The Guardian
Andrew Pulver
Easter: season of chocolate eggs and basket-wielding bunnies. But let it not be forgotten: it has its spiritual side, too. During the commemoration of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, thoughts of death and the afterlife hover deep in the background – which goes some way to explaining why so-called faith films compete hard for an Easter slot on the release calendar. When the audience is thinking about what will meet them over on the other side, a bit of religious affirmation goes down well.
Miracles from Heaven was this year’s faith film biggie in the US, with Risen not far behind. Miracles was adapted from one of those childlike-testimony memoirs – think Heaven Is a Real Place, which also got a film adaptation – which seek to establish the actuality of the afterlife. Risen is the other sort of faith film: an apparently historical drama that seeks to establish the actual existence of Jesus. Miracles, by all reports, is pretty sappy; Risen, with its police-procedural framework (Hail, CSI?), is surprisingly gripping.
Heaven, and other features of the afterlife, are one of film-making’s biggest challenges: how do you depict something that no one knows anything about? (Sci-fi nerds: The Undiscovered Country isn’t just the title of the sixth Star Trek movie, it’s Shakespeare’s description of the post-death state.) That hasn’t stopped people having a go – though, inevitably, of the big monotheistic religions, Christian traditions have had the greatest exposure on screen; despite extensive descriptions of Jannah, or paradise, in the Qur’an, Muslim film-makers have been understandably wary of grappling with sensitivities over figurative representations of religious subjects.
1. The ascent
Ghost (1990), starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, remains probably the definitive treatment – in any even vaguely religious context – of what might happen when you shuffle off this mortal coil. Spirits leave bodies, loaf about, do some haunting if they’re angry, then get carted off to the place downstairs by menacing-looking shadows (if they’ve been bad), or assumed into a blindingly light-filled space if they are the opposite. There’s a little non-theological manipulation of who can see what and when, designed to help the narrative along and provide a suitably emotional climax, but this is one of those films that almost perfectly ally the Hollywood idea of character “redemption” with onscreen religious redemption. The glimpse of heaven is pretty brief, with white-glowing figures welcoming Swayze into their number to the point that he becomes indistiguishable from the mass.
Risen, the Judea-set policier featuring Joseph Fiennes as the Roman copper tracking down the vanishing corpse of Yeshua, does something similar to depict Christ’s ascension to heaven – which will be celebrated on 5 May this year. The rising sun blazes out, leaving Cliff Curtis’s movement upwards to be inferred from a sort of retina-blasting rocket trail.
2. Blunders
Mistakes are the lifeblood of cinema narratives, and one of the most famous renderings of the afterlife revolves around one. In Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 A Matter of Life and Death, designed to at least partly celebrate the special relationship between Britain and the US after the second world war, pilot David Niven is accidentally un-killed after an air crash and has to argue his case before a “celestial court” to allow his earthly life to continue. The famous scenes – brilliantly designed and shot, on a gigantic scale – of dead airmen being received by angels don’t depict heaven, but a reception centre below the highest place. Likewise the celebrated stairway, where Niven discusses the case with his “conductor”, Marius Goring. The film-makers also had the bright idea to shoot the earthbound scenes in colour, but the afterlife in black-and-white – a reversal of the Wizard of Oz idea – to suggest the passionless serenity of immortality in contrast to the fecund emotions of living humans.
The angelic mistake also features in Here Comes Mr Jordan, the wartime romcom featuring Robert Montgomery, who plays a boxer picked up by an angel who can’t believe he’d survive the air crash he’s about to experience. In the 70s remake, retitled Heaven Can Wait, featuring a prematurely plucked quarterback played by Warren Beatty, the soul transit mechanism has been updated to Concorde.
3. Limbo
We are in trickier theological territory in the Peter Jackson-directed adaptation of The Lovely Bones, the celebrated novel by Alice Sebold about a murdered 14-year-old girl. After her gruesome death at the hands of loner George Harvey, Susie Salmon appears to enter some sort of limbo – normally reserved for unbaptised infants or pre-Christian patriarchs – or possibly purgatory, the cleansing environment for the heaven-bound. Here it’s called the “inbetween”, composed of fragments of Susie’s imagination and recollections. The “wide wide heaven” is further along, which she reaches after – as with Ghost – her spirit is somehow exorcised by the solving of the crime of her death.
The Japanese film After Life is bit of an outlier, though it takes place in a limbo-like way station: it’s clearly not connected to mainstream ideas of Christianity like The Lovely Bones, but its central idea that heaven consists of eternally re-experiencing a favourite memory gives it a point of similarity.
4. God and angels
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” says the third commandment, but that hasn’t stopped painters, sculptors and film-makers from conjuring up representations of the supreme being. Bruce Almighty, the Jim Carrey comedy from 2003, is a long way from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, but it tells us something about how Hollywood feels about religion. Not the least that velvet-voiced Morgan Freeman, player of presidents, soldiers and judges, now represents the fount of all wisdom – and has taken over from a previous predilection for the likes of George Burns, utterer of the classic gag “So help me, me” in the 70s comedy Oh, God! Bruce Almighty has a pleasing symbolic heaven: a white-painted empty office space, where Freeman descends from a glowing ceiling hole via a large white stepladder.
Angels and heavenly messengers regularly appear as characters in religious films. Clarence (angel, second class) squires George Bailey throughout It’s a Wonderful Life. At the opposite extreme, angels turn out as world-weary mind-reading German post-punks in Wim Wenders Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close. These films employ the same colour/black and white contrast as A Matter of Life and Death to point up the difference between life and the afterlife, but there the similarities stop. Wenders mournful essay on immortality and desire isn’t specificially religious (apart from the angels’ wings), and there’s none of that knockabout talking-stars comedy that is Wonderful Life’s idea of the heavenly beings.
5. Heaven
The “ultimate destination”, as Heaven Can Wait puts it, has proved a little intimidating to film-makers: its majesty and awe tend to defeat mortal imagination. Many films content themselves with stopping short at transit hubs, or sending their decedents back to stalk Earth. Some, however, have tried, with the faith-film likes of Heaven Is for Real proving the most prosaic. (Heaven is … in a church).
Comedies have approached the subject with considerable flair: Monty Python reimagined it as a Las Vegas floor show for The Meaning of Life, complete with cheesy Tony Bennett-ish singer and fake-breast-wearing angels. Honours, though, must go to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey: after defeating death at Battleships, Cluedo and Twister, they gain access to heaven after mugging some new arrivals and quoting rock band Poison to St Peter. God himself turns out to be a glowing light at the top of a Matter of Life and Death-style staircase. However, one film stands out as a serious attempt to describe and represent heaven: the Robin Williams-starring What Dreams May Come, directed by Vincent Ward and released in 1998. Like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, it goes for a Hamlet reference in its title; the subsequent death of Williams adds another layer of poignancy to a brilliantly imagined study of grief and redemption. It follows a car-crash victim, played by Williams, through a complex afterlife, as he grapples with his wife’s breakdown and eventual suicide. Dantesque in scope, it utilises still-impressive special effects to evoke a “painted” heaven, and its “Faces of the Damned” sequence is as nightmarish as any in cinema. (Casting Werner Herzog as one of said faces is a joke of masterly proportions.) What Dreams May Come puts the current faith-film movement into the shade: it deserves a resurrection of its own.
