Bruce Almighty looks for God's love in all the wrong places

The moral and spiritual implications of Bruce Almighty provided the topic of the hour at a recent press get-together.

Catholic director Tom Shadyac sat down with an array of religious journalists whose affiliations ranged from Catholic News Service to Christianity Today.

A number of pointed questions about the film were asked, and answered. Why does the movie depict the hero and heroine cohabiting outside of marriage? Why does God (Morgan Freeman) seem to tell Bruce (Jim Carrey) to stop “looking up” — to stop looking to God for help — and to rely on himself instead? What exactly is the message of the film, anyway?

I was unsatisfied with Bruce Almighty, and I didn't find much in the director's answers to enthuse over, either. I'm sure some pious moviegoers will enjoy Bruce Almighty, in part simply for its subject matter. Despite a recent bubble of religious themes at the movies, it's still relatively unusual for Hollywood to treat God, prayer and faith without open mockery. Christians may be so hungry for these elements that they'll take what they can get, whether the movie is good, bad or indifferent — and even whether the treatment of religious themes is commendable or iffy.

And Bruce Almighty does have some good intentions. It takes seriously the idea of surrendering to God's will. It depicts prayer as commendable, while deriding self-centered prayers. It also critiques the sort of passive fatalism that sits around blaming God rather than taking action to change things.

Yet the movie goes to the opposite extreme from passive fatalism by suggesting that we need to look to ourselves and not to God. In one key scene Bruce watches as God climbs a ladder to heaven, leaving him behind. “But what if I need you? What if I need help?” Bruce calls.

My first thought was that God would say something like “I'll always be with you.” Then, when I remembered that God still had the “prayer beads” Bruce had thrown away earlier in the film, I expected God to drop the beads down to Bruce, as much to say, “If you need my help, try praying.”

Instead, God says: “That's your problem, Bruce — that's every-body's problem. You keep looking up.”

“Don't pray for a miracle,” the movie emphasizes in so many words: “Be the miracle.” Make a difference. Give blood. Take the high road. Care about people. Forgive. Be satisfied with what you have. Is that what we'd be doing, if only we'd stop “looking up”?

Asked about this, Shadyac explained that the point is that we shouldn't keep looking up, looking only to God to change things without being willing to do what we can ourselves. Summing up his position, Shadyac said, “I hope people will look up, but don't just keep looking up.”

That may be less problematic than what the movie actually says. But, unfortunately, the movie does-n't say it. The movie agrees that it's good to pray, but it doesn't have much interest in what good it is — why prayer matters or why God might want us to pray in the first place.

Part of the problem is that the movie conceives of prayer exclusively in a petitionary mode, in terms of what we ask of God — as opposed to, say, prayers of worship or adoration, or even thanksgiving or repentance. Sometimes the prayers are selfish, sometimes selfless, but always people pray only to ask God for help. The idea that one might ever have anything to say to God that didn't involve what we want or need at the moment — that, in a word, it might be both possible and desirable to pursue a relationship with one's maker — has no place here.

Part and parcel of this is the typical movie picture of God as a deity who wants us to be good and happy but is nothing remotely like the object and goal of our being, our holy obsession, our life and our all. He's a sort of kindly manager or superintendent — just the sort of deity you might happen to pray to when you want something, but would never think of turning to just to spend time with him or to ask forgiveness for your sins.

Speaking of sin, that's another notion that's pretty much absent from the film. Not that there's anything wrong, for example, with telling a story about a shallow, naïve man who is living in sin instead of married. The real question is: When the man meets God and God cross-examines him about his life, why wouldn't the Almighty find a moment to express a preference for marriage over cohabitation?

Shadyac's spin on this, which he stressed as “my personal opinion,” was: “In God's eyes maybe Bruce and Grace were married from the first time they were together.” Apparently misremembering or misunderstanding the Gospel story of the Samaritan woman at the well, Shadyac claimed that Jesus had told her, “Ah, you've been married this many times already; you say you haven't, but you've been married this many times already.”

Here is what Jesus actually said: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly” (John 4:17-18). So far from implying that cohabiting couples may be married “in God's eyes,” Jesus contrasts the woman's previous legal marriages with her current cohabitation. In any case, Catholic sacramental teaching requires valid vows, not just sex, to make a marriage.

Of course Bruce Almighty is a Hollywood comedy, not The Divine Comedy. We're not looking for anything approaching theological precision. It's just a movie — a lightweight comic parable about letting God be God and trying to make a difference. I'm willing to give the movie its premise. And on the whole I don't mind its depiction of God as a dignified, humorous Morgan Freeman.

It's harder, though, to overlook the film's determination to aim as low as possible in so many other respects. Bruce Almighty is excessively preoccupied with nose-picking and dog urination (one of Bruce's triumphant “be-the-miracle” moments is when he finally trains his dog to use the grass instead of staining the furniture). In the film's lowest gag, Bruce uses his powers to make a monkey appear out of a man's posterior — then, as the man struggles to get away, the monkey forces his way back in again.

I wish one of the religious journalists at that junket had asked Shadyac what he was thinking of at that point.

Steven D. Greydanus, editor and chief critic of DecentFilms.com, writes from

Bloomfield, New Jersey.