HEAVEN IS FOR REAL

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: D

Greg Kinnear, Kelly Reilly, Thomas Haden Church,Connor Corum, Margo Martindale
Based on the book by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent
Screenplay by Chris Parker and Randall Wallace
Directed by Randall Wallace

Randall Wallace got off to a big start in Hollywood by penning the script for Mel Gibson's Oscar sweeping epic Braveheart, based on his own original novel. True, Braveheart was a heavy handed, hokey, and sometimes trite screenplay, but it was also emotionally stirring, filled with some great speeches and memorable dialogue that was reminiscent of Robert Bolt, in particular A Man For All Seasons. Far less impressive was his thoroughly idiotic script for Michael Bay's travesty Pearl Harbor, and his directorial debut, The Man In The Iron Mask, was Leonardo DiCaprio's Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, but frankly much more pretentious and not nearly as much fun.We Were Soldiers was not great, but it was a major step up, though one couldn't help but feel that Mel Gibson's guiding hand lifted the quality of the film. It wasn't until Secretariat that Wallace seemed to be genuinely settling into a groove and becoming  a solid, if uninspired, filmmaker, making his next project worthy of anticipation.

Heaven Is for Real begins with a young girl in Lithuania painting a portrait, and then shifts to Nebraska, where we meet Todd Burpo (Greg Kinnear), a handsome Pastor withmovie star good looks but a down to earth, every man "you gotta love this guy" personality that he apparently achieved by watching every episode of Seventh Heaven three or four times.  When Todd isn't giving entertaining if meaningless sermons about lions and unicorns, he's playing baseball or working as a volunteer firefighter (if he has any spare time after that, he presumably spends it baking delicious apple pies and wrapping himself in the American flag.).

While on a trip to Denver, Todd's four-year-old son Colton (Connor Corum) gets sick. Very sick. He is taken to the hospital, where he nearly dies on the operating table. When Colton awakens, he says he went to Heaven. He talks about looking down to see the doctor operating, and his Mom (Kelly Reilly) praying in the waiting room while his Dad "yelled at God" in the chapel. he also says he met Jesus.

The family doesn't know what to believe. In Heaven, Colton says he met his miscarried sister whom no one had ever told him about and his great-grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born. He shared supposedly impossible-to-know details about each. Colton went on to describe the horse that only Jesus (who has brown hair and bluish green eyes) could ride a horse, about how “reaaally big” God and His chair are, and plenty of other interesting tidbits. It's not long before the community is in an uproar about all of this Jesus talk (because if there's one thing small town middle America can't abide, it's a Jesus freak.) and the family must come to a decision of how to face the situation, and to decide for themselves if Connor is telling the truth.

Heaven Is For Real manages to be embarrassingly syrupy and heavy handed, while at the same time continually stopping short of committing to what it is trying to say, or what it believes. Wallace tries to fill us with constant warm fuzzies but never once delves beneath the surface to explore the complexity of religion and the nature of man's relationship with God. In fact, after Kinnear's final sermon about his son's visit to Heaven, one is left to feel that  perhaps a more appropriate title would have been Heaven Is Absolutely Honest To God Real I Think, Probably, But Actually It Might Just Be Metaphorical, And Whatever You Personally Believe Is Exactly What I Believe, Too but of course, Hollywood has a rule that it reserves it's clunkiest titles for Lee Daniels.).

Kinnear is likable enough, but far too old for the role of  the thirty-something Burpo, which is constantly reinforced by how ill matched he is with Reilly. Young Connor Corum is cute but awkward, trying hard but never truly feeling real (one has to wonder what kind of a performance he might have given with the guidance of a more seasoned actor's director.). The film's production values are mediocre, and it would be easy to mistake it for a Lifetime TV Movie if it wasn't for Wallace's constant failed attempts to do interesting things with the camera. (In particular, a sequence where the board of the church meets with Todd is so hyper active in it's Michael Bay style "dolly around the converstaion" approach that it caused more motion sickness in me than Gravity.). But by far the WORST choice Wallace makes as a director is in his depictions of Colton's time in Heaven: it's almost as if, because this was a best selling book, Wallace decided to mimic the look and production design of Reading Rainbow. In truth, the story is clearly being told from Todd's point of view, as established from the painfully slow moving character establishment section of the film. This movie is portrayed most of the time as the story of the people hearing Colton's tales and trying to decide if they are true, and as such, we really should not have seen these moments portrayed literally and visually at all.

But the crowning touches that raise this film to the level of truly awful are 1. The jaw dropping amount of emphasis given to Colton's love of Spider-Man, which is of course totally coincidental and has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the studio, Columbia Pictures, desperately needs The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to establish their reboot into a tentpole franchise and can use every bit of advertising they can get, and 2. the manipulation of facts and outright lies in storytelling. Remember that little girl in Lithuania? At the end of the film she is being featured on CNN, living on another continent and showing off her painting of Jesus which is based on her visions. When Colton sees the man in the painting, he says "That's him! That's what He looks like." The little girl is revealed in the ending crawls to be Akianne Kramarik, a real life prodigy.  But while the real Akianne is the daughter of Lithuanian parents, sheactually born and raised in Illinois, and though she does claim to have spoken to God and received vision and instruction form Him, the rather significant detail that she used a model for her painting of Jesus, and that other paintings she did of him do not match up, is completely left out, and the connection between Akianne's visions and Colton's is pretty much all fiction. If you are going to tell an inspiring story about proof that God is real, don't you dare make things like that up! Not only does it make you look foolish, it makes everyone who believes in the story into fools. In reality, though this film is likely to be far more embraced by the religious right than Darren Aronofsky's Noah, considering that the story it's based on happened barely a decade ago, it plays far more fast and loose with established accounts and throws in far more disrespectfully phony elements.

In the end, as some one who believes in God, and in Jesus, and does indeed believe that Heaven is for real, I did not buy a single moments of this insipid and manipulative piece of Hollywood hokum, and I found it to be genuinely insulting to its target audience.

Heaven Is For Real is rated PG "for thematic material including some medical situations."