Hollywood’s Greatest Masterpieces Get Religion, Unlike Schlocky Biblical Dramas

Forget ‘Noah’ or ‘Son of God’; to engage religious viewers, Hollywood should make more films like ‘Groundhog Day’ or ’2001′

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

Although it doesn’t open for another month, you can already tell that Noah, Darren Aronofsky’s action-packed account of the Bible’s original beastmaster, is going to be harrowing, and not only because it features an 11-foot wingless fallen angel voiced by Nick Nolte: Without a single screening the film has unleashed a small torrent of articles asking the inevitable question, namely whether God could make it in Hollywood.

The Heavenly Father will certainly have his fair share of screen time this year, with Son of God, a biopic about you-know-who, opening this week, and Exodus, a Ridley Scott extravaganza with Christian Bale as Charlton Heston as Moses, coming in December. But, our pundits have already taken to asking, is Hollywood capable of spinning a good religious yarn? Or is it too greedy, too shallow, and too impious to make anything that appeals to the faithful?

As is often the case when we strive to talk seriously about popular entertainment, we’re asking all the wrong questions. Rather than fretting about whether Hollywood gets religion—it does, gloriously so, and to great effect—we should wonder why, given its stratospheric success with religious-themed films, is Hollywood so reluctant to give its audiences what they so clearly desire.

This, first and foremost, is a question of definitions. Who’s a religious person? And what kind of film might he like? To hear marketers, in Hollywood and beyond, tell it, a religious person is someone whose cultural horizon begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation, some sort of sniggering simpleton who grows suspicious unless his entertainment features swords, sandals, and the heroes he’d read about in Sunday School. This lazy and skewed approach is no less offensive than the efforts to market products to women simply by slapping on pink packaging, and no less ineffective: Women, like religious people and members of minority groups and the young and the old and people with terrible nut allergies and anyone else who was blessed with the breath of life, are complex and nuanced people whose tastes and predilections run far deeper than a single, simple note.

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