Culture Blues

Tribeca 2011: Higher Ground

For the next month, Jeremiah and Jeff will be spending almost all of their free time watching and reviewing movies from this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It's about to get indie up in here!

Wanna get out of here and talk about The Lord?

I’d argue that films on the topic of faith are amongst the most difficult to get right. Typically, they come in two diametrically opposed types: the grand footprints-in-the-sand affirmation of Christianity (for instance, Signs) or the remorseless takedown of spaghetti-monster believing stupidity (for instance, Saved!). Personally, I much prefer the stance of the latter, but usually find those films unbearable to watch thanks to their pervasive smugness.

The degree of difficulty is what makes Higher Ground such an achievement. Here we have a film examining a woman’s 20-year struggle with faith that manages to feel genuine, never preachy. Our doubtful Christian is Vera Farmiga, once a bookish young woman that literally crashed into a Christian lifestyle and ends up a mother of three living in one of those early 70s granola Jesus communities. As if waking from a dream, Farmiga begins to explore her doubts, at first by trying to speak in tongues to the bathroom mirror, and later through more intellectual pursuits that tend to rub the male leaders of her community the wrong way. Her spiritual journey is both poignant and comedic; even if we’re not quite sure what she’s looking for, it’s impossible not to root for her.

Farmiga, who also directs, has crafted an impressively thoughtful debut. She shows a real talent for characterization, and Higher Ground moves along at an effortlessly breezy pace. The film can sometimes feel a little too gentle, giving off a certain sanitized NPR vibe, but Farmiga smartly raises the stakes as the film concludes, never letting things get too soft.

Higher Ground is a film that begs further examination. Farmiga doesn’t affirm Christianity, but neither does she condemn it. Her guitar-strumming Jesus freaks are certainly the object of some satire, but it’s never so mean-spirited as to make them seem inhuman. By limiting herself to just one woman’s struggle and by keeping her judgments firmly grounded in introspection, it seems that Farmiga has created that rare film capable of giving both believers and non-believers something interesting to think about.

VERDICT:  See it.