Review of Fireproof

Tonight I watched Fireproof, last year's movie by Sherwood Pictures, the south Georgia Baptist amateurs who made a splash in 2006 with Facing the Giants.

Like Giants, Fireproof was made with a walk-on cast and crew and budget of $500K. The only professional in evidence was Kirk Cameron. So the fairest judgment should be in the context of the movie's own weight class, but even by Hollywood standards the movie was far more watchable that the secular scorn would suggest.

A few thoughts:

1. Is anyone's house really that tidy? The Sopranos' house was neat in a way that communicated upper-middle-class vapidity. It's a subtle distinction, but the Holt house was neat in a way that communicated . . . nobody really lived there.

2. Is there really a public park with a cross erected on it? Don't tell the ACLU!

3. On the one hand, it is gratifying to hear authentic, unironic south Georgia accents uttered in a movie. But there are limits to this. The accent of the Dr. Keller character (the weakest of the bunch; more on this later) was implausibly pronounced. In real life, class and education affect how even a southerner speaks. For another, I have the impression that doctors seldom wind up practicing in their own hometowns. For instance, my sister-in-law is completing her residency this year, and the entire country is her job market. The chances that a man bred in S. Georgia returns to practice medicine in S. Georgia must surely be small. Conversely, the accent of Kirk Cameron's character Caleb Holt is implausibly weak. On the one hand, if Cameron can't do southern well, I'm glad he didn't do it badly. On the other, he's a firefighter, and his accent ought to reflect his background.

4. More on Dr. Keller. The story calls for this man to be the lothario trying to romance away Caleb's wife Catherine; what the movie unwittingly serves us, however, is a catalog of beta-male incompetence. Even Φ has better game than this guy! I can understand that a bunch of Baptist churchgoers have no idea what compelling "doctor game" looks like, but they should have found an acting coach who did!

5. Still more on Dr. Keller. The confrontation between the firefighter and the doctor trying to seduce his wife should have at least nodded to the class conflict involved, and its failure to do this robbed the film of authenticity.

6. On the subject of authenticity: the film's handling of race and race relations didn't have it. I can understand that race, like class, wasn't the film's message. But in real life, I bet you couldn't find a black atheist firefighter in the whole state of Georgia. As far as race relations goes, the gold standard here is Season Two of The Wire. Simon showed how race can impact how working-class people relate to each other even when the impact is not hostility and adversity. But this kind of deft was simply outside of Fireproof's ability.

7. Substantively, the film handled its subject well. It is reported that the two greatest stresses on a marriage are money and sex, and both play take their toll on this one. Caleb likes internet porn, to Catherine's humiliation; Catherine, for her part, wants to buy more stuff despite Caleb's frugality. Unfortunately, the movie never addresses Catherine's materialism; only Caleb's vice comes in for criticism. But then, the film is really about Caleb's uphill battle to save his marriage in the face of his wife's demands for divorce. And the advice that Caleb's father John (the movie's second weakest character; does the man do nothing but sit around waiting for his son to call?) gives Caleb on how to do this is pretty good, and doesn't really require the film's Christian metaphysics to appreciate.

My biggest fear going into this movie (other than that it would be badly done) was that the film would peddle "magical thinking": become a Christian --> have a better marriage. (Usually it works out that way, but not always, and not always for the reasons supposed.) There is certainly an element of this: Caleb cleans up his act and starts treating his wife better on the way to winning her over. But the change in Caleb's behavior also serves the movie's larger theological point: that the marriage relationship models that between Christ and the church. In becoming a Christian, Caleb becomes a Christ-figure: as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us even while we were yet sinners, even when we called for his crucifixion, so Caleb loves his wife sacrificially (in his way) even as Catherine professes her hatred for him.

Bottom line: definitely worth the $2.99 at family video.