Adapting a bestselling book into a movie is a two-edged sword. The good part is that there’s a guaranteed audience. The bad part is that fans of the paper form bring a boatload of expectations to the celluloid form that can be difficult to satisfy. As if that weren’t enough of a challenge, Blue Like Jazz, the film directed by Steve Taylor based on Don Miller’s wildly successful memoir, also comes saddled with the burden of ostensibly being a “Christian film.” When it comes to producing quality, the so-called Christian film industry doesn’t have a great track record. I dislike the label “Christian film” – it assumes a false sacred/secular divide and I’m loathe to even dignify the term by using it – but for the purposes of this review I feel I have to, because it’s difficult to talk about Blue Like Jazz without contrasting it favorably with most of the films that have come out of the evangelical community.
Don Miller (the fictionalized version of the memoirist and co-writer) escapes his sheltered Southern Baptist upbringing in Texas by choosing a notoriously debauched college over a more wholesome school. After some early jitters settling in, Don takes to his newfound freedom with great gusto, relishing the opportunity to give himself a personality makeover. Desperate to fit in, he reinvents himself as a wild party-going, culture-jamming college kid – and hides his Christian faith in the process. But despite his efforts to escape his religious background, Don’s encounters with his brilliant, eccentric classmates propel him along a journey toward an enlarged spiritual understanding.
I’m pleased to report that this film is technically proficient. That doesn’t sound like effusive praise, but it is a significant accomplishment since competence in the craft isn’t always a given for Christian movies. It’s nicely shot, well written, and the cast turns in strong performances. Crucially, the movie avoids sentimentality by counterbalancing its religious themes with reasonably candid depictions of less sanitary college antics (Christian artists everywhere, take note). Although tame by mainstream standards, the lack of puritanical squeamishness over content typical of Christian movies is refreshing, and it’s long overdue for a generation of evangelicals who, for better or for worse, mostly don’t adhere to rigorous standards of content.
The film’s portrayal of Texas evangelicalism is a caricature – but only just. The youth pastor’s cringe-worthy homily, complete with a crucifix piñata, might be slightly exaggerated, but that’s only because this is a comedy, not ethnography (for a more subtle, right-on-the-money depiction of evangelical culture, see Higher Ground). And anybody who has spent any time in the evangelical church will know that the kitschy Christianity of the film isn’t far from the truth. The filmmakers aren’t pushing any radical new doctrines; just challenging the church toward greater authenticity. Less pat answers, less pretense, less spin. Don learns to hear a kind of subtle resolution in his John Coltrane vinyls that his father doesn’t hear. His character arc sees him go from naïve, goody two-shoes, Baptist to worldly-wise Christian with more questions than answers. That sort of messy conclusion might not be the tidy resolution that evangelicals have grown accustomed to but, like jazz, there’s still plenty of resolution there for those with ears to hear it.
Okay, so…the inevitable question: How does it compare to the book? Overall, pretty well. The writers (Don Miller, Ben Pearson, and director Steve Taylor) respect the medium. The book’s subtitle is “Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” and the writers are smart enough to know that thoughts don’t play well on-screen. Instead they’ve chosen to distill the loose narrative from the book, tighten it into a cohesive narrative, and let that give the film its meaning organically.
There’s nothing especially groundbreaking about the story design; hardly a surprise since Miller’s other projects (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years + mystoryline.net) lean heavily on storytelling expert Robert McKee’s approach (Story, though McKee is one of the least formulaic screenwriting gurus out there, despite what Charlie Kaufman’s character says in Adaptation). But there’s nothing wrong with sticking to the tried and true conventions of the medium, and there’s enough novelty in the subject matter to keep it from feeling hackneyed. Miller’s fans will enjoy the nods to the book, like the sexy carrot motif and the blue bridge imagery, and they will also appreciate the film’s tonal similarity to the memoir. Miller’s faux-naïveté, which gave the book so much of its charm, has been translated to the screen by going for a quirky, comedic tone, and that makes for a refreshing change from the usual straight-faced, takes-itself-too-seriously evangelical fare.
At the risk of stating the obvious, unless this movie finds a mainstream audience it won’t make much of an impact beyond the church. Anecdotal evidence about the book suggests that it struck a chord with many outside the church, and the fact that the film has already screened at SXSW is possibly a good omen for its chances at mainstream success. But my hunch is that this film will find much the same audience as the book, namely young evangelicals. The book resonated deeply with a generation with profoundly ambiguous feelings about their evangelical heritage, and since the movie taps that same vein it’s likely to appeal to a similar demographic. The film doesn’t try to hide its Christian sympathies – it wears its religious themes on its sleeve – and that might make it too preachy for some. But its forthrightness is entirely appropriate – this is a film about authenticity, after all. And if this film’s legacy is that it assists the church in becoming more authentic and transparent, then that would be no mean feat.