Miracles from Heaven tells the story of the Beam family. Christy and Kevin (Jennifer Garner and Martin Henderson) are a good Christian family from Texas raising three daughters. Their middle kid, Anna (Kylie Rogers), suddenly gets very sick one day, complaining about severe stomach pain. After much skepticism from doctors, it is eventually revealed that Anna has an incurable motility disease. Anna and her family endure the sickness together, nearly going into financial ruin as they try to pay for Anna’s very expensive treatments.
What happens is in the title, and already revealed in the trailers. Late into the movie, after all the suffering, Anna falls head first down a hollow tree, and miraculously recovers from her ailment. This is basically the crux of the movie. Everything leading to that miraculous point is basically just filled, the movie seemingly unwilling to really test its characters, to push them into compelling situations that would take away from the ultimate message that God is real and that miracles really happen.
Just because a story is true doesn’t mean that it’s interesting. This is the kind of story that is usually summed up in five minutes on a local news broadcast. A girl falls down a tree and miraculously recovers from an incurable ailment. There just isn’t much more to the story than that. It doesn’t really benefit the storytelling to go into a lot of detail about the circumstances of the girl’s illness. There’s little to gain from the many, many scenes of Anna receiving treatment. It all seems moot, because the miracle is the story.
The most interesting thing about this film is how insecure it seems about its faith. It almost gives up becoming a movie as it heads into its final minutes, dedicating several clunky scenes to what amount to direct testimonials. The film offers so little conflict that it ends up manufacturing some for the end, creating paper characters to cast doubt on the story, only to have them immediately shut down by a heartfelt monologue that doesn’t actually have much to do with the matter at hand.
The end effect is that the movie actually makes faith look repulsive. At best, its views are contradictory. It doesn’t seem to know whether to laud or condemn Christy Beam for not leaving it all to faith, for trying everything she can to save her child rather than rely on prayer. A pastor presented as a good man in the film offers a sermon about how suffering may be a consequence of one’s personal sin, and then people espousing the same notion later as presented as petty and dumb. The film’s theology is pretty shaky, and game performances from a pretty professional group of actors can’t salvage that mess.
'Miracles from Heaven' isn’t trying hard enough. It doesn’t seem to think too highly of its target audience, offering Christians a story that feeds into their confirmation bias. It exists in an echo chamber of praise songs, easily digestible positive messages about faith, and a simplistic understanding of miracles. Faith is such a beautiful thing, and this movie really fails to do justice to what faith can mean to a person. Christianity deserves better than this.
My Rating:
