Miracles from Heaven

Whether serving God or Mammon, it’s no miracle that TriStar Pictures, along with Sony’s evangelical marketing and distribution arm, have gone back to the formulaic font of faith-based funds from whence sprang Heaven is for Real (2014). With Miracles, we have yet another rote melodrama, also based on a true story, capitalizing on the same built-in market of true believers as the previous film. However, this film propagates its faith-conquers-all message from a slightly different angle, with a different cast and with two entirely different words in the title. Clearly innovation in Christian cinema has not yet passed into the afterlife.

It should not come as a shock that the producers responsible for Heaven is for Real, Joe Roth and televangelist T. D. Jakes, would hope to follow up their prior success with a film in precisely the same vein. The only surprise here is that the film seems so at odds with itself, as though it were having its own internal crisis of faith about what sort of movie it is supposed to be. Miracles has already grossed its budget according to weekend ticket sales, albeit thanks in part to a Wednesday release, practically ensuring the revisitation of its formula in months and years to come. That the film will most assuredly be bumped out of the top three by Batman v. Superman next weekend does little to bolster my faith in any chance of not having to sit through another film of its ilk.

While the target demographic for this film may be appeased by its saccharine sentimentality alone, Miracles ultimately fails as a narrative on the basis of its tonal dissonance, styleless direction and abominable script. The premise plays like Cronenbergian body-horror aimed at helicopter parents, at least until the third act is subsumed in more traditional bible-thumpery. Moreover, it is in this third act that the script sells its characters short, as the titular divine intervention robs them all of a character arc that might be completed through their own volition. For a film based on living people, the characterization is shockingly thin, and as with last year’s 90 Minutes in Heaven, showing footage of the real-life family in question as the credits roll does nothing to mediate this shortcoming.

The cast must be on the outs with the almighty, as no one is given anything interesting to do here. The Beam daughters are paint-by-number caricatures of female youth, depicted by child actresses dragging each others’ performances down with mutually assured ineptitude, Queen Latifah is utterly wasted in this film’s subtle variation on Spike Lee’s “Magical Negro,” and Martin Henderson seems overwhelmingly content to play his one-note cornpone Texas dad with no sense of self-awareness. Jennifer Garner glowers competently, but that’s really all the creative freedom the role allows her over nearly two hours. The most egregious offender in the cast would have to be the tree into which Anna Beam (Kylie Rogers) falls, which looks like it was sculpted by an eighth-grade drama club. I refer to the tree as a cast member, because its performance is no more wooden than any other actor featured herein, even if it can’t be bothered to act much like an actual tree in its pivotal scene.

That the sanctimony-shilling Sony subsidiary tasked with selling Miracles from Heaven is called Affirm Pictures should provide some indication of the intention behind the products they push; these films are designed to corroborate the world-view of an evangelical audience, not to win new converts or entertain the uncommitted. I’m beginning to wonder if there is some nefarious script-generating algorithm out there that simply plugs the word “Heaven” into a title with a rotating repertoire of characters based on the statistical mean of the middle-American religious bellcurve. If not, perhaps I’ve just been graced with the secret to selling a screenplay or two every year. Rated PG for thematic material, including accident and medical images.