Wednesday, April 12, 2017

The Case for Christ

DIRECTOR: Jon Gunn  LEAD CAST: Mike Vogel, Erika Christensen , Frankie Faison, Faye Dunaway, Robert Forster, L. Scott Caldwell  SCREENWRITER: Brian Bird  PRODUCER:  Elizabeth Hatcher-Travis, Karl Horstmann, Michael Scott, David A. R. White,. Alysoun Wolfe, Britanny Yost  EDITOR:  Vance Null  MUSICAL DIRECTOR:  Will Musser  GENRE: Drama, Religion  CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Brian Shanley  DISTRIBUTOR: Pure Flix Entertainment  LOCATION:  USA  RUNNING TIME:   112 minutes
Technical assessment:  3
Moral assessment:  4
CINEMA rating:  V14
The Case for Christ narrates the true story of Lee Strobel (Mike Vogel), a self-proclaimed atheist and award-winning investigative journalist with the Chicago Tribune.  While dining out with his wife (Erika Christensen) his five-year-old daughter Alison (Haley Rosenwasser), is saved from choking to death on a large gumball by a black woman.  When thanked by the tearful mother, the life-saver Alfie (L. Scott Caldwell), a nurse, promptly states that it was Jesus who did it, adding that she and her husband had meant to go to another restaurant but she had a God-given feeling that she would be needed there instead.  Strobel sneers at all this, but later on Leslie would join Alfie’s church.  “You’re cheating on me, with Jesus!” he says in one of their many fights, and proceeds to dig up evidence disproving Jesus’ existence and resurrection.
A true-to-life story translated to film gains power when the actors perform with conviction.  Those are the two big things going for The Case for Christ which easily overshadow the movie’s technical loopholes.  The period dressing (early 80s) is on point, and the over-all acting is good, although Forster as Strobel’s pathetic father is moving.  It’s not the movie’s fault that it has earned very few reviews from First World critics—it’s just that these (apparently nonbelieving) critics tend to avoid touching faith-based filmmaking.  And rightly so, for religion is beyond their purview, thus their critique may be crippled by a merely technical assessment of the film’s artistic merit.
The Case for Christ is a conversion story that highlights its emotional drama more than its theology but has apparently pleased its target audience, debuting to $3.9 million at the box office— an accomplishment for a movie made on a $3 million budget.  This may be saying something about the movie-going public’s hunger for faith-friendly films.  CINEMA watched the movie on its 6th day of showing; we were rather surprised that the handful of viewers with us then applauded as the credits rolled—pretty unusual for a Filipino audience (who would giggle, sigh, shriek, and swoon to a local romantic comedy, but applaud, never).  We understood then that the applause was for the real-life Lee Strobel who since his dramatic conversion has gone on to become a zealous pastor, authoring several award-winning books on Christian apologetics.  From atheist to Christian apologist—that’s the story that the audience applauds, and the applause signals the need for more edifying filmmaking.  The Case for Christ is a rich source of discussion topics: marital fidelity, the dynamics of conversion, pride and humility, the wounds caused in the child by absent fathers.