"Heaven Is for Real" Superficial

After several decades of irony as the dominant tone of artistic and social discourse, there has recently been a swelling movement towards what has been branded “the New Sincerity,” a misplaced effort to return to the cultural womb where genuineness is elevated above all other aesthetic qualities. While the tyranny of immature irony is not edifying, the opposite is no more welcome. The New Sincerity is responsible for Bronies, for “Bound 2,” and for 30-year-olds who watch “Adventure Time”; as a result, it deserves a certain circumspection.

The film “Heaven Is for Real” fits this ethos to a tee, with the unwelcome addition of a naive version of American folk religion. The blithely agrammatical title says it all: an unhappy marriage of glorified childhood with a dull, simplistic, yet insistent Christianity. Most ominously of all, it is prefaced with words that strike dread into every critic: “based on a true story.” It is unclear why director Randall Wallace, who had previously been associated with moderately successful projects like “Braveheart” (as writer) and 1998’s “The Man in the Iron Mask” (as director), has abandoned himself to such drivel; whatever the case, the harm done to his career by “Heaven Is for Real” should be irreparable, and justly so.

The premise is so saccharine that only the harshest satire could have extracted anything artistically worthwhile from it; any film that tried to work with it seriously was doomed to ignominious failure from inception. Greg Kinnear plays Todd Burpo, the saintly fireman-wrestling-coach-garage-door-repairman-pastor of a small town in Nebraska. His wife, Sonja (Kelly Reilly), is a housewife who gives music lessons to the choir on Monday nights. His four-year-old son Colton (Connor Corum) is predictable in his lack of complexity and his cloying sweetness—he insists on accompanying his father on a hospital visit, saying “If I’m with you, I won’t be afraid.” Of course, all is not well in the house of Burpo: Todd has fallen behind on paying the bills, and Colton is struck down with a sudden case of appendicitis. Colton later claims to have visited heaven while undergoing the operation. When the story gets out, disbelief and frustration ensue.

Perhaps the greatest sin of the screenplay is not its leaden dialogue, predictable stock characters, or shameless emotional pandering. It is rather the inescapable fact that it is profoundly, heart-stoppingly boring. The 100-minute playing time drags; sadly, there is not enough real dramatic conflict in the plot to fill even this relatively short space.

The cinematography is as clumsy as the screenplay. The inevitable sweeping vistas of green Nebraska fields with the equally inevitable obnoxious lens flare are the characteristic item in the film’s visual vocabulary. This Instagram aesthetic is supported on the one hand by awkward framing, and on the other by CGI shots of Colton’s vision of heaven that are so ludicrous and so cripplingly garish that they put Kanye West’s video production skills to shame.

Ultimately, however, it is the shallowness of the message that destroys whatever chance the film has at any meaningful artistic merit. The dramatic climax, a disappointingly jejune sermon that Todd delivers before his congregation, affirms (without justification) the validity of Colton’s vision while at the same time dismissing the unpleasant but compelling concepts that provide any sort of stakes in the gamble of Christianity: the twin possibilities of Hell versus ultimate meaninglessness. “Heaven Is for Real” is religious pornography: the objects and actions presented are all aimed to please, and there are no real conceptual consequences to any of them.

David Byrne prophesied the rise of New Sincerity in the 1980s during the production of the film “True Stories”: “For years we have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief. It was getting hard to go around not liking everything.” This statement is an insightful criticism of the artistic trends of the 20th century. Some things, however, should never be liked, genuine or not, and “Heaven Is for Real” falls solidly into this category. Heaven may or may not be real, but this film’s execrable quality is certain.

—Staff writer Jude D. Russo can be reached at russo@college.harvard.edu.