Michael (1996)

Nora Ephron's Michael arrived on Christmas Day 1996, casting John Travolta as the Archangel Michael, a smoking, drinking, sugar-eating celestial warrior billeted in an Iowa boarding house. Three tabloid reporters are dispatched to verify the story. The premise is theological whimsy, and the film treats it as exactly that. There is nothing here that a cultural auditor of the present decade would need to flag. The cast is white, drawn from the era's standard Hollywood rolodex, and nobody involved appears to have considered that a statement worth making.

Ephron directs and co-writes, and Andie MacDowell's Dorothy is a working journalist with a career, but the machinery of the plot exists to pair her off with William Hurt's Frank. The resolution is traditional and unapologetic about it. Race never enters the frame. Neither does climate, nor class, nor the tabloid press as an object of economic critique, though the setting offers ample opportunity for the last of these. Michael's grubbiness is a gag about an angel, not a statement about bodies or self-acceptance. No character is diagnosed, accommodated, or explained in the language of neurodivergence. The film's engagement with Milton is a throwaway joke about shields resembling suns, not a revision of any historical narrative.

The film does have a soft sermon at its center. Michael mends wounded hearts, revives a dead dog, and wants to see the Sears Tower before his allotment of miracles runs out. The sentiment lands through charm and Randy Newman's score, never through instruction. Critics at the time were unimpressed, leaving a 36 percent rating and Owen Gleiberman's D+ in the permanent record. Audiences disagreed, and it opened at number one. A relic, then. Harmless, well-groomed, and entirely of its moment, which is to say a moment that predates all of this.