A friend, whose opinions I tend to share, put me on to the 2017 movie Revival, available on Roku. It is the story of a Southern Baptist preacher in rural Arkansas who is torn between his conviction that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin and his attraction for a drifter who comes to his church one day looking for food and shelter.
Read no further until you've seen the film. I can't do a decent review without revealing the ending.
Because the topic matter concerns the intersection of religion and homosexuality, it was a given that I would be strongly drawn in by the story.
And right up to the ending, I assumed, as the plot unfolded, that this would be just another tale of the imbecility of homophobic evangelical bigotry and I would be writing a critical review of the film, listing predictability as its main weakness.
When the ending turned out to be anything but predictable, I was blown away. I then had to take a bit of time to consider why it left such a bad taste in my mouth.
At first I concluded that what I expected was that the gay preacher would see the light and choose love and affection over the rigidity of evangelical homophobia. And the fact that the bad guys won this one pissed me off.
But that thought gave way to the conviction that the story simply went off the track. The preacher had displayed nothing but decency and sincerity up to this point. Why would he act so out of character?
And that thought then gave way to the argument in my head that his self-loathing, clearly the motivation for his actions at the end, was sufficiently intense to explain the ending after all.
Add to this act of murder the actions of the minor characters, the blood lust of Trevor, the incestuous thoughts of Jimmy, the greed and duplicity of the rival pastor in the town, and you've got, if not an actual horror film, a depiction of Christian folk filled with sin and depravity.
The weakness of Roman Catholicism, Protestants are wont to say, is that the clergy have too much power: they can forgive the worst of sins in the confessional. The weakness of Judaism, by contrast, is that there is little emphasis on doctrine or belief; what counts is going through the motions. When evangelical Protestants turn the focus on themselves, their failure to live up to the impossible demands of Sermon-on-the-Mount morality means that the overwhelming majority of them are caught in an endless cycle of sin and imperfection. And a moral code in which sexual acts are right up there with murder and deceit, if not out ahead in importance. Add to that the fact that the church is made up of a large number of emotion-junkies, people who "feel the spirit" and confuse the thrill with religious sincerity.
Watching a community of evangelicals display these sins to an almost exaggerated degree makes you question why anyone should be attracted to religion. Was this the real goal of the filmmaker?
If so, maybe I need to give the film a much higher grade than a B-minus. And the acting is first rate.
And if in the end I still have a bone I have to pick, it is with the book, not the movie version of the story.
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