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What exactly is a "Christian movie review"? When the word becomes an adjective, things get blurry. Some treat a Christian movie review as a sort of sermon-essay that draws on examples from movies. Others say a Christian film journalist should primarily review, promote, and applaud films that spell out the gospel in plain language. Still others write reviews as a discipline of renewing our mind, as Scripture exhorts us to do, leading us to "dwell on" what is "excellent … worthy of praise … of good repute" (Philippians 4:8) in all the art culture has to offer.

One film opened across the country this week that made it very clear just how many different uses there are for a Christian movie review.

Monster's Ball is a drama directed by Marc Forster, filmed with quiet grace and a naturalistic style, like Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. It stars the fantastic Billy Bob Thornton as Hank, a corrections officer carrying intense racial prejudice in one hand and a sidearm in the other. Hank's aging father Buck (Peter Doyle) constantly reinforces the family's race-hate. For example, he calls his grandson, Sonny, "weak" because he befriends black neighbors. Halle Berry plays Leticia, the wife of a convicted killer, who is trying to raise her son right and survive as a black single mother in the middle of the South's racial tensions. Hank is deeply shaken after a confrontation with Sonny (Heath Ledger of The Patriot), and his raw emotional wounds open the door for a new and unlikely friendship. When Leticia gets a job pouring coffee at Hank's favorite late-night diner, they become friends against all odds.

Make no mistake: This is a story about unbelievers, behaving in sinful, reckless, dangerous ways as they nurse their particular needs for love, understanding, and intimacy. People are killed. Men lash out in racist hate. Father and son use prostitutes to find fleeting satisfaction. A mother beats her son. Lovers fall into hasty sex while under the influence of alcohol. It is not a pretty picture, and definitely not a film for younger viewers.

But the story's theme comes across loud and clear: love and compassion can overcome hate, even hardened racism. Hank is growing into a healthier perspective in the way that a toddler learns to walk—by making every variety of mistake, fumbling his way through hard lessons of love and loss, gaining wisdom inch by inch. His errors are clearly portrayed as missteps. (Hank's interaction with a prostitute is not glamorized, but shown as the joyless, empty, and contemptible exchange that it is.) Thus, when he finds true love, the revelation is all the more meaningful. The Bible itself tells us stories of men more evil than Hank who learned about love the hard way. Hank's evil is hard to look at, but his slow awakening to acceptance and love is quite beautiful.

Mainstream critics are highlighting the movie's strengths, and some are quite moved by its portrayal of love's power. A. O. Scott (The New York Times) raves, "The characters and the bond that develops between them are too complex for words, and the writers use very few. Their economy and the eloquence of Mr. Forster's unshowily beautiful images give Monster's Ball the density and strangeness of real life." And Moira Macdonald (The Seattle Times) writes that it gives us "a low-key gift of redemption and love."

But in his Chicago Sun-Times review, Roger Ebert writes, "The movie is not about redemption, not about how Hank overcomes his attitudes, but about how they fall away from him like a dead skin because his other feelings are so much more urgent. The movie then is not about overcoming prejudice, but sidestepping it because it comes to seem monstrously irrelevant. The movie has the complexity of great fiction, and requires our empathy as we interpret the decisions that are made."

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February (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46