The beauty of faith is in not seeing. This is a flaw inherent in Heaven Is For Real. It tells a story of faith that is not faith at all. It is a story of proof, of small details that would apparently confirm an existence beyond this one. It doesn’t allow for any real ambiguity in its narrative, and that makes it difficult to tell any kind of real story. All it really offers is hollow affirmation for believers who might not be satisfied with faith alone.
Pastor Todd Burpo (Greg Kinnear) has a minor crisis of faith when his four-year-old son Colton (Connor Corum) nearly dies from a burst appendix. Colton miraculously makes it through, however, and life seems to return to normal. But Colton starts talking about some pretty strange stuff. Specifically, he talks about going to heaven while on the operating table and meeting Jesus. At first, Todd is merely amused by his son's stories, but as the details get more specific, he begins to question what he knows. And as he spreads Colton's stories, he faces a measure of resistance from his wife and his congregation.
That measure of resistance, however, is very slight. At worst, they get a couple of pointed questions and needling statements. Todd never really doubts his son, and never faces a compelling argument against his belief. This is not the stuff that makes good cinema. More often than not, stories are fueled by conflict, and all this film can offer in that regard are economic concerns that are never really addressed, and a halfhearted subplot concerning the Church board.
And so the film is mostly a gradual affirmation. It spaces out Colton's stories, the child suddenly remembering new details of his visit to heaven. He starts doling out facts that he couldn't possibly know, and that's enough to finally convince the people around him. None of it is very interesting. It's made even less interesting by the movie's lack of ambiguity. Rather than leave any room at all for personal reflection, it ends up visually affirming everything that Colton saw. In the end, seeing is believing. And we see what he sees, the religious experience basically reduced to seeing ghosts.
To the film's credit, it's often shot in rather intriguing ways. Characters are often shot in silhouette, and the camera makes amazing use out of negative space. The horribly conventional scoring aside, the overall direction seems to suggest something more unsettling than easy affirmation. In the film's most compelling moments, Greg Kinnear is able to depict a struggle that goes well beyond the text. Grounded performances from the likes of Thomas Haden Church and Margo Martindale offer a trace for the film that might have been.
The religious content of Heaven is for Real might be a comfort to some. We can all choose what we want to believe. Judging it as a movie and as a narrative, however, it offers no such relief. There is a hint of a far more interesting movie lurking in between frames, one that really poses hard questions about what people choose to believe, and the beauty that can be found in uncertainty. But this film only wants to be certain. There just isn’t much story to be found in certainty. There isn’t much faith to be found in there either.
My Rating:
