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— as well as at least two films that were originally made for theatrical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.
