Clarence Gilyard Jr | Through the Shattered Lens

“Does your mother look like a gorilla?” Evan (Chandler Macocha) demands of one of his fellow college students. “Do your grandmother look like an ape? WHO IN YOUR FAMILY IS THE MONKEY!?”

Normally, you might think that Evan sounds like a jerk but, since he is a character in the 2014 film A Matter of Faith, he’s presented as being a hero. No one can come up with anything to say when he demands to know why no one in their family looks like a gorilla. Because Evan is apparently the first person to ever use the “Why don’t humans look more like apes?” argument, he wins every theological debate that he gets involved with.

A Matter of Faith is all about a theological debate. Professor Kamen (Harry Anderson) is a popular college biology professor who teaches that evolution is the only possible way that life could have been created. He even brings a rubber chicken to class to illustrate that the egg came before the children. However, one of his students, Rachel Whitaker (Jordan Trovillion), has always been taught that the chicken came first because God created the chicken. When Rachel’s father, Stephen (Jay Pickett), discovers what Kamen has been teaching and that Rachel hasn’t even opened her Bible since going off to college, he heads down to the campus. When Stephen objects to what Kamen teaches, Kamen challenges Stephen to a debate. Stephen agrees, though you have to wonder why a college would sponsor a debate between a professor and some random guy that no one has ever heard of before. It would be one thing if Stephen were an activist with a huge following. But really, Stephen is just a guy who no scientist background and stepped into a professor’s office and was challenged to campus date. Is it even ethical for Kamen to debate the father of one of his students like this?

Soon, the Evolution vs. Creationism debate is the hottest ticket on campus, because apparently it’s a very boring campus. Everyone is planning on attending! Rachel wishes her father would just drop out while Evan, who works for the school newspaper, tries to help Stephen prepare. Evan discovers that the college’s former biology professor, Joseph Portland (Clarence Gildyard, Jr.), lost his job when he refused to each the theory of evolution as established fact. In fact, Kamen was the one who got Portland fired. Can Stephen convince Portland to set aside his bitterness and help him win the debate? And can Evan help Rachel see that her jock boyfriend, Tyler (Barrett Carnahan), is a no-good frat boy who doesn’t even go to church? And will Rachel ever develop a personality beyond sitting in her dorm room and studying?

Yes, this is a Christiano Brothers production, with all of the awkward dialogue and heavy-handed sermonizing that one would normally expect. Rich and Dave Christiano wrote the script while Rich directed. The debate aspect of the film will undoubtedly remind many viewers of God’s Not Dead, though the film deserves some credit for not resorting to the old trope of having Professor Kamen be a former believer who became an atheist due to family tragedy. That said, the debate itself is a bit of let down as neither side makes much of a case for itself. When Kamen uses Freud to dismiss the existence of God, Portland shouts out, “Freud was wrong!” and the stunned gasp from the audience made me laugh out loud.

The actors playing the college students are all fairly boring. Watching the film, one wonders when the last time was that the Christianos ever talked to anyone under the age of 40. Not surprisingly, the best performances in the film come from Harry Anderson and Clarence Gilyard, Jr. Anderson, in particular, deserves a lot of credit for bringing some nuance to the role that was probably not present in the script. (Sadly, this was his final acting role. He died four years later.) Gilyard, as well, has a good moment towards the end of the film when Portland apologizes for his previous refusal to only teach creationism, saying that the job of the college is not to push either creationism or evolution but to allow both sides to be heard. That’s not a sentiment that you would necessarily expect to hear in a Christiano film.

That said, once you get past Anderson and Gilyard, you’ve still got Evan demanding to know if anyone has a monkey in their immediate family and one gets the feeling that, despite all of the talk of letting both sides be heard, the film has more sympathy for Evan’s abrasiveness than Portland’s fair-mindedness. As well, it’s hard not to feel that, as a character, Rachel is never really allowed to make up her own mind about anything. At first, she looks up to Kamen. Eventually, she looks up to her Dad. At first, she wants to spend all of her non-studying time with Tyler. By the end of the film, she’s falling in love with Evan. In the end, Rachel’s decision is never about what she believes but instead about which man she’s going to follow. For Rachel, it’s less a matter of faith and a more a matter of, “Hey, he’s cute!”

In the end, when I think about this film, I’ll probably think less about the debate and mostly just remember Harry Anderson and the rubber chicken.

As I watched the 2000 film Left Behind: The Movie (not to be confused with the remake starring Nicolas Cage), I found myself thinking about names.

For instance, if your name is Rayford Steele, you really probably don’t have any choice but to become a pilot and maybe star in a low-budget action movie. I mean, let’s just be honest. People with names like Rayford Steele don’t end up working the night shift at 7-11. In Left Behind, Rayford Steele is played by Bad Johnson and Johnson has just the right look to play a character named Rayford Steele. He’s handsome in a somewhat old-fashioned, Gary Cooperish sort of way.

And yes, Rayford is a pilot. He had a wife who resents the fact that Rayford is always flying off and abandoning his family. She goes to church and she worries that he’s not a believer. Rayford, meanwhile, is having an affair with flight attendant Hattie Dunham (Chelsea Noble). That affair, however, may have to soon come to an end because Hattie has a new job with the UN. Poor Hattie. Nothing good ever comes from working at the UN!

Just as anyone named Rayford Steele would have to become a pilot, I imagine that anyone named Buck Williams would have to become a globe-trotting journalist. We’re told that Buck is one of the most famous and successful journalists in the world. Someone even mentions that Buck is so brave that he would have reported from Hiroshima while the first atomic bomb was being dropped. (I assume that would have been a fairly short broadcast.) Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a struggle to buy Buck Williams as a crusading journalist because he’s played by Kirk Cameron. Buck is described as being tough and cynical. There’s absolutely nothing tough about Kirk Cameron. At his best, he projects an earnest blandness. At his worst, he reminds you that he’s the guy who, years after starring in this film, would claim that a conspiracy of atheists was responsible for Saving Christmas receiving bad reviews.

Finally, if your name is Nicolae Carpathia, you’re pretty much destined to grow up to be very wealthy and also very evil. You’re not going to end up living in the suburbs, mowing your own lawn and complaining about property taxes. No, with a name like Nicolae Carpathia, you’re destined to end up using your position at the UN to take over the world. When you declare that your goal is to lead the world into “seven years of peace,” everyone knows that you’re planning on doing the exact opposite.

Or, at the very least, everyone should know. As played by Gordon Currie, Nicolae Carpathia is obviously evil from the minute he first appears. (Even if you didn’t know his name, you would think he was evil just from the way he smirks.) However, in the world of Left Behind, almost everyone loves Nicolae Carpathia. When thousands of people mysteriously vanish, all at the same time, Carpathia is the person to whom humanity turns their tear-brimmed eyes. The viewers know that it’s the Rapture and Rayford Steele and Buck Williams come to realize that it was the Rapture but Carpathia sees it as an opportunity to lead humanity into a …. dare I say it? …. new world order.

Left Behind is an odd film. For the most part, it’s a fairly ludicrous film, a low-budget and excessively preachy attempt to create a religious epic on a Wal-Mart budget. Kirk Cameron is miscast as a journalist and the film’s special effects are so obviously cheap that one can’t help but feel the filmmakers got a bit too ambitious for their own good. (Just check out the scene at the start of the film when Buck Williams reports while “bombs” explode all around him.) With a running time of one hour and 40 minutes, the film drags a bit and the characters are often frustratingly dense. (Even non-evangelicals have, at the very least, heard that there’s a thing called the Rapture.) And yet, occasionally, there will be moments when the film actually comes close to working. Brad Johnson, for instance, gives about as good a performance as anyone could as Rayford Steele. The scene where Carpathia manipulates a subordinate into committing suicide may not be terrible original but it’s still surprisingly effective.

Despite the fact that the film itself barely made a profit, Left Behind would go on to spawn two sequels. We’ll look at the first, Tribulation Force, in 15 minutes. Hope to see you then!