Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

For the Bible Tells Me So
Directed by Dan Karslake
B+
Reviewed by Steven Wells
Opens Fri., Oct. 12

If you can get through For the Bible Tells Me So without sobbing, you're either a robot or an alien or an irredeemable bigot. In which case, may God have mercy on your warped and rotten soul.

For the Bible Tells Me So ends with footage of gay Christians and their families attempting to march on the headquarters of the fake-Christian conservative propaganda outfit Focus on the Family.

The crowd includes one woman who--believing the lies of James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family--rejected her daughter's lesbianism.

When her daughter killed herself, Mary Lou Wallner read up on both homosexuality and the Bible. And like other parents in the documentary, Wallner came to the conclusion that it's homophobia, not homosexuality, that's un-Christian.

In For the Bible Tells Me So Christian and Jewish scholars take the oft-quoted "antigay" verses of the Bible (while pointing out how seldom multimillionaire preachers mention the verses that condemn the rich) and put them into historical context.

It turns out, for instance, the sin for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed wasn't same-sex love but inhospitality. This leads one African-American lesbian Christian to wryly comment about her own experiences with racism and homophobia in supposedly Christian towns in New England.

But while For the Bible Tells Me So methodically demolishes all the arguments for homophobia, both spiritual and temporal (and makes a convincing case for a direct connection between hypocritical "hate the sin, love the sinner" piety and the horrors of gay-bashing and the terrible gay teenage suicide rate), it succeeds most effectively on the anecdotal and emotional level.

The documentary presents Christian gays and lesbians as brave, decent and honorable people. And we also see their so-called Christian detractors in their true colors: ignorant (of both science and the Bible), hate-filled and completely un-Christlike.

Dobson and his fellow sheetsniffers continue to do untold damage to kids whose only sin is to have been born both gay and part of a religious culture bizarrely obsessed with repressing human sexuality. This film might not swing any bigots, but let's hope it brings cheer and solace to those who've been through the fundamentalist hate mill.

And no, it isn't "balanced." No argument in favor of truth, reason and tolerance needs to be.

It's hard not to feel bad for James Gray. As several woe-is-he articles have already professed, his debut, 1995's Russian mob saga Little Odessa, arrived during the Tarantino craze and couldn't have stuck out more.

Nor, sadly, could it catch a break. Neither could his 2000 follow-up The Yards, with Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix. Is there no room on this green earth for classically structured, calmly paced, plainly shot, nakedly earnest, thoroughly humorless and often downright dour retro-dramas?

Phoenix and Wahlberg return in We Own the Night, only Gray's third film ever, not to mention his third film about families joined in crime. Phoenix gets front and center this time as a budding nightclub owner in 1988 Brooklyn, in a bit too deep with Russian mobsters and their smuggled drugs. Wahlberg plays his cop brother and Robert Duvall their chief-of-police father.

Guess who doesn't mind playing favorites?

It's possible Gray's influences reach back further than Serpico-era Sidney Lumet--say, heyday D.W. Griffith. Gray's plotting can be crude, and his thematics cruder. As the characters keep reminding us, the theme is family. Sure enough Phoenix winds up the prodigal son returned, and then some. This isn't cause for aggressive eye-rolling because Gray is so committed and straightfaced we can't help but believe in it too.

We Own the Night is so humor-averse that the closest thing to comic relief (Danny Hoch) gets the ever-living shit kicked out of him, but it compensates with an absorbing seriousness. Gray's the kind of filmmaker whose direction "serves the story," but he lets fly with two of the year's most kinetic set pieces: a drug bust gone wildly awry and, soon after, a claustrophobic car chase set in a rainstorm and entirely within one vehicle. Kick. Ass. (Between this, Death Proof and Bourne 3, this is one helluva year for automotive mayhem.)