National Post (National Edition)
A faithful endeavour with the Trinity
The boundary between cinema and faith is not easily crossed, even if you can find it. Recent years have brought many bad and/or forgettable Christian-themed films, including Soul Surfer, Heaven Is For Real, Risen, and that Rapture movie with Nicolas Cage.
The Shack is, from a storytelling point of view, better than most, although its spiritual shortcomings are common; believers may not find enough to engage them in what amounts to a twohour sermon about what they already know, while ye of little faith (ye know who ye are) will feel harangued.
The plot is simple. Mack (Sam Worthington) is shovelling snow one day when he notices a typewritten note in his mailbox. (God types!) The Creator, whom his wife likes to call Papa, has invited him to spend a weekend at a cabin in the woods. And like that other movie cabin-in-the-woods, something bad has happened there in the past, after Mack lost his daughter while on a camping trip.
He doesn’t really believe the note, but he heads out to the wilderness anyway. And whom should he meet but Papa Himself, played by Octavia Spencer and in one scene by the great First Nations actor Graham Greene. Avraham Aviv Alush plays Papa’s carpenter/rabbi son. And model/actress Sumire Matsubara is the enigmatic Sarayu (aka the Holy Spirit), who collects tears and uses them to water her garden.
Mack has two other kids, a wife (Radha Mitchell) and a best friend (Tim McGraw, who also appears on the soundtrack), but the bulk of the story has to do with his weekend with the Trinity. Unlike the recent (and underrated) Collateral Beauty, it’s never in doubt that these three are who they say they are. Jesus actually does his walk-on-water thing, in case Mack needs convincing.
There are some sweet, even funny moments in the film, which was adapted by a trio of screenwriters from the 2007 novel by William P. Young, and directed by Britain’s Stuart Hazeldine.
(His first film, a 2004 short called Christian, has been described as The King of the Jews meets The Lord of the Flies.)
Mack is surprised to find a Gideon Bible in the bedside table of God’s guest room. And the cup in the bathroom is a grail! (OK, I made that one up.)
There is also a singular image that is almost worth the price of admission; Mack is standing in the midst of Sarayu’s unkempt garden, marvelling at how wild it is, when the camera swoops upward and we see a fractal pattern of whorls in the apparent chaos. It’s a lovely, visual reminder that the big picture can elude us, particularly when we’re inside the frame.
But for the most part the film fails to answer the question it lays out; and to be fair, how could it? It is one of the central mysteries to any theistic faith — how can an all-powerful deity allow evil to exist in the world?
A better non-answer can be found in the fantastic French film Of Gods and Men, from 2010. But give The Shack credit for trying its best to deliver faith and hope; to say any less would be uncharitable. ∂∂½
IT’S NEVER IN DOUBT THAT THESE THREE ARE WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE.