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Come Sunday

6/7/2018

5 Comments

 

C+
​2.33

A preacher reconsiders the idea of hell and makes himself into a heretic.

Directed by Joshua Marston
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Martin Sheen, and Condola Rashad
Initial Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
This viewer is always going to be sympathetic to a story of waking up to the lazy falsehoods of unexamined tradition, and Come Sunday is exactly that.  Having only recently listened to the excellent This American Life episode that inspired this adaptation of Reverend Carlton Pearson’s dark night of the soul, Joshua Marston and his talented cast caught me at just the right moment.  The confluence of an evergreen theme and the freshness of the real story should’ve added up to a quality experience, but Come Sunday is too bland to make much of an impact.  This story is powerful enough to get me tearing up at work when it’s in podcast form, but the cinematic version has me distracted and bored.

The greatest distance between what I expected and what is in Come Sunday is how Marston and writer Marcus Hinchey interpret a pentecostal intellectual tradition, which is to say it doesn’t exist for them.  Coming from Catholic roots, I expect a strong amount of scholarly interrogation in religion.  I can respect conclusions based on mountains of scholarship, even if I personally think the foundational premise is incorrect.  In Pearson’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) big heretical moment, that scholarship is done in the margins.  Come Sunday shows from the opening frame of the dog-eared, notated bible that Pearson is a man who does his homework, but his insistence on the nonexistence of hell is communicated with feeling and faith, both of which do not work as strongly on me even as they give Ejiofor plenty of opportunity to emote.  Give me the theological back and forth between Pearson and Martin Sheen’s Oral Roberts.  The best scene in Steve McQueen’s Hunger is a long take between a prisoner and priest arguing about the morality of hunger strikes.  There’s no reason a similar scene can’t exist here.  From the This American Life episode, Pearson is convincing in citing verses and in the historical tradition of the bible, but in Marston’s telling, Pearson is a squish who doesn’t want to believe Rwandan orphans are doomed to eternal torture.  

By backgrounding the intellectual work of creating a new doctrine, Marston and Hinchey instead foreground an arc for Pearson that further detracts from the drama.  Come Sunday is a character study that takes for granted the inciting incident which disrupts Pearson’s life.  It’s less interested in causes (why he loses his congregation) than the effects, as in how the congregation made him feel.  The former is the more unique and intriguing film in that it would’ve involved a lot of discussion and refinement of the inclusive theology.  The latter is an easier script to write, and is therefore the film we get.  Pearson enjoys the balls-and-strikes simplicity of saving souls, allowing him to rack up big numbers to one day present to god after he dies.  That, plus the adulation of having a large and respected congregation, gives Pearson an inflated sense of self that’s tied to the outward signs of success, all of which he’ll have to give away as a result of his epiphany.  Scorsese’s Silence dealt with some of this, where missionary work is shown to be more for the missionary than the converted, but that was one piece of a much larger tapestry.  In Come Sunday, it’s a pat and insufficient summary of a more complicated man.

The better arc comes in Pearson’s move from a fear of god to a love of people.  The homophobia  of the pentecostal church comes in for a deserved lashing here.  Roberts gay son, who killed himself in his 30’s shortly after coming out, is framed as a test for the great preacher, instead of as a needless and pointless loss of life caused by a father’s callousness and cruelty.  Keith Stanfield’s Reggie, Pearson’s organist, is another gay man that Pearson has a difficult time ministering to.  Stanfield is a great and versatile actor, and the anguish in his performance is evident.  Pearson is not tending to Reggie’s actual needs, but instead is clumsily sculpting him into a prescribed and restrictive form that’s not helpful for anyone.  Pearson breaking out of this thinking, even after recognizing his inclusive theology, is short-changed with little more than thinking about the lyrics to a trite children’s song.  It’s not great criticism to weigh the movie that is against the movie you’d prefer, but it’s so easy to imagine a film where Pearson has his epiphany, intellectually battles himself and his colleagues with it, and then follows the initial revelation to further epiphanies in how he should be ministering to the shunned and cast-out.  We instead get a mostly-internal struggle backed by uncinematic insistence and the painful transition from an opulent house to a comfortable one.

If Come Sunday falls on the negative side of a what-if scenario, it’s not like there isn’t good stuff here.  I appreciate Marston’s low-key direction, most noticeable when it frames Pearson as a rock star emerging from his dressing room before a big performance.  Ejiofor is credible as a magnetic personality holding together a large and diverse congregation, one of the few able to thwart what MLK called the ‘most segregated hour of Christian America.’  Any needling of casual christianity is also something that’s going to work on me.  Pearson’s sermon when he first discusses his doctrine gets acclamation and amen’s when he’s talking about saving all those Rwandan orphans himself, both of which cease when he says how foolish such an effort would be.  His congregation doesn’t actually give a shit, but they imagine themselves as godly people who enjoy being in the presence of someone who claims they do.  The film tiptoes up to the idea that living in relative comfort and luxury is a great sin when so many have so little; that if there was a hell, it’d be the indifferent who would join the evil.  That’s too big of an idea for a film with modest aims.

Come Sunday leaves the viewer with a sense that this is totally fine and competent, well-acted and directed.  It also completely lacks the stickiness of the This American Life episode, making it disposable.  Pearson the man is simply less interesting than Pearson the heretical minister, but Come Sunday is sure of the opposite.  C

5 Comments
Sean
6/11/2018 11:12:19 am

Lasting impressions of Come Sunday were very good to great performances from Ejiofor, Stanfield and Rashad. Jon already touched on the two gents so I'll praise Condola Rashad's performance as Gina Pearson. Prior to Carlson's epiphany she was very much a background performer both as she was depicted describing her marriage as arranged and the love will come. She was completely forgettable and ancillary to that point and embodied as Carlton described a distraction from his focus on God. As Carlton had his change of faith to focus not on God's vengeance but on His love she really grew as a character in her unwavering support and the love that was promised did show. Her arc was to me more interesting than that of her husband.

2nd heap of praise to Vondie Curtis-Hall as Bishop JD Ellis strong in his judgment of Carlton at the Joint College of Bishop trial. Bishop Ellis had comments about the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mva2K8RQzE4
I, like Jon, would've preferred a back and forth debate but it's a story of a man's changing faith not a man's lost faith so I understand.

B-

Reply
Sean
6/11/2018 11:21:21 am

I forgot- Jason Segel was distracting. I couldn't take him seriously I kept thinking he was going to bring out his Van Helsing puppet from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Reply
Sean
6/11/2018 11:31:39 am

and Carlton's youtube response to Ellis' above video is solid too. And much more the intellectual debate I wanted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCiC2mbEIyw

Lane
6/13/2018 09:03:33 pm

I don’t think I can add much to J Kissel’s excellent initial review. This is an easy Mediocrity win for best review and it’s only a shame that it couldn’t have been for a better film.

I, too, only just recently listened to the “This American Life” episode that the film is based on, and I couldn’t agree more with Kissel: where the radio narrative focuses on the causes of the conflict, the film basically focuses its attention on the effects, and it’s to the detriment of the narrative that this is the case. There’s so much that could have been explored here, and so much that wasn’t. This might have made an excellent limited run series on Showtime or HBO, but condensed into an hour and 45 minutes, there’s too much nuance, too much arc, that is simply lost to tell a compelling story.

“Come Sunday” enters the pantheon of “religious disenchantment” narratives that has,
actually, a long and distinguished religious history. Francis Newman represents from the
Catholic perspective;
George Elliot sums up the early Protestant Victorian era; Vincent van Gogh has his own story of
a fall from grace; and, relating to our current film, James Baldwin probably projects the best
summation of a black Pentecostal experience with his play “Amen Corner” and a few of his
essays in “The Fire Next Time” and others. The problem is, compared with these, “Come
Sunday” would be an easy F. Like, a not even trying, F. Where those narratives plumb the depths
of tension that can happen in humanity, “Come Sunday” would like us to believe that
Kierkegaard’s dark night of the soul can happen if you watch too many Sarah McLachlan dog
infomercials. As someone who takes both religion and doubt very seriously, “Come Sunday”
simply glosses over dramatic depth in favor of dramatic tension. And while I’m generally in favor of
dramatic tension, the tension here felt too cheaply bought at the expense of dramatic depth.

In praise of the film, I will agree with Sean that the acting is very well done. Sets and costumes
felt very authentic to early 21st century evangelicalism. I’ll give it to the “This American Life”
folks, they did really try. But what makes for a compelling theological story on radio doesn’t
always translate to film, a much different medium. I’m kicking myself that I haven’t gotten to
“First Reformed” yet, which I’ve heard is a best movie of the year so far; a film that deals with
faith and doubt in all it’s messy complexity.

While “Come Sunday” tried, we still don’t have our great religious disenchantment film yet. I’m
not sure that film could come out of Pentecostalism anyway. The questions that Pearson asks in
the film have basically been dealt with for a few hundred years (a few thousand in the Catholic
faith) by Protestant theologians and Pentecostalism is only 112 years old. It’s basically in diapers when it
comes to the Christian faith. As I have argued in other social media venues, I still believe that
“The Exorcist” is the best Christian film ever made because it’s ugly and scary and doesn’t
equivocate in its belief in the remedy. “Come Sunday” is a well acted film that scattered its seed
on the rocky soil, and not much came of it.

This film doesn’t get an F because we’re grading on a film curve, but if you really want some
deep Pentecostal faith tension, read Baldwin.

Grade: C+

Reply
Sean
6/20/2018 12:40:18 pm

"Scattered its seed on the rocky soil, and not much came of it"

I get that it's a parable but damn it's a beautiful line. Probably fits a that's what she said too.


Reply



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