Movie Review: Come Sunday

Come Sunday *** / *****

Directed by: Joshua Marston.

Written by: Marcus Hinchey.

Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor (Carlton Pearson), Lakeith Stanfield (Reggie), Jason Segel (Henry), Martin Sheen (Oral Roberts), Danny Glover (Quincy Pearson), Condola Rashad (Gina Pearson), Tracey Bonner (Kiesha), Tonea Stewart (Lillie Ruth Pearson), Selena Anduze (Claire), Ric Reitz (Richard Roberts).

 

I don’t begrudge the people who make Christian movies like the God’s Not Dead series or the recent I Can Only Imagine into “surprise” hits at the box office (seriously, several of these films become hits a year, why are people still surprised). I get the fact that there are Christians in America who don’t feel that Hollywood respects or reflects their beliefs, and want to see entertainment that do. What I often do wonder however is why the people who go see those movies never seem to want to see anything the least bit complicated about Christianity? Why do they want films with easy black and white morality, instead of something more complex? Martin Scorsese’s Silence was one of the most profound religious movies of recent times, and no one went to see it.

 

Joshua Marston’s Come Sunday isn’t akin to Scorsese’s Silence, but I do think people who take their Christianity seriously should see the film. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Carlton Pearson – who when the film opens is the Bishop at a large Pentecostal Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They regularly get 6,000 in the pews on Sundays – and it amazes many that he has as many white parishioners as black, and they worship together in harmony. Slowly though, Carlton starts going through a crisis in his beliefs – not because he questions God’s existence, or his mercy – but because he starts to see things in a new way. It starts when he refuses to write a letter to help get his Uncle Quincy (Danny Glover) paroled, and his Uncle kills himself in prison. It gets worse when he sees news reports about Somalia – and all the children there dying of starvation and other things they have no control of. Carlton doesn’t come to question God in the normal way you would think – he never wonders why God lets horrible things happen to good people. No, instead he starts to believe that God doesn’t condemn people to Hell at all. That Jesus’ sacrifice saved everyone, and everyone will be welcomed into Heaven. That he can support his ideas with scripture (although he admits that some what he says contradicts other stuff in the Bible) doesn’t make his argument go down any easier. He is question what people have been taught forever – and they don’t much like it.

The film is based on an episode of This American Life (who is one of the producers of the film), and to be fair, I think that episode is deeper and more meaningful than the film is. As a radio episode, I don’t think they quite felt the need to package things as neatly as they go in this film, to flesh out other characters around Pearson as much. The film is at its weakest when it feels like they are trying to shoehorn in other characters into Pearson’s crisis of faith. The film doesn’t paint anyone as villains – even those who abandon Pearson do so because of their own deep faith and beliefs. They just truly believe he is wrong.

 

The reason to see Come Sunday is Ejiofor’s performance as Pearson. He is great at the many preaching scenes in the film – those are the showcase sequences to be sure, and he nails them. But he’s even better at the quieter scenes, when he starts to question his own beliefs – the things he has preached forever, but insists on staying the course, consequences be damned. The film shoehorns this into a rather typical story that in all honesty is kind of bland. In Ejiofor’s performance, you see the great film this could have been. He’s far more interesting that anything that surrounds him.