Heaven Is for Real (2014)

There is a particular strain of American cinema that arrives quietly, carrying a paperback and a sincere expression, and asks nothing of us but our willingness to cry in a darkened room. Heaven Is for Real is such a film. Randall Wallace, who once directed Secretariat and wrote Braveheart, here concerns himself with a small-town Nebraska pastor whose four-year-old son returns from emergency surgery with reports of having visited the afterlife. The boy describes a great-grandfather he never met, a sister lost to miscarriage, and the red marks on Jesus's hands. Todd Burpo, played with weary decency by Greg Kinnear, must decide whether to share these claims with a congregation already losing faith in him. The film handles this with the steady hand of a Sunday school teacher, and it earns its tears honestly enough.

As a piece of cultural messaging, the film is almost entirely inert. Its congregation is white, rural, and unexamined. Its women occupy the roles of supportive wife and worried mother, and the screenplay has no interest in troubling that arrangement. There are a few minority faces in the supporting cast, present without comment, which is the film's entire approach to difference. No racial themes surface, no economic critique emerges from the family's financial strain, and the environment goes unmentioned. The film's moralizing is religious, not ideological. It wants us to believe in heaven, not to reconsider our politics.

What remains is a competently made devotional drama that knows its audience and serves it without apology. The heaven sequences are heavy-handed, the sort of thing critics called overextended, and they are. But the preaching here is aimed at the soul, not the ballot box. We are left with a film that is sincere, warm, and almost completely untouched by the cultural currents of its own decade. It grossed a hundred million dollars against a twelve million dollar budget, which tells us something about who was watching. It tells us nothing about the times.