By Marie Straub
I admit, the above was at least partly my expectation when I went to watch
Machine Gun Preacher. I got less than, more than and exactly what I expected. As horribly contradictory as that sounds, it’s true, but perhaps I should begin by breaking down what those expectations were. I expected the "horrors" of Africa to be on display (they were). I expected said "horrors" to face the wrath of Gerard Butler with a mullet in a biker jacket, with some charismatic Jesus on the side (right again). This, I figured, would in all likelihood be an "America, fuck yeah!" movie, without any of the irony of
Team America: World Police (OK, here I was a little off – there was no irony, but there wasn’t quite the "America, fuck yeah!" either). I expected to be highly annoyed, but I was neither spot on nor pleasantly surprised. There was, at least to some degree, an effort to engage with the "horrors" of Africa they had on display, rather than allowing them to exist merely so that an American hero could rise. This, I suppose, is an improvement. That improvement could, in fact, have been driven home in a complex and fascinating film if the filmmakers hadn’t missed the moral ambiguity that really should have been at the heart of this story, but hey, at least they tried to hit it, right? That’s pretty much the best recommendation you can give this film – a nice try – but let’s take a closer look.
Somewhere in South Sudan, a young boy is being forced to kill his mother and join the ranks of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). It’s not pretty. Meanwhile, across the world in Pennsylvania, Sam Childers (Butler) is a drug addict fresh out of jail (and telling the police to go fuck themselves as he leaves). He’s the kind of guy who, when he gets back to his trailer (of course he lives in a trailer), is angry when he finds out that his wife (Michelle Monaghan) has stopped stripping and insists she gets herself back on the pole. That’s not going to happen, however, as she has gotten clean and found Jesus. Sam is not happy, in fact he heads out to get his first fix, and later to rob a crack house with his addict buddy Donnie (Michael Shannon). When a random hitchhiker pulls a knife on the two of them, Sam will, in a fit of rage, not just overpower him, but also stab him to within an inch of his life. When he arrives home – partly wasted and covered in blood – he will cry out to his wife for help. She will take him to church, assuring him that no one cares if he has good shoes or not, and when he rises from the baptism water, everything will be different. For one, it will start him on a path that will lead him to that boy in South Sudan.
Does all of this sound a bit ... I don’t know, for the lack of a better word – ‘hokey’? That’s because it is. Charismatic churches are so often the butt of jokes, even among church-going folk, that it’s unsurprising that filming sequences of this type in a way that made them seem credible was always going to be difficult. But difficult is not impossible. The truth is, church has never looked so unattractive or uncompelling, but then, neither has Gerard Butler. While Butler plays the angry violent addict and the angry warrior saving children on either side of this film well, his weepy bloody turnaround is about as convincing as his finding Jesus (by which I mean ‘not at all’). The tough stuff in between is, as it turns out, above his capabilities and it’s a stumbling block the film never recovers from. But then, the script doesn’t help either. Covering a number of years – from Sam’s release from prison to his crime-filled days, his turnaround, his decision to build a church for outcasts in America, how he ended up preaching, his decision to go to Sudan, deciding to join the fight there, being pushed to the very brink, and how he made his way back again – the film is ultimately a mundane exercise in laying out the events of Sam’s life one after the other. It feels like an interview with the guy (this film is based on the real Sam Childers, after all) cut-and-pasted on to screen. His motivations are never credibly presented as he goes from "I think I'll build a church for outcasts" to "I think I'll go to Sudan" without ever seeming compelled in his decisions.
The scriptwriter, Jason Keller, has not made something of Sam’s story and the director, Marc Forster, has failed to take a stance on it where one is sorely needed – the scenes in church seem filmed by someone who doesn’t believe in them but is not brave enough to let his film make that assertion. Ask any artist, judging your subject matter is always going to be problematic. Despite this, and this is the one credit we must give Butler, there are a few moments when he manages to pull his performance back from the brink of the unbelievable – one preaching session in which he adamantly declares that “God doesn’t only call the good” being a case in point – but for the most part, it is clear that with this role he has bitten off far more than he can chew (I say this as something of a fan of much of his previous work).
As the credits roll, footage of the real Sam Childers is screened, including a moment in which he asks if your own child were kidnapped and he could bring it back to you, whether you would care about what methods he used to do so. Right there is what should have been the heart of this film. Sam Childers starts out an angry violent man hiding in drugs and ends up a man channelling his anger and violence towards warlords in order to save children in the name of God. Does that make his violence and seemingly continued inability to contain his rage OK, just because it is now in a new setting? Is it justifiable even? Could you make the argument that he is really called by God? There’s enough there to possibly make a few lukewarm atheists ask the question and there is, in the story of Sam Childers, a film worth making and watching. Unfortunately, this is not the film that was made. There are a few spare moments when they dare to tread on this ground, but mostly Forster tip-toes around them and Keller seems to have missed them altogether. It’s disappointing work from Forster who has given us such films as
Monster’s Ball,
Finding Neverland and
Stranger Than Fiction.
It’s not especially bad, if you’re a softie like me you’ll even cry in parts, but it’s not especially good either. Mostly, I was disappointed by what could have been – three stars at a push.
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