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.
