That’s great, it starts with a news tape, tidal waves, and endless prayers, Almighty Bruce is quite afraid…
Written: Jun 04 '03 (Updated Jun 04 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Loads of classic Carrey antics and clever humorous devices that don't overpower the film's meaning.
Cons: Underused supporting cast, a few immature jokes, pacing is a tad slow for a comedy.
The Bottom Line: Jim Carrey takes on a comedy that provokes actual thought, and it's good. It's guuuhhhd.
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| divad23's Full Review: Bruce Almighty |
Jim Carrey starring in a film where he gets to be God? Yeah, right. The day I go to see a movie like that will be the day that a monkey... Oh, wait. Never mind.
In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see the film Bruce Almighty if all I had to go on was the advertising. You know how it goes - trailers appeal to the lowest common denominator, and they often give away the funniest moments of most comedies, if not the entire plot. Jim Carrey, while he has experimented somewhat with drama in recent years, is most well known for his cartoonish roles in such whacked-out low-brow comedies as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber. Those kinds of movies may rope in audiences by the zillions, but it just ain‘t my style.
Apparently Mr. Carrey felt the same way, because he was working on this one while he could have been working on Dumb and Dumberer. (Did you know he wasn’t going to be in that one? Neither did I until the other day.) Perhaps it had more to do with the money than the desire to make an “intelligent” comedy, but whatever the case, Jim has reunited with director Tom Shadyac (who worked with him to great effect on Liar, Liar) for a shrewd, funny, and ultimately reverent film about God. Or, more specifically, what might happen if God gave a person His powers for a short period of time. If it hadn’t been for an intriguing interview with Tom in CCM Magazine, I might have dismissed this flick as another irreverent mockery of my personal beliefs. Glad I didn’t do that!
Who says that you deserve this, and what kind of God would serve this?
You see, Jim Carrey plays a character named Bruce Nolan in this flick, who’s a bit down on his luck. (If you want to call it luck.) He’s the news reporter for one of Buffalo, New York’s underdog TV stations who gets all the light-hearted stories that get bumped whenever there’s breaking news. His girlfriend Grace (played by Jennifer Aniston), while nice and perky, doesn’t seem to be connecting with him like she apparently once did. His co-workers make fun of him. He drives a beat-up old car. His dog likes to pee on the furniture. On and on it goes, and Bruce suspects as things turn from bad to worse that God has some sort of a vendetta against him. Despite Grace’s best attempts to help him stabilize, Bruce continues to rant and rave about his mediocre life in a world run by a mean God until one day, things come to a head. As Limp Bizkit might say, Bruce has “one of those days”, and it leads to a total meltdown (in classic Jim Carrey style, I might add) that costs him his job. On top of all that, he has a fight with Grace over his attitude about the whole situation (which alternately makes you want to feel sorry for the guy and laugh at his melodramatic schtick), and finally, while driving by himself late at night, he caves in and finally starts asking God some honest questions. Even this sequence, a serious prayer that might have sounded cheesy coming from your typical Christian sub-culture film, comes off as genuine and is not without its humorous moments. It’s a vulnerable part for Carrey to play, and anyone who believes in God could probably identify with his questions.
Well, to make a long story short, God (expertly played by Morgan Freeman) sets out to answer Bruce’s questions by summoning Bruce to His office and offering Bruce His job. This is where the true weirdness and hilarity ensues. You see, Bruce thinks He can do a better job than God is apparently doing, and this is God’s way of making him put his money where his mouth is. (Careful what you wish for, pal!) While it might seem like a ridiculous premise for a movie, the style and wit with which Shadyac handles this idea are reason enough for a standing ovation. Seriously.
I don’t mean to start any blasphemous rumors, but I think that God’s got a great sense of humor
Aside from a few minorly annoying crude jokes (and admittedly, a few funny ones), the humor found here is both clever and sensitive to the subject matter. Many of the laughs rely on the same ploy that worked so well for Liar, Liar - things that people say get taken literally and used against them, Bruce struggles to fully grasp what’s happened to him, and most importantly, it works because we can identify with it. Carrey’s character in Liar Liar was believable because all of us would be horrified if we were required to say exactly what was on our minds instead of weaseling our way around the truth. Here, we can relate, because I think most of us have wished at one time or another that we could run the world and mete out justice to those who we felt were being unfair. Living vicariously through Bruce’s actions is a lot of fun at first… until there’s a break in the laughter and you realize that he’s not really doing his job. To borrow an overused phrase from another movie, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
God’s got his phone off the hook, baby, would he even pick up if he could?
This is where the movie starts to bless us with more than just an endless shower of giggles. As a stream of voices begins to fill Bruce’s head, he begins to freak out, and only when the real God drops the hint that these are prayers which won’t go away unanswered, Bruce begins to realize that he can’t spend all of his time plotting to take over the coveted news anchor chair and rearranging celestial bodies for the sake of seducing his girlfriend. He’s got to stop ignoring those prayers, and get them sorted out and answered - and the filing system he comes up is one of the wittiest moments in the film. (Let’s just say the puns were right up my alley.) Even though he’s got superhuman powers and he can answer millions of them in a matter of a few hours, this soon grows tiring, and he comes up with a more “efficient” way of dealing with the problem. And this is where we have to put our thinking caps on… smart viewers will be able to figure out the repercussions of this situation before they actually occur on screen.
Kind of like when life is like the sequel to a movie, where the actors’ names have changed
While I’m not one of those movie connoisseurs who can pick out an Academy-Award winning performance at first glance, I would have to say that the acting in Bruce Almighty is believable and lovable. Morgan Freeman comes off as benevolent and caring while also stern - he loves Bruce enough to correct his errors in a creative and humorous way, but at the same time he makes it clear that he’s not gonna tolerate any of Bruce’s blasphemy (even if he finds some of it funny). Jennifer Aniston doesn’t depart too much from her character in the TV show Friends, but her role as a sensitive schoolteacher who loves kids and scrap booking is very realistic, as is her frustration with Bruce. Look for a touching scene where she struggles with whether or not to keep Bruce around or let him go in the wake of his egotistical meltdown (and remember, she doesn’t know he has God’s powers). Steven Carrell is perfect as Bruce’s slimy competitor for the news anchor position - there’s one scene where he’s supposed to imitate some of Jim Carrey’s usual shtick that must have been extremely difficult to do, but he pulls it off and it’s hilarious. And of course, Carrey himself has gotten quite good at showing us both sides of his personality - he could take the most depressing, dejected monologue and make it a laugh riot, and I’m glad he has so much more to work with than toilet humor here (even if a little of that creeps in). There’s one scene where he goes off on a tirade about how the world won’t take him seriously - it made me wonder if this was a chance for Carrey to air out a few of his personal grievances through his character.
Plot-shaped hole
I think that this movie had a pretty solid plot that didn’t come off as too contrived and didn’t resolve itself too quickly (I actually thought it was about to end a few times before it really did.) Even though there might be obvious holes in the plot at times (quite often you might find yourself why he couldn’t just speed up this or make that disappear or whatever), it is possible that a human with God’s powers might still not be smart enough to think of everything, so this didn’t bother me enough to knock down my overall rating of the film. In the end, things tie up fittingly, but not necessarily as neatly as your typical Hollywood ending. It’s not rocket science, but it makes sense as the ending to a story that the director obviously wants real people to be able to relate to.
You’re a God, and I am not, and I just thought that you would know
I have to say that I loved the choices that were made regarding this film’s soundtrack. Of course, the quirky Joan Osbourne hit “(What If God Was) One of Us” from a few years makes for an obvious choice, but it doesn’t quite show up in the way you’d expect. Vertical Horizon‘s popular single “You’re a God” also makes an appearance here, which gives it a fitting re-interpretation, and I was thrilled to see Christian rock-chick Plumb score yet another soundtrack inclusion with her song “God-Shaped Hole” (even if it’s not one of her most eloquent tracks). That makes a grand total of four soundtrack songs from her album candycoatedwaterdrops (sorry, couldn’t resist the plug).
Tell me all your thoughts on God
Of course, the aspect of this movie that has most people either curious or suspicious is how it portrays God. I tell ya, with some audiences, there’s just no pleasing ‘em. Many conservative Christians are upset that a movie would dare portray a God with any sort of a sense of humor, much less one who would take such a gamble with a person’s life (they evidently haven’t read Job). Others will see a vague portrayal of their God in Morgan Freeman’s character, but find him too all-encompassing and not specific enough to be the Judeo-Christian God. Still others will balk at how the term "freewill" is tossed around and taken for granted (the subject of freewill vs. predestination has been a hot topic of theological debate for me and a few friends within the past year, though here it deals more with humans loving each other than humans loving God).
And of course, non-religious people will likely find that this movie is “too preachy”. (Probably because they haven’t had to suffer through most of the schmaltz put out by the Christian subculture.) Let’s face it, any time a movie deals with God with even a small hint of reverence, it’s going to come off as preachy. Any movie that tries to put forth a particular point of view could be seen as preachy, so it’s a fair statement. I don’t think Shadyac (who is a believing Catholic) and his crew are setting out to use Jim Carrey as a pawn in some sort of misguided attempt at mass conversion here. Because the message here isn’t “There is a God and this movie is gonna prove it to you”, nor is it “Follow our religion or burn in hell.” It’s a simple step, a nudge for people who, like Bruce, already claim to believe in God, but think that God has lost control of the universe or watch people suffer. It won’t offer all the answers, but it will offer a challenge to those who feel let down by God. That challenge is basically to put us in our place, and realize that we can’t do God’s job, and even if we could, zapping everything we wanted into existence out of nowhere wouldn’t do us any good in the long run. Even for someone who’s been a devout Christian all of his life (yours truly), that was a fitting and timely challenge, because there have been times when I’ve been tempted to believe that God didn’t care about the outcome of various situations in my life.
It’s that aspect of the movie, beyond the wit and comedy and musical selections, that has driven me to declare that Bruce Almighty is the best flick I’ve seen so far this year, and to highly recommend it to anyone from any religious background (or none at all) who is willing to open to their mind to the imaginative way that this film views the relationship between God and man. Even if you think God is purely fictional, it’s still food for thought. (And that’s the way the cookie crumbles.)
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
divad23
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 in Music |
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Member: David Martin
Location: Pasadena, CA
Reviews written: 567
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Just add an implicit "in my humble opinion" to every sentence I write.
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