Higher
Ground,
the Film
Testing the Evangelical
Experience
 |
| Higher Ground director and star, Vera Farmiga |
But the actual film is nothing like
that stereotype. As gentle as it is savage, as merciful as it is just, Higher Ground, recently released on dvd,
is a serious, thoughtful work about the real lives of homegrown, American,
Evangelical Christians.
I’m familiar with Evangelical
culture. Though raised in a Unitarian household, I also grew up in the 1940s
and ‘50s in Lancaster County, PA, then a dominantly agricultural region
governed by a traditional, Christian fundamentalist morality which, of course,
almost no one could live up to. I learned to get along with fundamentalists
because there wasn’t anyone else around to play with. My first kiss with my
first girl friend was in a corn field. My closest neighborhood friend through
junior high and high school was a Missouri Lutheran who believed in the Bible
literally.
Yet there was also suspicion. My
Unitarian interior, fostered by my parents, always understood that, no matter
how much I seemed to be accepted by my friends, teachers, and acquaintances,
they all most probably and not always secretly believed I and my whole family
were going to hell.
By the time Jesus freaks appeared in
the 1960s, rising out of the hippy culture and, in a sense, as an alternative
to it, I was more than distrustful of Christian conservatives. They passed too
many judgments, left too much out, bullied presumed sinners they didn’t even
know with venomous enjoyment. Also, by then I’d had my own spiritual
experiences on psychedelic drugs and didn’t want to be told what I needed to do
to save my soul. No religion, cult, or sect has a corner on the longing for an
eternal home where we may find happiness without fear of wrath or destruction.
That’s a basic human longing.
With complete respect, then, Higher Ground portrays that longing as
it expresses itself within a congregation of ardent Evangelical believers who
go about their busy lives of serving the Lord while supporting each other as
extended family through one after another of life’s temptations, triumphs, and
tragedies.
At the center of the tale is
Corinne, a young mother played with astonishing subtlety by Vera Farmiga, who
also directs. Even in childhood Corinne seems always a little outside the
circles she moves in, always a little puzzled by the behavior she sees around
her.
Yet she strives to participate. In a
harrowing scene, when her infant daughter is missing in the wreckage of a freak
automobile accident, she cries out in desperation for God. When the child is
rescued her husband proclaims it’s God’s answer to her cry. The couple become
Christian, joining an Evangelical congregation and receiving full-immersion
baptism in a local creek.
But Corinne, though she tries, never
seems wholly comfortable, either in her marriage or in her church. She never
enjoys sex, which she tries to avoid, and she can’t seem to fully sign on to
the doctrines, either—especially regarding deference to the men. When she tries
to speak out on matters of faith, she is reprimanded by the pastor’s wife, who
reminds her that it is not a woman’s place to preach. When she consents to see
a marriage counselor before leaving her husband, the church therapist—a
self-described “prophet of God”—tells her she is possessed by Satan.
Yet with the possible exception of
the therapist, none of the many characters in the film is stereotyped. They
don’t speak with one hackneyed voice, their spiritual yearning is portrayed
authentically, their longing for community in communion with a divine creator
and savior is universal, even if others do not thrill to the same
conceptualizations. We live in bewildering times. The Evangelical life
portrayed in Higher Ground is a
response to these times, but not at the expense of the humanity of the
characters portrayed.
Will Corinne leave the community
where her life has been centered for a dozen years or more and go out into the
world on her own? It seems so, but we can’t be quite sure. The emotional tug of
security in the group is a powerful force she must overcome. Anyone who has
experienced the turmoil of breaking with a group identity and striking out on
one’s own knows the feeling. That’s the remarkable thing about this film. It
humanizes a group all too often demonized on one hand and sanctified on the
other. In doing so it comments with elegant delicacy upon the helplessness we
all encounter, no matter what our ideology, when we come face-to-face with
existential circumstances we may never be able to understand.
Higher
Ground is adapted from a memoir, This
Dark World, by Carolyn S. Briggs, who also collaborated on the screenplay.
The character Corinne, played so expertly by Ms. Farmiga, is Ms. Briggs’ screen
persona, though apparently the film diverges from the book, I suspect to crank
up dramatic tension. In any case, the book was quite well received among the
hip intelligentsia, as the film has also been. A more interesting question is
what Evangelicals think of it.
Personally, I admired it. I liked
the music, too, much of it played live in group worship situations and other
communal gatherings. It’s Christian contemporary, which can be quite as lively
and heart-felt as any secular song of love and longing.
But most of all I liked the sheer
artistry of the film, a story told about people I’ve tended to avoid in a way
that makes me feel their frustrations, joys, and pains as I would feel my own.
In that sense the film reaches beyond its ready-made niche to speak to the
wider culture, a bridge, however fragile, between Evangelicals and the rest of
us, softening hardened perceptions.
That’s the value of good art. We
need more of it in our fractious world.
