The problem with many religious movies is that they have all the entertainment value of a sales training video. In other words, they’re overly obvious, a bit ham-fisted on the messaging, and the happy ending happens a little too easily.
I remember having to watch religious movies in Sunday School. Oh, boy. I used to sneak out and find my friends Glenn Murschal and Terry Schiller smoking by the lilac bushes at the far corner of the parking lot. They’d be there for attendance, wait for the lights to go out, and then they’d sneak out and never come back in. We were on the same altar boy crew. They figured after an hour of lighting candles and carrying liturgical items around met their religious obligations for the week. I would have stayed out there with them but I was too big a coward. Nobody in my house smoked so it would seem pretty fishy if I came home from Sunday School reeking of Glenn Murschal’s Chesterfields at the age of 13.
Many decades later, I was making a failed effort to be a real estate agent and was attending a seminar on basic real estate sales techniques. I was sitting there thinking that this sales training movie is just about as good as that Three Wisemen movie we had to endure every Christmas in Sunday School. Where are Glenn Murschal and Terry Schiller and a pack of stolen Chesterfields when you need them?
Faith, God, the religious experience—these are all natural subjects for movies. Religious-themed art has been a part of our shared civilization for millennia and has sparked some of the highest artistic achievements. The stained glass windows in the Cathedral at Chartres. Marc Chagall’s paintings of Jewish village life. The Divine Comedy by Dante. Mozart’s Requiem. The Quaker hymn Simple Gifts.
So what makes a good religious movie? The same thing that makes any good drama: a compelling story, complex moral issues, a sense of ambiguity, and a seriousness about the implications of the story, in this case from a perspective of faith. Sounds simple enough.
It seems as if making a good religious movie is as hard as making a good political movie. Both genres easily descend into polemic and stilted characters. Two good examples of this are Old Fashioned (2015) or Bobby (2006). Both of these movies were made with the best of intentions. Maybe that was the problem.
There are, however, good movies either about religion or with strong religious themes that are definitely worth a rental. Here are my favorites.
Religion—particularly Catholicism—is a major theme in director Martin Scorsese’s films. He was raised Catholic and briefly attended seminary. Many of his films explicitly deal with Catholicism and the Christian faith. The most notorious of these is The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which caused an enormous uproar and was heavily criticized by the Catholic hierarchy in the United States.
Silence is based on the 1966 novel of the same name and tells the story of the effort to stamp out Christianity from 17th-century Japan and the two Portuguese priests who struggle to hold on to their faith despite terrible abuse. This is one of Scorsese’s most beautifully filmed movies. It was shot by the heralded Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work in this film. This is a deeply serious movie and one that deserves your time and attention.
The story of Joan of Arc (or Jeanne D’Arc to the French) has been a compelling one for moviemakers for more than a century now. I counted 17 different movies about her (well, 18 if you include the Joan of Arc parts of 1989’s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but let’s not).
It is an incredible story, let’s be honest. A teenaged girl from a small town in 15th-century France has a series of visions that spark her to lead French armies against the English occupiers in the middle of the 100 Years’ War. After a series of victories, she was captured, arrested, put on trial, and was told she would be burned at the stake unless she renounced her beliefs. Initially, she did, but then changed her mind and held fast to her faith and was burned at the stake.
Of the many movies made about her, I recommend The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). This masterpiece is considered one of the greatest films of all time. It was made by the French, but directed by the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. The film centers almost entirely on her trial by a religious court, and Dreyer used the transcripts from the trial as the basis of the screenplay. Joan is played here by Maria Falconetti (also known as Renée Jeanne Falconetti).
The film is notable for its intense and innovative use of closeups. It’s a far more religious film, dealing much more intimately with Joan’s faith and her ecstatic visions. Cinematography is by Rudolph Mate, who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and went on to have a long career as a cinematographer and director, receiving five Academy Award nominations for his work over the years. Add this to your queue because it is such a masterpiece of psychological introspection into the nature of faith.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s sweeping tale of the great 15th-century Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev. The film was made at the height of Soviet Communism and was suppressed for many years by the Soviet government because of its explicit identification of Orthodox Christianity as an inherent part of Russian culture (something not compatible with the Communist ideal). It was not released until 1986… 20 years after it was made. It’s a masterpiece.
Iconography plays a central role in Orthodox Christianity. Churches are not allowed to have statuary and the only musical instruments allowed are “the unadorned human voice.” Icons, however, cover the walls of every Orthodox church. Icons are venerated and kissed during a service. Rublev is considered the best iconographer of all time (possibly because most are anonymous). Iconographers do not consider themselves to be creating a painting; they are said to “write an icon.” This is visual language. Western art concepts such as perspective, realism, etc., are alien to iconography. The images are flat and without perspective and the choice of color is freighted with meaning. These artists are writing the story of a particular incident or explaining the life of a saint, so the usual aesthetics that apply to painting don’t matter in iconography. Despite all this, Rublev’s icons are quite painterly (as they say in art history class). The faces are compelling to look at and hauntingly beautiful.
The film itself is considered one of the greatest films ever made. It stars a Tarkovsky favorite Anatoly Solonitsyn. Solonitsyn played the lead in Tarkovsky’s two other big films: Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979). He conjures a portrait of a man with great religious passion who also is relentlessly involved in the events of his time. The camera work especially is just jaw-dropping—shot by Tarkovsky’s frequent collaborator Vadim Yusov. A must-see.
Peter O’Toole (as King Henry) and Richard Burton (as Thomas Becket) star in this tale of medieval England and the battle of the wills between two former drinking buddies, one the King of England and the other the Archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas Becket began a career in the Church mainly because options for a man from his social background were fairly limited then, and a clerical career was nice steady work with free housing.
Once he was ordained and eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury (at King Henry’s “suggestion”), Becket transformed into an ascetic and a highly principled leader in the medieval English church. Nobody saw that one coming, particularly not his old drinking buddy, the king. Henry finally got fed up with “this troublesome priest” and broadly hinted it sure would be good if someone got rid of Becket. Four knights took him up on the hint, and Becket was murdered in the Cathedral of Canterbury.
This movie has a powerhouse cast. In addition to O’Toole and Burton, the cast also includes John Gielgud as King Louis VII of France (delicious casting!). The screenplay is by Edward Anhalt and is an adaptation of the original play by the French writer Jean Anouilh.
Roses in December (1982)
A documentary about four American women—a lay missionary and three nuns—who were raped, tortured, and murdered by government soldiers during the civil war in El Salvador in 1980. The focus of the film is on Jean Donovan, the missionary who gave up a life of wealth and ease to follow her faith and work for social justice in El Salvador.
This is a largely unknown documentary and is certainly one you should add to your list. Be aware that the technical qualities of the film are not so good. The video has degraded with time, the graphics are lame, and the music is an annoying folk guitar that sounds like something that hippie roommate you had in college would play while he filled your cramped dorm with the smell of incense and weed. Just set those perturbations aside while you watch it.
The story the film tells far outweighs the quality of the filmmaking. It’s only an hour long and was made as a television documentary by Ana Carrigan and Bernard Stone. El Salvador was not a good place to be in the 1980s (and it’s still not great). The courage of their faith that brought these four women to that benighted land to minister to victims of the civil war is inspiring. Look at me, I was thinking to myself while watching it. What am I complaining about? I got put out waiting in line at the grocery store this morning while the guy in front of me in line was yelling into the phone about owls to his apparently hard-of-hearing mother. Was my situation really that bad? No. Would I have the courage to do what these women did? Hmm… well...
This is a movie about taking seriously the prospect of living the life of faith. These women are—or should be—saints.
During the years I worked as a TV comedy writer, one thing happened fairly predictably. At some point during a season, one of the writers would pitch an idea that was pretty serious. You know, along the lines of one of the main characters has a heart attack or something terrible. At the end of the pitch, there would be a beat of silence and then one of the other writers would say: “But funny.” Ethan Coen and Joel Coen won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000). The literary work they claimed they were adapting? The Odyssey. I found that very amusing.
No source material is claimed for this film, but it sure feels as if they had at least read through The Book of Job and its tale of a man whose life falls apart in every way. I like to imagine the two brothers sitting across from each other reading it aloud and then when they finished, looked at each other and said: “But funny.”
Michael Stuhlbarg has the role of a lifetime here as Larry Gopnik, an observant Jew who teaches physics at the University of Minnesota and lives in a drab suburb of Minneapolis in 1967. Larry is at a crossroads in his life. He is on the verge of receiving tenure when his wife tells him she is leaving him for his neighbor. Oh, and by the way, they want him out of his house. His tenure is denied, and things just go from bad to worse. He seeks guidance and succor from a series of rabbis but gets nothing.
While the movie itself is very funny, it raises one of the most simple and profound questions in Judaism: why do bad things happen to good people? The Coens do not provide an answer in this movie. God seems distant and uninterested and things just keep getting worse. But funny.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.