Review of Letters to God (2010) by Chads — 13 Apr 2010

To me, there's more spirituality coursing through the celluloid of Robert Bresson's "Au hasard Balthazar" than this Christian recruitment tool for people who love God, not movies. To me, there's more signs of God in the titular donkey than the church where Brady(Jeffrey Johnson), an alcoholic mailman, finds redemption after a DUI arrest with his son present in the stopped vehicle.

But to its credit, "Letters to God" does include a scene in which infidels can relate to, because finally, somebody makes sense. Maddie(Robin Lively), the mother of a young boy stricken with brain cancer, tells her own mom, "Stop quoting the Bible to me.

It's not curing my son." She disagrees with God's will, so for a little while, in a loaded film which preaches to the converted, "Letters to God" becomes accesible to those who believe that having faith is "religilous".

In her darkest hour, when Maddie can no longer pretend that supplication has the power to repel the cancer cells from ravaging her son Tyler(Tanner Maguire), Olivia(Maree Cheatham), instead of talking like a grown-up, offers her daughter platitudes, a stock choice of words that confronts the matter at hand with magic.

(Like Sarah Silverman says, "Jesus is magic!") This mother's flare-up creates a slight rupture in the Christian-based rhetoric of the filmic text, which, incidentally, is the film's only sane moment because "Letters to God" sees tragedy with rose-tinted glasses.

Because Tyler drinks the ideological kool-aid, he sees a newly-born baby as being his replacement. In the bedroom, Maddie tells her son otherwise, that he can't be supplanted, but this is exactly what the movie intimates, and believes.

Earlier in the film, his best friend's grandfather tells the sick boy about how he was "handpicked by God" and "chosen for the role of a lifetime". "Dying is Fine", in a sense, because God's will and plan can't be cross-examined under the strictest sense of church dogma.

But Tyler couldn't be faulted if he changed his mind about death, echoing the John Ryan Pike(of Ra Ra Riot) line: "You know that dying is fine, but maybe I wouldn't like death if death were good.