Billy Graham Presents Collection (DVD)
Before getting too far, let me note that the five films in this collection are intended to be evangelistic tools, and I will review them as such. If this is not your cup of tea, stop here!
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First, let’s make one thing clear: I AM A CHRISTIAN—a follower of Jesus Christ! I am not ashamed of that, and (God-enabling) will never deny Him in the face of derision or persecution. However, I will deny affiliation with Christian filmmakers and screenwriters who insist on portraying Christians as simpering, sniveling, pie-in-the-sky idealists whose witness for Christ is reduced to soft, dulcet tones as all nature hushes to hear their words and the heart-rending music swells in the background. If they truly think that this is the way to engage the culture around us, these folks have not visited the real world in far too many years.
Unfortunately, the five DVDs in the Billy Graham Presents Collection (The Climb, The Hiding Place, Something To Sing About, Road To Redemption, and Last Flight Out) all share these characteristics. I can already hear the gasps: “She dares to criticize the great Billy Graham!� No, I don’t dare. First, I am critiquing films, not a man. And second, I feel compelled to ask why a man who has been called by God to preach to over 210 million people in 50 years and be the spiritual guide to world leaders would lend his name to such genuinely poor evangelistic tools as these films. It’s heartbreaking.
Honestly, the spiritual content in each film is theologically solid and consistent. The technical aspects of movie-making (color quality, location, lighting, cinematography, etc.) are well applied, and it is clear that enough money was spent on each film to keep them from looking like low-budget quickies. Also to their credit, there is at least one recognizable actor or actress in each film, so that the audience won’t instantly write the movies off as art flicks full of unknowns. The structure of the films is not the problem. The problems are in both the screenwriting and the direction of the actors—problems so dominant in all five films that I am reviewing them as one.
The rather pathetic dialogue that is spoken and coached out of the actors tends to overshadow all the beautiful settings and artful action directing found in these movies, which generates a feeling of dislocation for the viewer. The background is running and the actors are in the setting, but often it’s like watching a dialogue pasted over a travelogue. Additionally, the editing is rather choppy—sudden close-ups of the actors are overused to emphasize the importance of the words they are going to speak. (Actually, I guess this is a directorial problem, too.) Ultimately, this gives a feeling of contrived get-in-your-face preaching, rather than living by an example that invites interest in what it means to be a Jesus-follower. These excessively dramatic methods also invite overacting, as well as noticeable hesitation and lack of conviction in the delivery of the lines.
But the really painful message of these movies is that the Christian life is passionless. Yes, knowing Christ and living a life that holds Him forth as the supreme example of how to live do bring a joy and a peace that really go beyond all human understanding. However, this does not mean that the follower of Christ becomes an emotionless drone with a universal flat-line personality and the same modulated holy tones of speech and pious eyelifts to heaven. The Christian characters in these movies just don't seem real. They are just what unbelievers run from and do not want to associate with—religious clones. I found it disturbing that I, personally, was unattracted to many of the main Christian characters because I just could not identify with them. What I wanted to do was to take them by their shirt collars and ask, “Where’s the struggle to be like Christ in a godless world? Where is the truth that we all have been given individual personalities and God finds satisfaction in our differences? Where is the passion of the greatest man who ever lived: who knew pain, cried tears, shouted in anger, laughed with His friends, drank at weddings, and called the religious leaders of His time ‘dirty snakes’?�
The Climb has been used as an outreach tool in many churches (even my own); the other films were unknown to me, save The Hiding Place. I would be embarrassed to invite my non-believing friends to view The Climb or any of the other three because I felt embarrassed for Billy Graham and those involved the filmmaking. I am confident that they had the best of intentions and the greatest desire to draw people to really know God, but I also know that they are capable of finding better writers, directors, and actors who could produce a product that enthralls, plants ideas that may lead to life-changing decisions, and gives an honest picture of Christ and what it means to live by faith. Truthfully, time would be better spent viewing a film like End of the Spear and discussing the examples of Steve Saint and his family—real people living real lives—rather than trying to navigate through the insipid Christianity portrayed in this collection.
(Note: In defense of The Hiding Place, it is a restoration of the original Hollywood film released in 1975 when even I believed that living the Christian life was a call to boring acceptance and quiet resignation, so consider it a great biographical story of Corrie Ten Boom and her family and leave it at that. I believe that The Hiding Place would have value in viewing just as an example of great Christians who lived and died for their faith, but not as an evangelistic tool.)
_____________________________________________
First, let’s make one thing clear: I AM A CHRISTIAN—a follower of Jesus Christ! I am not ashamed of that, and (God-enabling) will never deny Him in the face of derision or persecution. However, I will deny affiliation with Christian filmmakers and screenwriters who insist on portraying Christians as simpering, sniveling, pie-in-the-sky idealists whose witness for Christ is reduced to soft, dulcet tones as all nature hushes to hear their words and the heart-rending music swells in the background. If they truly think that this is the way to engage the culture around us, these folks have not visited the real world in far too many years.
Unfortunately, the five DVDs in the Billy Graham Presents Collection (The Climb, The Hiding Place, Something To Sing About, Road To Redemption, and Last Flight Out) all share these characteristics. I can already hear the gasps: “She dares to criticize the great Billy Graham!� No, I don’t dare. First, I am critiquing films, not a man. And second, I feel compelled to ask why a man who has been called by God to preach to over 210 million people in 50 years and be the spiritual guide to world leaders would lend his name to such genuinely poor evangelistic tools as these films. It’s heartbreaking.
Honestly, the spiritual content in each film is theologically solid and consistent. The technical aspects of movie-making (color quality, location, lighting, cinematography, etc.) are well applied, and it is clear that enough money was spent on each film to keep them from looking like low-budget quickies. Also to their credit, there is at least one recognizable actor or actress in each film, so that the audience won’t instantly write the movies off as art flicks full of unknowns. The structure of the films is not the problem. The problems are in both the screenwriting and the direction of the actors—problems so dominant in all five films that I am reviewing them as one.
The rather pathetic dialogue that is spoken and coached out of the actors tends to overshadow all the beautiful settings and artful action directing found in these movies, which generates a feeling of dislocation for the viewer. The background is running and the actors are in the setting, but often it’s like watching a dialogue pasted over a travelogue. Additionally, the editing is rather choppy—sudden close-ups of the actors are overused to emphasize the importance of the words they are going to speak. (Actually, I guess this is a directorial problem, too.) Ultimately, this gives a feeling of contrived get-in-your-face preaching, rather than living by an example that invites interest in what it means to be a Jesus-follower. These excessively dramatic methods also invite overacting, as well as noticeable hesitation and lack of conviction in the delivery of the lines.
But the really painful message of these movies is that the Christian life is passionless. Yes, knowing Christ and living a life that holds Him forth as the supreme example of how to live do bring a joy and a peace that really go beyond all human understanding. However, this does not mean that the follower of Christ becomes an emotionless drone with a universal flat-line personality and the same modulated holy tones of speech and pious eyelifts to heaven. The Christian characters in these movies just don't seem real. They are just what unbelievers run from and do not want to associate with—religious clones. I found it disturbing that I, personally, was unattracted to many of the main Christian characters because I just could not identify with them. What I wanted to do was to take them by their shirt collars and ask, “Where’s the struggle to be like Christ in a godless world? Where is the truth that we all have been given individual personalities and God finds satisfaction in our differences? Where is the passion of the greatest man who ever lived: who knew pain, cried tears, shouted in anger, laughed with His friends, drank at weddings, and called the religious leaders of His time ‘dirty snakes’?�
The Climb has been used as an outreach tool in many churches (even my own); the other films were unknown to me, save The Hiding Place. I would be embarrassed to invite my non-believing friends to view The Climb or any of the other three because I felt embarrassed for Billy Graham and those involved the filmmaking. I am confident that they had the best of intentions and the greatest desire to draw people to really know God, but I also know that they are capable of finding better writers, directors, and actors who could produce a product that enthralls, plants ideas that may lead to life-changing decisions, and gives an honest picture of Christ and what it means to live by faith. Truthfully, time would be better spent viewing a film like End of the Spear and discussing the examples of Steve Saint and his family—real people living real lives—rather than trying to navigate through the insipid Christianity portrayed in this collection.
(Note: In defense of The Hiding Place, it is a restoration of the original Hollywood film released in 1975 when even I believed that living the Christian life was a call to boring acceptance and quiet resignation, so consider it a great biographical story of Corrie Ten Boom and her family and leave it at that. I believe that The Hiding Place would have value in viewing just as an example of great Christians who lived and died for their faith, but not as an evangelistic tool.)
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