Fireproof (2008)

Fireproof arrives from Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, a congregation that supplied roughly 1,200 volunteers to fill out its cast and crew, along with donated fire stations, trucks, a train, and a hospital wing. The film concerns Caleb Holt, a fire captain whose professional creed of never leaving a partner behind does not extend to his own marriage. His wife Catherine, a hospital administrator, wants a divorce. His father hands him a journal called the Love Dare, forty days of prescribed gestures, and the machinery of the plot begins to turn. Critics were unmoved, with a Metacritic score of 28, though the film opened at number four and earned $33 million, which suggests the audience it was made for was waiting.

The Love Dare is less a narrative device than a curriculum, and the film treats it as such, with Bible verses printed on the page and a conversion scene that lands with the weight of a scheduled appointment. Caleb's transformation is announced, then demonstrated, then announced again. The film's view of marriage is complementarian and unapologetic about it: the husband wins back his wife through sacrificial service, and the wife is won. Any viewer arriving with contemporary expectations about gender roles will find the door politely closed, and the film will not be troubled by the knocking.

The cast is almost entirely white, and race never enters the conversation. Neither does anything else from the current cultural conversation. There is a Black supporting presence in Michael, played by Ken Bevel, but the film has no interest in what that might mean, and neither does the film have any interest in what it might not. This is a picture about one thing, and it pursues that thing with a single-mindedness that is, in its own austere way, respectable. It is a sermon with a budget, and it never once pretends otherwise.