“Do you have to be a saint to perform a miracle?” Ralph asks this of Father Hibbert in his religion class. Ralph has a vested interest in the answer, because his mother is in a coma and the doctors have said it will take a miracle for her to wake up.
It turns out you don’t need to be a saint. It requires faith, purity and prayer. So fourteen year old Ralph sets out to win the Boston Marathon, which would take a miracle, so that the miracle will awaken his mother.
The problem is that Ralph isn’t too sure he can do it (but his faith grows as he trains), he has trouble praying, and he’s fourteen years old with raging hormones, so purity is pretty much out of the question.
Set at a Catholic school in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1953-54, the plot has a few serious holes. For example, miracles aren’t transferable. If Ralph wins the Marathon, that doesn’t mean he can use that miracle to help his mother. With all the priests in his school, you’d think someone would teach him this lesson.
But in spite of the problems with the story, it is still an enjoyable coming of age story that lets us think about the meaning we find in our lives.
As Ralph commits himself to winning the Boston Marathon, he is caught between two priests: Father Fitzgerald, the headmaster, and Father Hibbert, a younger teacher who is coaching Ralph. For the most part these two characters fit our preconceptions about older and younger educators. The older Fitzgerald is authoritarian. Ralph is on the verge of being expelled from school (for a number of reasons) and often finds himself in Fr. Fitzgerald’s office. Fr. Fitzgerald believes that the best thing they can do for the boys is to teach them their place in the world. In this, Fitzgerald represents the idea that fate rules our lives. Happiness is to be found in accepting our lot.
Fr. Hibbert is more of an iconoclast, reading Nietzsche to his class. Hibbert, we discover, is somewhat faithless. He has adopted more of a nihilist perspective, that God really doesn’t matter and life has no meaning other than what we do. If we are to find happiness, it will be by doing those things we value. Fr. Hibbert may also be a bit frustrated with the life of the priesthood. What is missing for him is not a love life (the typical film convention for frustrated priests), but running. Before he became a priest, he was the top Canadian marathon runner. Just before the 1936 Olympics, he hurt his knee and wasn’t able to compete. On the day he entered the order, he was told, “Basilians don’t run,” so he never ran again.
These two priests, and the poles they represent, are another kind of coma. They are technically alive, but they are asleep to the world around them because they are each so tied to their own philosophy. Fr. Fitzgerald tries to prevent Ralph from running the marathon. Fr. Hibbert helps him train, but forbids any talk of miracles.
As Ralph undertakes his quest for a miracle, he has an effect, not only on these two priests, but others who are stuck in their own waking comas: his best friend Chester who is afraid to risk anything, and Ralph’s potential girl friend Claire who is hiding her own desires under a desire to become a nun. Everyone who knows Ralph is affected by his pursuit of a miracle.
I won’t give away how Ralph does in the race or if his mother wakes up. But I will say that you don’t have to be a saint to perform miracles. They sometimes happen even with little faith, in the midst of struggles with purity, and when we hardly know how to pray.
At the end of the film, when Ralph has set his sights on the next Olympics, Fr. Hibbert asks, “If we’re not chasing after miracles, what’s the point?”
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