Heaven is For Real (2014) - An Exploitation of Innocence

(The following content is reran from the 2018 Christmas marathon on Letterboxd, as originally seen here.)

Why were there so many Christian films in 2014? In part, we can thank Todd Burpo, for deciding his lucratively successful Heaven Is For Real ministry venture simply couldn't make do with a successful tell-all book, press tours, and speaking appearances by his underaged son Colton, all recounting the boy's trip to heaven during an appendicitis surgery when he was three. In addition to all his other flush sources of income, Todd decided he needed to give his son his very own movie, directed by a real director, starring real actors, and distributed by a production company whose reality is questionable at best but leans towards interaction with this plane on good days. I won't bother with the question of whether the movie deserved to exist - while I'm normally inclined to say all artistic expression deserves a chance, Todd Burpo's entire career over these last fifteen years has rested upon the exploitation of a child who only just recently became a legal adult. He has no right to treat his son like a rarefied prop with which to entertain and inspire the masses, and he certainly should not predicate a kid's upbringing on being The Single Most Important Person On The Planet. It's terrible parenting to use your offspring for financial gain, and if there's an ounce of truth to anything he spews about heaven by manipulating Colton's story, I can't imagine any criteria through which he gains entry.

Shouldn't come as any great surprise, then, that Heaven Is For Real's biggest issues spring from the need to satisfy Todd's narrative. Carved away from the terrible real life circumstances leading to its creation, there's merit to the inciting incident and subsequent fallout as a story in its own right. A man of faith who wears many hats in his close-knit community suffers a series of medical and financial woes, culminating in the near-death of his toddler-aged son on the operating table. He soldiers on through the pain despite shaken beliefs, until his son claims to have left his body and seen the Lord God and Jesus. This spins into two interlinking issues, as the father is desperate for any reason to strengthen his beliefs again and begins treating his son like an authority figure instead of raising him, and the larger community bristles at the notion of their pastor moving from preaching useful metaphor to Biblical literalism. There's something interesting in the notion of laying a man so low and asking him to continue displaying the same level of strength and confidence he embodied before in the face of doubts and personal weakness. You could wrangle a decent ending out of such a story.

In fact, while watching, a superior version of this tale cropped up in my head. Basically, Todd realizes he's let his need to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt overwhelm his duty as parent and preacher, and potentially run the risk of damaging his son's development. The solution isn't to find irrefutable proof in Colton's statements and make the whole community come about to a new way of thinking, but rather to synthesize his two duties. He was neglectful towards Colton towards the start of the picture, after all, and the weakening of his passion for preaching correlates strongly to his increasing need for evidence. As a man of faith, he knows his scripture, and as a father, he knows his son. The two roles need not come into conflict with one another - the confidence and displays of strength he needs as a father can revitalize his sermons, and the depths of his faith can enable him to believe Colton's stories through his own lens of understanding without deferring the power in a father-son relationship to a child in hopes of greater understanding. Leave the actual truth of Colton's trip to heaven ambiguous, call for unity through common love of Jesus and the Bible's teachings, and there you have it. Got a fairly decent Christian film with a nice little "love your kids, don't obsess over details, be a pillar for the community" message in it.

Course, with the Burpo family so closely involved in this film's financing and production, such an alternate take is all but impossible. A story very loosely inspired by real events might fly with such a different interpretation, but with Todd Burpo and his ministry getting a say in the story, no dice. Because the film needs to end with Colton proving heaven exists and Todd resolving all his woes with said proof, the promising material becomes total naff. The movie only acknowledges Todd's immediate, eager transfer of control to Colton as weird insofar as his failing to find the RIGHT way to give Colton control to bring about the appropriate revelation. Those viewing his behavior as distressing or inappropriate are cast as simply doubting without reason or angry at God for not granting them special treatment. The question of literal scripture against metaphorical readings drops out of sight the moment Colton goes from describing general childlike interpretations of what he's heard in church to truth bombs beyond his understanding. Every conflict and character has to eventually run aground of the undeniable "truth" and come around to a singular point of view, and so the movie loses any impact its high-minded questions might've offered.

Any religious movie preaching a fundamentalist viewpoint is bound to be bad, but this isn't to say the final product is devoid of merit. The camerawork goes a fair ways towards keeping the film in the "bad but I can respect some elements" two star category, rather than the lower realms of actual hate the source and story deserve. Visually, Heaven Is For Real acquits itself well, thanks to Randal Wallace's direction of alternately storied/hacky cinematographer Dean Semler. The Nebraskan vistas and awe-inspiring glances to the sky have more of a gentler 80s Mad Max or contemporary Dances With Wolves feel than the same man's work on something like Peep Beep Meme Creep 2, and there are some interesting camera pushes here and there which feel like they belong in a better movie. There's a general folksy sense about this community and its people, one I rather like in spite of its total lack of authenticity when compared against the millionaire who minted his fortune by using his son. I can even find some merit in the way Greg Kinnear plays Todd's wide-eyed obsession opposite Connor Corum's innocent proclamations.

If you want a good idea of how Heaven Is For Real feels in a neatly-wrapped package, I think it's worth considering an early scene where Todd visits a psychologist concerning Colton's strange behavior. She dispenses some highly sensible avenues for diagnosis and treatment, only for Todd to effectively go "What if hlurgly blurgy bloo," which prompts her to suggest ESP as a more reasonable alternative. Todd then dismisses her profession, and refuses to consider his son as anything except a perfect source of knowledge who's causing HIM problems for the rest of the runtime. The movie as a whole also dovetails from something with the potential for constructive conversation into, "Well I can't understand it, so I'll just say something crazy and dig in my heels." Give more consideration to Colton's needs and experiences, acknowledge Todd's maladaptive reactions, do anything except fall back on an unexamined revitalization of faith. Anything's better than allowing a man who quite plainly views his son as a cashflow more than a person any measure of vindication.

Next time - Kirk Cameron's flamed out, so we're doing apocalypse fan-fiction with Nic Cage instead.

2/5