God is Santa Claus, right down to the red velvet outfit lined with white fur. Or at least that's how He appears to Ralph, a 14-year-old struggling to be a good Catholic in Hamilton, Ontario in the mid-1950s.

Ralph needs a miracle to wake his mother out of a coma. He decides that winning the Boston Marathon could be that miracle. In his defiance of the incalculable odds against him, Ralph gets some inspiration from Santa/God. It also helps that his teacher is a former marathon runner willing, reluctantly at first, to coach Ralph despite orders from his superior that he not encourage the boy. The teacher and student learn from each other.

Mawkish and manipulative. That's how the story could have felt if it weren't told deftly. Writer/director Michael McGowan handles his material with low-key assurance. He makes moving a film that could have been maddening. Saint Ralph (2005) encourages faith without preaching. It puts a lump in one's throat or brings a tear to one's eye without twisting one's arm. McGowan's celebration of an underdog is Rocky with restraint, Dead Poet's Society without the dead.

Ralph is trying to navigate adolescence but his overpowering hormones keep changing the landscape. He confesses often -- quite often -- to having "impure" thoughts and to indulging in what everyone describes with that era's euphemism as self-abuse. Nothing is explicit but the movie makes it clear that Ralph is aroused by everything from women's breasts to, accidentally, the water nozzle in the public swimming pool. As he is about everything, Ralph is endearingly frank about his impulses. When a priest offers to hear his confession, Ralph suggests they wait a few minutes because he's likely to have yet another impure thought in the meantime.

Ralph is precocious, but not in the exaggerated way of many on-screen youngsters. He is a real kid. It is possible to know someone like him, or even to be someone like him. With his war hero father dead and his mother comatose, Ralph pretends he is living with grandparents. This leaves him free to make his own way, which often leads him astray. His antagonist, the strict priest who runs the Catholic school Ralph attends, suspects that the boy's transgressions are attempts to get expelled.

"Or," the father asks, "is there another reason I'm completely overlooking for your utter inability to fit in?"

"I'm destined for greatness," Ralph suggests, with only the slightest question mark. He believes it.

"You're 14 years old. Greatness is not an option."

Ralph's belief in himself is infectious, largely because of the delightful portrayal by Adam Butcher. Ralph never intends to be funny or inspiring. He is unfailingly amusing and touching because of the earnest energy with which Butcher invests his performance.

The other actors support Butcher's Ralph very well. Gordon Pinset is stern but not mean as the demanding school principal. Campbell Scott deftly signals the subtle transformation his working with Ralph has on the young priest who challenges the older priest's authority. Jennifer Tilly expertly uses just enough of her breathy, curvy sexuality to make her a plausible object of a boy's desires without compromising the intelligence that makes her plausible as his mother's nurse. Michael Kanev is charming as Ralph's more serious friend.

Tamara Hope does very well as the young lady to whom Ralph is most attracted. If there is a flaw in the movie, it is that her character is slighted. She intends to become a nun, a vocation to which she is called more strongly than Ralph is to running. But when she makes a choice that seems to contradict that calling, the movie presents it too suddenly to make it convincing. The matters involved are too profound for them to be treated so glibly.

At most, that is a minor distraction. One doesn't need the help of either God or Santa Claus to forgive it because every other aspect of Saint Ralph is so wonderfully affecting.




Recommended:
Yes