Posted: 02/26/2001

Left Behind

(2001)

by Joe Steiff

Religion, hope, fear, denial, anxiety, despair, faith. A film that asks, “What do you believe in?”

When I was around 10 years old, a new minister came to town. He was different from the others because he was young. Hip. Cool. No fire and brimstone from him. No, you couldn’t hear his sermons from outside the church on a winter’s day. And probably for the first time, I realized that preachers aren’t called to the ministry when they are old men.

As a result, I began attending the youth group more regularly. Probably because in some ways I idolized him. Which made his “betrayal” all the more devastating.

Because one Sunday night, he played us a reel-to-reel tape. An audio program, much like a radio show, that described planes falling from the sky killing hundreds because pilots had vanished; massive car pileups because some cars suddenly became driverless; families whose parents or children or siblings simply disappeared. A world where it didn’t matter whether or not you were good, but simply whether or not you had accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Because some of the people left were in fact very good people, just not of the “right” religious belief.

In other words, The Rapture.

At least as understood by a 10 year old boy.

I had nightmares for weeks, and my mother finally had to call the minister to come talk to me. I can’t remember what he said. I do remember that the nightmares did eventually stop, but I had also stopped attending church. A program that was supposed to reinforce my faith in God had in actuality dealt it a devastating blow.

That audio program could have been the basis for Left Behind. And in the intervening years, I’ve become intrigued with the challenges of creating contemporary religious films (or for that matter, contemporary religious fiction).

I don’t know about you, but most of the religious films or stories that usually come to my mind have been historical. Sometimes epic, sometimes not, but rarely set in present-day. Usually these films are adaptations of Biblical books, characters or events.

Even though there are occasional attempts to make the historical work more contemporary in tone (Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell, which interestingly enough, our young minister denounced), there seem to be relatively few examples of stories set in the present-day that treat religious themes seriously.

The few contemporary examples I can think of range from cautionary tales (“don’t let this happen to you”) to self-congratulatory “and-then-I-saw-the-error-of-my-ways” conversion stories. But I find these contemporary cautionary/conversion stories disturbing. They seem to me to basically operate as permission to watch or read about a lot of behaviors that ultimately are considered sins. I have to tell you, some of the most erotic books I ever read as a kid were in this category. What apparently made them “religious literature” was that at the end, the writer found God.

K.L. Billingsley, in his book The Seductive Image: A Christian Critique Of The World Of Film, suggested that some of the reason for this lies in the fact that pre-conversion material is more dramatic, filled with the kinds of conflict that Hollywood likes to build films around. He suggests that once a character has embraced God, he seems less interesting (in dramatic terms). This may also be due to the fact that a spiritual life is an intensely personal and internal experience, almost at odds with a medium that requires observable behavior and visuals to relay its stories.

Yet Billingsley and other writers such as Orson Scott Card suggest that post-conversion stories are the very stories we need more of: what happens after a person has chosen Christ as his savior. Few of these stories exist, Tender Mercies being one of the few examples Billingsley can cite.

It is from this heritage that director Victor Sarin brings us the Canadian production Left Behind, starring Kirk Cameron. Make no mistake; the film falls firmly in the “and-then-I-saw-the-error-of-my-ways” conversion stories. Even though the Rapture has occurred, the story centers on the people who had not (yet?) embraced God and who have been, indeed, “left behind.”

But at least the film does not present gratuitous sin or tantalize the audience, as did those books I read as a teenager. Instead it tries to engage the audience with suspense, pulling from various genres at different points in the story in an attempt to keep the material dramatically interesting.

Cameron plays a global CNN-type reporter who slowly tries to piece together what is happening. His investigation intersects with the lives of an apparent voice of reason and hope in a world turned upside down, Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie), and with a pilot Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson), whose wife and son have disappeared, leaving him only his daughter Chloe (Janaya Stephens).

The film has more than its fair share of melodrama, heavy-handed moments and predictable ironies. But the biggest distraction is that the film isn’t quite sure of its identity. Is it a character-driven drama? A conspiracy thriller? A suspense film? A horror film? A investigative mystery film? A millennium film? A devil film? At different points, it hints at each of these, but it never fully commits to any. Taking such a risk may have made the film a better one.

Some of the indecisiveness of the style may be a result of the filmmakers’ not being clear about who the intended audience is. If the film is targeted towards devout Christians, the story really can’t hold much suspense. It is, as they say, preaching to the choir.

If, on the other hand, the film is meant to reach a non-Christian audience, it needs to develop the genre elements more fully. Doing so would in effect make it a genre film (take your choice of any of the ones it seems to want to be) that has at its core a Christian message. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whom Sarin is trying to reach, though a reasonable guess would be those who already know the story. Which is kind of a shame.

In addition, some of the story material seems over-labored. The conspiracy angle is drawn out about as thinly as possible and is pretty unsatisfying. Having a videotape that explains everything to our heroes seems a bit too contrived. And during the panic over missing passengers aboard Steele’s jet, some of the action seems delayed as if waiting to make sure every actor is hitting his marks.

With these weaknesses noted, there are several impressive sequences and elements, particularly the climactic showdown in the United Nations, which is chilling and tense. The two men praying in the church is one of the more effective prayer scenes on film. And some of the performances are quite good (notice I didn’t say Kirk Cameron). Janaya Stephens is probably the best here and deserves another movie. And Gordon Currie is very effective in his role. Brad Johnson does the best he can with the writing and heavy-handed direction, but it’s difficult to throw a Bible at a mirror and make it seem convincing. Much of director Victor Sarin’s experience seems to be in television, and that may be a better medium for him than feature films.

So there are some things to recommend this film, and it’s the perfect time for a story like Left Behind’s. We are still on the threshold of the new millennium, and most of the millennium films so far (such as Strange Days or Last Night) have sidestepped the religious aspects of such a transition. 2000/2001 seems prime territory for apocalyptic visions with a more religious tone (such as Magnolia and this film). I’m just not sure Left Behind lives up to that potential.

If you’re interested in this subject matter, and you want something more thought provoking, you may want to check out Michael Tolkin’s 1991 film The Rapture. Tolkin dives into that rare territory of post-conversion experience, but he does it with a vengeance: what happens after a character accepts God, only to have her life in many ways become worse. Sounds like the film is anti-faith, doesn’t it? But it’s not. In fact, Tolkin’s film makes many of the same points Left Behind is aiming for, just several times more powerfully. I saw The Rapture ten years ago, and I am still haunted by it. Left Behind? I could barely remember it upon leaving the theater.

Joe Steiff is an independent filmmaker and faculty member at Columbia College of Chicago.

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