Hollywood and Christian audiences love movies that are about the search for (Christian) God in one’s life. How do we come to Christian God? What does Christian God mean to us? These stories tend to be about a lost soul finding their way back to a flock and discovering the acceptance and home there. But, how does one lose faith? And, I’m not talking about losing faith because a church is psychotic, doing evil things, is a cult, or is packing people up to go to South Africa to form a suicide cult. What if somebody, you know, just stops believing?
In her first and so far only directorial outing, Vera Farmiga (Bates Motel) asks us “What is faith?” and more importantly, “Why is faith?” Higher Ground is based on Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost, about Carolyn’s journey into a community of self-described Jesus freaks, and how she extricated herself from that community without explicitly demonizing the church by focusing on Carolyn’s on screen surrogate Corinne.
Corinne wasn’t an always faithful type. As a teenager, she was a minor rebel who went out with rocker boys until she gets pregnant. Her parents were ripping the family apart because one of their planned children was a stillbirth, and her sister, Wendy, was rebelling in her own fashion. It’s only through a harrowing close call with death that Corrine and her husband Ethan find God and their new devotion to a new church.
Churches find their strength through forming communities with the belief that faith gets stronger in numbers. Corrine and Ethan are welcomed into the loving arms of the flock where their friends share their deepest thoughts with each other as filtered through the church. One lady draws pictures of her husband’s penis. Another tells Corrine that she’s dressing too provocatively and attracting the lusty attention of other men. Whatever their issues and problems are, they deal with them as filtered through their faith and through the standards of their church.
Farmiga doesn’t hold back the shade for some of the church’s sexist beliefs (such as women cannot question the pastor), but she also doesn’t judge the characters for trying to find each other through their faith. In Higher Ground, the church is neither crazy pants evil nor an exalted place of salvation. Sure, it can lead to some backwards behavioral patterns, but the church is actually a spine for people who need to find their path through life. For some, faith provides a way to discover new found joys in life. In others, faith patches over the rough spots in life. It can be a social obligation or the promise of a guardian angel. Corrine’s internal struggle to find God on her own terms provides the film’s modest backbone on which we can apply any number of our own life’s details.
As a director, Farmiga has such a light touch in a movie that could go cartoonish in so many ways. With all the faith-based Chick-Tracts-Posing-As-Movies that exist, it’s nice to see somebody have to struggle to find her own path, even if that means alienating everybody she knows. I hope she finds another movie that speaks to her on such a personal level.
