Monday, April 13, 2020

Miracles from Heaven (Columbia Pictures, Affirm Films, Roth Films, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime celebrated Easter by re-running a lot of their previous faith-based movies — quite a few of them with Black protagonists — as well as at least two films that were originally made for theatrical release (remember movie theatres?) but were aimed at what the movie studios have euphemistically called the “faith audience.” These are moviegoers who are not only strongly religious themselves but want stories about characters who make God a presence in their lives almost every moment — as a non-“faith” person, I wonder if there are really people who talk about God and His plans for them as incessantly as the characters in these movies do. I watched all but about the first 15 minutes of Miracles from Heaven, an odd and sometimes lumbering movie (I missed the first 15 minutes because Lifetime slotted it for 2 ½ hours instead of just two) based on a true story of the Beam family of Burleson, Texas. As my husband Charles said when the two of us saw the movie Shine, there are certain true stories that get filmed because the real-life events fit so neatly into movie clichés, and this was one of them: father Kevin Beam (Martin Henderson, a much sexier actor than the types that usually play sympathetic husbands in Lifetime movies!) is a veterinarian; mother Christy Beam (Jennifer Garner, top-billed) seems to be a stay-at-home housewife whose main function is to get her three kids to church on Sunday; and the kids themselves, in age order, are Abbie (Brighton Sharbino), Anna [short for “Annabelle”] (Kylie Rogers) and Adelynn (Courtney Fansler).

One wonders what possessed the Beam parents to give all their daughters names beginning with “A,” but we’re not allowed to think about that much because Anna, the middle daughter and the focus of the story, gets a life-threatening stomach disease so rare it’s hard to piece together from the various references to it in the dialogue exactly what it is. What we do get is that her body has basically forgotten how to digest food and absorb its nutrients, and there may be some other things wrong with her as well. The local doctors in Texas inform the Beams that there’s only one doctor in the entire world who can treat their daughter’s condition, and he’s Dr. Nurko (Eugenio Derber) of the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. The problems facing the Beams include not only the expense of traveling back and forth between Burleson and Boston but the nine-month waiting list for the super-doc’s services (nine months Anna simply doesn’t have!) and the rather grim reality that slots on Dr. Burko’s waiting list typically open up not because his patients get better but because they die. When her attempts to phone the good doc fall flat, Christy Beam decides to fly across the country with Anna “on spec,” hoping that if she shows up on Dr. Burko’s doorstep he and his office staff will take pity on her and admit her daughter for treatment. She appeals to Dr. Burko’s receptionist and gets the usual put-downs until she appeals to the woman’s sensitivity, asking her point-blank the question that usually penetrates the cold, cold hearts of movie bureaucrats: “Don’t you have children of your own?” Christy and Anna Beam make one good friend in Boston, a Black cabdriver and overall good person named Angela (Queen Latifah, the only person in this movie besides Garner whom I’d heard of before — and, as usual, she steals the movie right out from under all the white people in it!), who offers to take them around Boston and show them the sights. (Actually, the whole movie was filmed in Georgia, and “goofs” writers on imdb.com have noted that the aquarium Angela takes Christy and Anna to is the one in Atlanta, not the one in Boston.) Dr. Nurko finally accepts Anna as a patient — a slot has opened in his schedule and neither Christy nor we want to know why — only the treatments are arduous and require Anna to make frequent trips to Boston for in-person follow-ups.

While I found myself wondering why Christy and Anna didn’t just move to Boston for the duration — I would presume Christy could have found a home and a job there instead of racking up huge plane fares flying back and forth — there’s a fascinating scene in which just as Anna is on the point of giving up, saying that in her bed at Children’s Hospital she’s been dreaming of heaven and wondering why she can’t just go there already instead of enduring the pain and suffering of her disease, Kevin, Abbie and Adalynn show up after a suspenseful scene in which they try to pay for their plane fare, they’ve maxed out all but one of their credit cards and when the ticket clerk at the airport is trying the last one, his computer suddenly crashes and he agrees to write them their tickets by hand. While all this has been going on Christy has withdrawn from the local church because too many of her fellow congregants have asked her what she, her husband or their daughter may have done to deserve this punishment from God. Christy reacts exactly as you’d expect her to — she gets insulted, especially at the slam that Anna is somehow responsible for her own condition, and she refuses to go to church again. Eventually Dr. Nurko patches up Anna as best she can — she’s still not well but she’s active enough that she’s able to return home and play with her sisters in their ample backyard. The three Beam girls climb up a hollowed-out tree, only Anna slips, falls down the entire length of the tree (in a sequence that briefly looked like she was on her way to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland) and lands head-first on the ground. The Beams call 911 and both police and firefighters respond; the firefighters quickly realize that they can’t do the most obvious thing — cut down the tree — because it’s so weak it would fall apart and Anna would be buried under the debris. Instead they have to send a firefighter down on a rope and have him pull her out manually. He does, but she’s suffered a concussion and she has to go to the hospital again — though when she recovers from the concussion and other injuries from the fall, she also seems cleared of that bizarre stomach disease that got her into all this trouble in the first place.

Miracles from Heaven was based on a memoir by Christy Beam herself, adapted into a screenplay by Randy Brown and directed effectively by Patricia Riggen, and though there were some clunky moments on the way to the expected happy ending, for the most part this was a quite entertaining and even moving film. I especially liked the fact that Brown’s script confronted the “theodicy” problem — why, if God is love and loves us and wants us to be happy, does He allow bad things to happen to us? — and I loved the worm-turning scene in which Christy finally comes back to her church and gets assailed by fellow congregants who question whether Anna was really as sick as she claimed — and they get told off by the father of Haley (Hannah Allgood), a 10-year-old cancer patient from Boston who was Anna’s roommate at Children’s Hospital, and dad showed up in Texas to thank Christy and Anna for inspiring his daughter and making her happy even though Haley did not survive her disease. According to an imdb.com “trivia” commentator, making this film was such a powerful experience for Jennifer Garner that she found God and converted — and while that one is a bit difficult to believe, one can easily see why: she was enacting a woman full of emotional turmoil in a story deliberately structured by the writers (including Christy Beam herself in her memoir) to attribute every good thing that happened to Anna to direct intervention by God in the form of a miracle, symbolized on screen by the appearance of a butterfly in every scene supposedly representing God making something happen that would allow Anna to recover fully. Within the conventions and purposes of a “faith” movie, Miracles from Heaven is actually quite a good and powerful work, and even though I’ve never been able to bring myself to believe in God (though I’m far less intense about it than I was 30 or 40 years ago!), I could accept it as good, valid human drama about people who didn’t deserve the bad things that happened to them but weren’t impossible-to-believe-in goody-goods either.