Toni Braxton!), and in the opening we see the choir rehearsing for an upcoming contest among church singing groups against their better-heeled and hated rivals in the next town over, who’ve taken the contest from them five years in a row. (The film opens with the choir singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and the song is mixed the way Elvis Presley wanted his religious album, How Great Thou Art, to be — Braxton’s is only the lead voice in an ensemble, just as Elvis had wanted How Great Thou Art to present him as the lead singer in a gospel quartette and instead it got remixed to put his voice front and center, just like all his secular albums, and he was upset about it but decided there was nothing he could do about it.) 

The man is a white Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Fischer (David Julian Hirsch), and though he has a day job he’s a volunteer cantor and music teacher at the local synagogue (so well before they meet each other writers Joyce Gittlin, Janet Fattal and Stephen Tolkin have established that though they’re from different religions, both central characters are involved with church music). He’s about to send his wife and two daughters off on a bus trip to see relatives while he remains behind with his son — only when they get on the bus, so does a twitchy young guy who first offers one of the Fischer girls some candy and then, when the wife says no, pulls out a gun and shoots Mrs. Fischer. Director Paul A. Kaufman rather confusingly cuts away here but we later learn that the young killer knocked off not only Mrs. Fischer but all three of the kids as well — a plot premise unexpectedly timely in the wake of the Virginia Beach killings a few days ago and the whole normalization of mass shootings in public places, to the point where schoolchildren and government workers are routinely trained in how to keep themselves alive in case an active shooter shows up at their premises. (I couldn’t help but think of the possibility that one of these maniacs might show up at Charles’s workplace and widow me.) The blow renders Jacob virtually catatonic; he buys a bus ticket to wherever the next bus will take him, and by authorial fiat it dumps him in that little Alabama small town where, starving and totally exhausted, he collapses on the church grounds and falls asleep. The three Smiths find him and Asher immediately wants to take him in. So does Uncle Moe — he even quotes Matthew 25 (the “For I was hungry, and you fed me … ” verse) — but Nina is scared of having this strange man around her son and wants him thrown off the property. Later she relents and allows him to stay in the caretaker’s room at the church, but only for one night. When he wakes up he cleans the place — which had previously been the dumping ground for everything the church members wanted to get rid of but couldn’t decide whether to throw away completely — and that seems to impress Nina enough that she relents and lets him keep on staying there. 

Eventually the Smiths wear down his alienation enough that when Uncle Moe presents him with some old clothes the church had collected for a rummage sale, he says, “Thank you” — the first words any of the Smiths have heard him say, and indeed the first words any of us have heard him say since his family was massacred. At first he tells them his name is “Sam” but eventually he lets slip his real one. He regains his composure long enough that, after being assured by the local postal carrier that the postmark can’t be traced back to the small town — he’s told the mail goes to a central sorting center in Birmingham — Jacob writes a letter to his mother Hava (Paula Shaw) that reads, simply, “I’m alright [sic]. Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Nina, her son and her uncle have been trying to figure out the identity of their houseguest from the odd array of skills he possesses, including woodworking and songwriting; at one point Nina sees him at their piano channeling his grief (though they don’t know what caused it) by working on a song called “This Very Moment” (actually written by Toni Braxton with her collaborators Keri Lewis and Davy Nathan). Nina joins him at the piano and they sing it together, and naturally she declares it the “killer song” they need to win the gospel-choir contest. They do — though the competition is pretty formidable (the other church’s choir is led by a woman who both looks and sounds like Aretha Franklin tearing through an infectious, rocking version of “I Shall Not Be Moved”) — with Jacob on stage with them, looking as out of place as you’d expect for a white Jewish guy in a Black Christian (Methodist, the script tells us, which raised Charles’s eyebrows since he doesn’t think of Methodism as a Black denomination) church. There’s also a scene in which Uncle Moe takes Jacob rabbit-hunting — only, for reasons Moe can’t fathom but we understand, Jacob flinches at the mere thought of holding a gun, let alone shooting anything.

This turns out to be a premonition of a scene later in the film in which, flush with success in the big singing contest, Jacob is resting inside the church — and two white racists break into the church intent on vandalizing it and possibly burning it down. Jacob grabs the gun and, just as the racists ex machina are not only threatening to rape Nina (who’s heard the commotion and come in to investigate) but taunting him and telling him he’s too much of a coward to shoot, he does so and wounds one of them in the arm. They flee, the police arrive and declare his actions legitimate self-defense, but the crisis makes Jacob realize that he’s fallen genuinely in love with Nina. Nina seems O.K. with this and her son Asher is definitely into having a new dad (his birth father left when Asher was 2, and it turns out it was because Nina went to a bar with her girlfriends and ended up being picked up by another man) even though he’s white and Jewish. But Jacob’s growing attration to Nina and his guilt over being interested in another woman so soon after the murders of his wife and children convince him that it’s time to return to Brooklyn and reunite with his mother and what’s left of his family. He’s shown putting memorial stones on their grave markers, but his mom convinces him that he belongs in whatever place — and with whatever person — makes him happy, and there’s the expected reunion at the end. Though Twist of Faith could have been even better than it was — I wish the writers had done more with the obvious conflicts, religious even more than racial, between the leads (how would a committed Jew like Jacob feel about being in a church environment surrounded by all the people affirming their belief in Jesus Christ as Messiah, Savior and Son of God?) — but it was one of the most profoundly beautiful and moving things I’ve seen in quite some time, on Lifetime or anywhere else, and I wonder how I missed it six years ago. I probably saw it on Lifetime’s schedule but assumed it would be a manipulative tear-jerker; though there are some clichéd elements, for the most part it’s a surprisingly sophisticated story, alive to the strangeness of its premise and quite a bit more than the usual fish-out-of-water tale I’d have expected if I’d known what I would be watching in advance.