Based on the semi-autobiographical, non-fiction book of the same name co-written by Evangelical pastor and author Greg Laurie with Ellen Vaughn, the Christian historical drama Jesus Revolution presents a liberally condensed account of the emergence of the "Jesus Movement," a non-exclusive wave of Christian revivals in the late-'60s and early-'70s that was primarily born from the ashes of disillusionment, and the embers of hope, carried by young people who had either lived through or vicariously experienced the rise of the hippie counterculture, and then its dispiriting descent into waywardness, substance abuse, and communal fracture. Some came to experience grace on their own terms, while others converted on the long and winding road to what remained of San Francisco's hippie sanctuary. But to agnostic burnouts and crewcut suburbanites alike, they were all "Jesus freaks," still identifying with the Summer of Love's emancipatory idealism, but now seeking to trade in the false prophets of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll for a charismatic and personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
This new film drama, following the anecdotal framing of Laurie's book, centers on three actual persons, and the intersection of their lives and ministries at the very outbreak of a spiritual revival that, both book and film contend, reverberates in the Church to this very day, and offers profound lessons for how, in our own time of disillusionment and disunion, God can move a similar revolution in the restless generation of the present. The film stars Kelsey Grammer as Chuck Smith, a certifiably square pastor who, at the encouragement of his daughter (Ally Ioannides), opens the doors of his struggling Costa Mesa church to the barefooted, shaggy-haired, bead-bedraggled Jesus freaks, outcasts of main street and boardwalk alike. Jonathan Roumie plays Lonnie Frisbee, a dyed-in-wool hippie who becomes a major, and eventually problematic figure in Smith's vastly expanding, passionate, and youthful congregation. Finally, there's Joel Courtney as the teenage Greg Laurie himself, an archetypal "seeker" who wonders from a broken trailer home with his alcoholic mother Charlene (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) to an alienated and inebriated youth on the most superficial fringes of the hippie counterculture, only to come to a higher calling inspired by Smith and Frisbee's ministry when his girlfriend Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow) makes their mutual conversion an ultimatum of their relationship.
Jesus Revolution is the latest production of the still rather young Kingdom Story Company, a Christian film and T.V. production firm founded by brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin upon an exclusive funding and distribution partnership with the AT&T subsidiary Lionsgate following the substantial success of the brothers' 2018 film I Can Only Imagine. Since their first earnest steps into feature filmmaking with the aesthetically impressive but otherwise psychotic pro-life drama October Baby in 2011, the Erwin Bros. have gradually come into their own as among the most prolific writers, directors, and producers of Christian cinema. Indeed, for anyone paying attention, whether they are self-identified Christians seeking faith-based alternatives to the secular monoculture, or secularists themselves approaching faith-based entertainment through a glass of morbid or ironic curiosity, it could even be said that the Erwins are among the few Christian filmmakers (as opposed to filmmakers who just happen to identify as Christians) that one could adequately classify as auteurs in their field. Though brother Andrew is only producing on this latest venture, Jon sharing writing and directing duties with fellow Christian filmmakers Jon Gunn and Brent McCorkle respectively, their much more sophisticated stylistic imprint - a less kinetic, much more tightly budgeted, but unmistakeable derivation of the savvy commercialist gloss of Michael Bay and Peter Berg - not only remains, but reaches new heights of technical and artistic maturity, not only for the brothers themselves, but also for Christian cinema writ large.
Over the last fifteen years or so, the Christian movie has blossomed into one of the most stable and successful niches of independent cinema in America. Or, that is to say, one of the most successful niches of independent cinema that is concerned primarily with popular and socially conscious dramas, rather than with genre movies or catchy cerebral art pieces. But at the time that Jesus Revolution takes place, such a state of affairs would have been virtually impossible to imagine. For most of the history of commercial American cinema, whether you were a Protestant hardliner or a card-carrying member of the Catholic Legion of Decency, you really only had two options in terms of fighting the spiritual fight against a rapidly expanding mass media and its comorbid secular materialism, which definitionally pointed in the direction of moral relativism and degeneracy. The prevailing route was that of the begrudging compromise: To take the puritanical victories where you could in terms of industrial self-censorship and regulation, but ultimately acceding to cynical handouts in the form of religiously defanged messaging and sensational epics. (This relationship was brilliantly satirized in the Coen Bros.' Hail, Caesar! A room full of religious elders, representing a dysfunctional congress of Judeo-Christian orthodoxies, are called into a studio board room, not to judge the spiritual merit of a film, but rather to assure the guilt-ridden Catholic studio exec that his movie won't offend anybody.) The second, narrower route, was that of the faith-based alternative, or Christians producing their own independent movies.
The prototypical Christian film was aesthetically defined by a lot of the same characteristics as the lowest rungs of exploitation picture. Produced outside of the Hollywood studio system in flyover regional contexts, these movies were privately funded by entrepreneurs and congregations that didn't have nearly as much cash to spread around as do the hyperlinked mega-churches and dark money conservative special interests groups of today. And the people who made these films, if they weren't Evangelized castoffs of the exploitation racket themselves, were individuals with little to no professional experience (much less a critical or artistic consciousness about filmmaking), and who thus lacked the specialized skills and institutional knowledge to smoothly plan and run a production. The Christian film, for the majority of its coherent existence, was dominated by didactic adaptations of Bible stories, unintentionally horrific kiddie fare, and dour apocalyptic tracts, all of the grungiest production quality. Before a very few of them could go on to become meme-worthy curios of paracinema, they were not distributed in theaters, but taken on roadshows of local churches and tent revivals. And as far as their technical aspirations were severely retarded, their narrative substance, to the extent that conventional narratives were explored at all, took a back seat to their charismatic function; which is to say, their ability to not only preach to the choir, but to generate and inspire a feeling of divine grace in the already converted, or the unconverted and undemanding, regional spectator.
Over the next couple of decades, particularly during the home video boom of the late-'80s and early-'90s, the alternative prerogatives of Christian media became much more seriously focused on refining narratives, technology, and production to produce a more professional product. Even as American society became more socially and geographically stratified, certain entrepreneurs of faith were able to target a much broader swath of the converted and unconverted alike than their parochial forbearers could ever dream. The very mass media that had threatened to snuff out the light of Christ, sending youth spiraling into a eternal darkness of materialism, became a vehicle for broadcasting revival into as many homes as possible. The arena-packing Evangelical minister went from a prominent public figure in an ephemerally Protestant country, to a stage act and talk show celebrity, trading in the revival tents and rented-out baseball fields of the crusading '50s and '60s for the "mega-church," a fully climatized house of worship that was also progressively diversified for maximum public (and financial) outreach, synthesizing elements of concert venue, community center, and eventually even strip mall. Meanwhile, and not unrelated to the fusion of church and dynamic performance space, the dominance of gospel music as the preeminent form of popular Christian commodity was subtly displaced by a new generation of faith-based music labels employing songwriters and musicians whose influences were steeped in contemporary rock and pop music. For the increasingly suburbanized and individuated middle-class of the Christian community, the proliferation of faith-based children's animation, such as the classic Davey and Goliath or Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki's VeggieTales, ensured that the video library of both the home and the private school were not only well-stocked, but well-stocked with professional quality works that kids actually wanted to watch. The organizing principle of Christian media remained charismatic, but the incorporation of mass media into Christian life, and the reciprocal assimilation of Christian life into a niche of the mainstream consumer market, inevitably trended in the direction of that charismatic purpose being sublimated by new spectacle, theories of education, idioms of expression, and, especially in the case of T.V. and movies, more sophisticated narratives that were character- and action-driven, rather than being structured around didactic teachings. Christian movies were increasingly no longer just polemical tracts, or the same keynotes from the Bible rehashed over and over again (and never on the same decadent scale that Hollywood could muster). They began to reflect diverse contemporary interests in the form of discrete genres, not only the most obvious apocalyptic and conspiracy thrillers emblematized by the Left Behind franchise, but also modern history, drama, romance, and comedy.
Though the explanation for these seismic changes in American Christian experience, and thus much of its collective consciousness, is mostly material, it is impossible for Evangelicals themselves, like Greg Laurie or the Erwin Bros., to fathom or narrativize its significance outside of a specifically spiritual and cultural framework. This is perhaps one reason why, even in the context of Jon and Andrew's own faithful filmography, Jesus Revolution feels so decisive and personal. The rise of the Jesus freaks is presented by the filmmakers as nothing short of an expressionistic phenomenon, a challenge to puritanical modes of not only personal presentation, but also, more deeply, contemporary interpretation of the word of God, igniting the titular revolution in Christianity. It gave birth to bigger and more charismatic types of service, with Chuck and Lonnie's revival tents, backed by the real life prototypical Christian rockers Love Song, serving as a template for the mega-churches that were just on the horizon. Here, the Erwin Bros. trace a direct continuity between psychedelic and folk rock festivals and contemporary Evangelical Christian practice. This revolution also, by the same token, promoted a less conventional type of Christian music. Finally, the real-life story of Jesus Revolution implicitly portends the sanctioning of the Erwin Bros. to engage in similar types of more personal, emotional expression - to be Christian artists, and not just Christians first, and artists second.
Jesus Revolution represents a fairly remarkable feat of dramatic and technical accomplishment, if, but not only because, even with the liberalization of the market for Christian content, the feature Christian film remains much more retarded in its ambitions than either music or children's media. I would hazard to say that, while even most secularists can see something of worth in VeggieTales or some Christian music, most self-identified Christians would never be caught dead watching a Christian movie. My neck of the woods isn't precisely the most dense in terms of concentration for the Erwin Bros.' target audience. Still, the few faithful who turned out were clearly feeling the charisma, loudly affirming the moments of unavoidable sermonizing delivered by the sock-puppet characters, and generally treating the movie experience as how most Christian films are made and advertised; as an opportunity for spiritual affirmation, rather than escapism, much less critical stimulation. And yet, there were moments when even this excited, restless church crowd grew remarkably silent. And, no, I don't mean out of boredom. There was a clear tension of awe and indecision, of being invited to view this uniquely charismatic mode of popular art in a way to which they were not used. We all found ourselves in the surprise situation of not simply attending an extension of church. We were finding ourselves immersed in the film as its own kind of charismatic experience that was not only not exclusively Christian, but, indeed, primarily artistic.
I think the big change began at that critical point in the story where the schism between pastors Chuck and Lonnie is just beginning to emerge. As much as it is a prediction of anything else, Jesus Revolution is a great crash course in the emergence of the "hip youth pastor" stereotype, with Lonnie poised as a cute, affable predecessor to a million punk, metal, straight-edge, skater, and Hip Hop preachers to come. Though Roumie gives the standout performance of the film, there's no getting around the extent to which this depiction of Lonnie Frisbee, and the actor's casting, is something of an inside joke for the faithful Christian consumer, and thus a portent of a much more subversive turn in the story. Roumie, you see, with his long list of bit parts and supporting roles in movies and television, is most famous for playing Jesus Christ in the on-going T.V. series The Chosen. So here he is as this eccentric, but historically significant character in modern Christian history, where part of what makes him endearing is that he, as a stereotypical hippie, of course looks so much like what ordinary people imagine when they think of Jesus. When Lonnie and Greg are handing out tracts on the boardwalk, asking people if they "know Jesus," many they encounter assume that Greg is talking bout Lonnie himself. The borderline blasphemousness of this joke is already far more than most Christian filmmakers would even dare to get away with. Another great example of this kind of humor, which is quite racy by the standards of Christian films, is when Lonnie first takes the pulpit at Chuck's church. Among the hymns listed on the hymn board behind him, rather prominently, is "420."
But what starts as a mildly off-color joke - in a squeaky clean movie where, otherwise, nobody swears, has sex, or even, despite its implication, so much as rolls a joint and puts it to their lips - turns out to be the set-up of a much more impressive challenge that the Erwin Bros. make towards their audience, to not simply nod along with all the parts that they already know they're supposed to agree with, but to actually think for themselves; to interpret this dramatized series of events, where many aspects of this "true story" just aren't certain.
One could say that where the story goes is "inevitable," but for anyone unfamiliar with the history of the Jesus Movement, the dark downward plunge that Jesus Revolution takes in the second act is actually rather shocking, even unnerving. At first a guileless, though unorthodox minister, Lonnie's centrality to the growing Jesus Movement goes to his head. It isn't long before he's claiming to be moved by the Holy Spirit and conducting faith healings during Chuck's revivals. Now, suddenly, the same square pastor who so loved Lonnie and his friends that he accepted the secession of some of his oldest partners in the church, is thinking more about his ministry's public image than the substance of Lonnie's message. When Lonnie learns that Chuck wants to move him to a less visible position, the original Jesus freak's conviction that God is working through him metastasizes into delusions of grandeur. Before long, Lonnie officially splits from Chuck's church to found his own tangent of the growing movement, the commune that Greg and other Jesus freaks have built out of a rundown house Chuck bought for them empties out, and Greg himself is once again mired in a new kind of broken family.
It would be one thing to argue that the filmmakers clearly paint Lonnie as an antagonistic figure, and this certainly goes to the heart of the film's foundational lie. The Jesus Movement was, of course, not a "revolution." What the film dramatizes is, allegorically speaking, just scratching the surface of an incredibly chaotic period in not only Christian spirituality, but spirituality in the United States more broadly. For every Lonnie Frisbee there is a Charles Manson, and for every eccentric group that was formally adopted into the ecumenical fold of American Christianity (its modes of hip expression appropriated for good charismatic measure), there were many more that were damned to a judgment of heresy so unspeakable that Jesus Revolution can't even acknowledge them. The filmmakers' vision of this story as being one with deep, historical reverberations is quite accurate - but only to the extent that cycles of spiritual revival, fracture, heresy, and reformation are endemic features of American society as a long symptom of the Protestant Reformation. It's just that instead of the reverberations of the "burned-over district" in western New York in the early 19th century, which gave birth to the Millerites, Shakers, and the Church of Latter Day Saints, we're now seeing the aftershocks of the "burned-out district" in southern California. And even in those terms, the conditions of modernity and mass media made it much easier for orthodox Christians to condemn and excommunicate the social utopians and cultish ne'er-do-wells of their own reckoning. They could instead, rather strategically, pick up on only the most superficial modes of fashion and form, with the confidence that, as Chuck Smith himself put it rather explicitly, this would attract young people to the ministry, only for the Holy Spirit to "work" on them, the metamorphosis to a more orthodox conformity occurring "from the inside out." (The real life Chuck Smith was ironically both more open-minded, and yet disingenuous in his aims than the character Grammer plays. His wife was also a more prominent figure in the opening of his congregation, which renders the creative license taken by the filmmakers disconcertingly sexist.) With a pathological nostalgia that isn't any different for Laurie than it is for most secular baby boomers, what is presented as a "revolution" is really better understood as a logical synthesis of liberalized expression and conservative values, in this case only more intimately related to the century's old Protestant condition of seeking a more individual, personal relationship with God. Lonnie's arc as a character arc, however adequately written and well-performed, is from this perspective no more or less than an object lesson in one taking such a credo too far.
And, yet, there is evidently so much more tension and ambiguity to Jesus Revolution, which, at a fundamental level, goes right back to the understated despondence that the Erwins must at least unconsciously feel as free artists forever compromised by the most unreasonable of censorial standards, both Christian and secular. They probably would have loved to not just show tabs of acid being dropped from a plane over a festival crowd while Timothy Leary preaches his false gospel, but to actually show what dropping acid and rolling a joint actually looks like. Though puritans grouse over "explicit content" teaching kids by negative example, such material culture is essential for understanding characters and building a sense of dramatic realism. Unfortunately, it's not only a foregone no-no as a Christian filmmaker, but a guaranteed R-rating from the non-theistic Motion Picture Association. The absence of that sense of a tangible connection between drug culture and the heightened state of consciousness that drugs create manages to both undermine a central conflict of the story, while also leaving enough conspicuous absences that Jesus Movement proves awash in spiritual tensions that, if the history is whitewashed, more accurately reflects the pervasive schisms of the times. The point is clearly supposed to be that Lonnie has traded in one form of false enlightenment for another, that in the charismatic thrall of the Holy Spirit, he is still an acid-head going on a long trip - a power-trip, no less. And, yet, Smith's reversal and retrenchment into conservative cynicism, and his confrontation with Lonnie, is weighed down by a discrete uncertainty that, perhaps, Lonnie really is showing the way and the light, and Smith is just too afraid to follow him. The explicit invocation of Christ's return to Nazareth ("Truly, I tell you... no prophet is accepted in his hometown") all the more problematizes our sense of sympathy and, more problematically, our sense of belief. Though the depictions of Lonnie's spontaneous faith-healings are highly dynamic, it is crucial to point out that the filmmakers never reveal whether or not they are authentic. Is this a madman we're watching here, a Jesus freak who's gone and mistaken himself for Jesus... or are the Erwins putting the "doubting Thomas" question right to us, in a modern hide? Indeed, Jesus Revolution is so non-judgmental in its perspective, that it proves to be one of, if not the only spiritually serious of the "faith-based" films in the genre's entire history. It could really go either way, and the filmmakers turn out to be more intuitively interested in the emotional challenges that that question poses, than in plotting everything out into an easy-to-swallow sermon.
For those who are not Christians, or at least not Evangelicals, there's no getting around the alienating qualities of what sermonizing and preachiness is endemic to Jesus Revolution. For others, the sickly and disingenuously "apolitical" portrayal of such a critical period in American history will be the far more intolerable characteristic. In that regard, I will only say that the anodyne political vision of the film is resolved by its combination with the filmmakers' undeniable talents, which results in conspicuous absences and contradictions that give the story more philosophical substance than it at first appears to possess from just its surface. Still, I'm hoping more than a few will recognize the substantial technical and narrative maturity of Jesus Revolution for its niche. Akis Konstantakopoulos's cinematography is exceptionally well done in particular. And even on the side of nostalgia, the needle drops that the Erwins have selected to score much of the film are surprisingly tasteful. More than anything, though, the attraction of Jesus Revolution for a secular audience is inextricable from what makes it such a big leap forward in terms of Christian cinema as a whole. As embellished and creatively condensed as just about any "true story," the film nonetheless depicts something that is so much more grounded than just another run-of-the-mill Bible adaptation, or any polemical tract in which the glut of conservative Evangelicals can let loose with their paranoia and cult of self-victimization. This is a piece of American history that is not only of import to secular and Christian audiences alike, but is the sort of story that could only be told in the emergent context of a more technically and narratively sophisticated Christian cinema. Indeed, I'd wager that this drama pulled from the contours of one of the most mythologized and cynically retread periods in American history, is among the most relevant and accessible ever made about it.
Comments
Post a Comment