Christianity is a 2,000-year-old faith that has inspired men to fight and to die, to create artistic masterpieces, and to sacrifice worldly desires in the hope that an eternal paradise awaits in the afterlife. For millennia now the followers of Jesus have struggled not only to successfully spread their gospel across the globe but to hold tight to their beliefs even as the world has transformed into a place nothing like the Judea in which Christ lived.
Their history is at times glorious and at times shameful, at times peaceable and at times bloody. And, even if you consider the existence of any sort of God to be nothing but wishful clinging to fairy tales, there’s no denying that there’s something fundamentally human about wanting to better understand one’s place in the cosmos. Great films have been made about man’s wrestling with his beliefs. Great films deserve to be made.
So why do evangelical Christians insist on producing bland tripe like Blue Like Jazz, movies that do little more than preach to the choir? There has been a string of these openly faith-driven projects released wide theatrically since 2004, when The Passion of the Christ proved there is a large audience willing to pay for a religious experience. However, these recent films have lacked the artistry of Mel Gibson’s controversial work. Last year alone there was Courageous, about a group of police officers dealing with their faith, and Seven Days in Utopia, a finding-God-through-golf movie that scored an impressively low 12% on Rotten Tomatoes.
With Blue Like Jazz, the problem is the simplistic way it explores its ideas. When straight-arrow, devoutly Baptist college student Don (Marshall Allman) discovers that his mother has been having an affair with the church youth minister, his faith is shaken and he decides (spurred on by his atheist, deadbeat, jazz-loving father) to move far from his Texas home to attend Reed College in Portland, a school with a reputation as the most godless campus in America.
From the minute he arrives at Reed, the movie paints the place like a right-wing Christian conservative’s nightmarish view of today’s liberal academia. The first thing Don sees is an American flag being pulled down from a pole and the head of a bunny costume run up in its place. On his first trip to his dorm’s men’s room, two lesbians march in to use it as well, casually arguing about whether singer Tori Amos is a “queer icon” while Don is left to uncomfortably finish his business at the urinal.
He befriends one of these girls (Tania Raymonde) and follows her advice not to “come out” as a Christian if he wants to be accepted at Reed. He shirks church-going and ridicules believers to score cheap laughs from his classmates. He experiments with alcohol and drugs. He joins a civil disobedience club, helping to stage political protests in order to impress Penny (Clair Holt), a cute blonde who catches his eye. In other words, he does what many thousands of college students have done before him.
Of course, in the end he discovers that he’d have been better off staying true to his beliefs and not allowing the improper actions of some members of the Christian faith to cloud his entire view of religion. That message is fair enough, if dull.
I wish the story (which is based upon a best-selling book) had been more ambitious. I wish it had confronted not just those who turn away from Christianity because of the abundant hypocrisy and sinfulness that has too often existed within its churches. I wish it had confronted and addressed those who don’t view Christians as bunch of simple-minded fools but who simply don’t feel any need for a faith of their own. That’s where the discussion gets much more interesting.
But I don’t believe the makers of Blue Like Jazz understand those people, and they haven’t a clue about how to speak to them.
