<em>Hollywood continues to stereotype the Church, says Julia Hamilton.</em>
Miracle at Manchester is a drama, based on a true story, of high-school sophomore Brycen Newman (note the appropriate surname), a student at Cathedral Catholic High School in San Diego who is diagnosed with medulloblastoma, an extremely aggressive and fast-growing type of brain cancer.
The opening scenes of the film show Brycen (Kory Getman), a star player in his high-school baseball team, the Dons, having a sudden and unexpected crushing pain in his head. The alarming-looking helmet heightens the impression of the agony, as if the helmet is causing it. If only.
Brycen dismisses the incident and walks his girlfriend Alex (Brennan Hunt) to her class, but, not long after, a hellish headache and a nosebleed suggest that something more serious is afoot. Brycen goes with his father, Richard (Eddie McClintock), to the hospital where a young female doctor dismisses his concerns. “He’s a healthy kid,” she says, blithely discharging father and son, against all the evidence, a scene that felt like it had been thrown into the mix to add some conflict to the narrative’s otherwise seamless trajectory. The “healthy kid” is anything but and Brycen is soon under the care of neurosurgeon Dr Getty (Dean Cain) heading for radical brain surgery.
In the meantime, a subplot involving a good-hearted local mechanic, Ed Hanson (Daniel Roebuck) kicks in. Hanson does up veterans’ cars for free and his wife, Marilyn (Kathy Patterson), is a cancer nurse at the hospital where Brycen is being treated. As a teen approaching driving age, Brycen longs for a car. Hanson is gifted a 1967 Mustang, a car he’s always wanted, but he ends up, through his wife’s involvement with Brycen and his family, doing up the car for Brycen instead. The car is covered in rust, known in the automobile world as the “cancer” of cars. More dots are joined up.
The surgery Brycen undergoes is, however, incomplete. He has more headaches and nosebleeds as the seemingly unstoppable cancer continues to advance rapidly. Not only will Brycen need further surgery, he will also need chemotherapy and radiation. The last resort is a specialist treatment centre in Florida and this is where Brycen is headed when the entire school, all 1800 students, gets together to pray for a miracle at Manchester stadium, led by a priest of solidly Irish extraction whom we’ve already been introduced to earlier.
When Dr Getty examines Brycen’s next set of MRI scans after the prayer session, the cancer has miraculously evaporated, allowing Brycen to return, bald but otherwise apparently unchanged, to his life, his girl and the car he has been gifted by the saintly Ed Hanson.
Relentlessly upbeat with its punchy soundtrack of “Fight Song” (“Take back my life song/Prove I’m alright song…”), this is a movie that is underpinned by the very American refrain of “we can beat it” and the can-do attitude that exemplifies the American dream.
At the same time, we’re told, “We trust in God to do the job”, an expression which suggests a sort of lumberjack God who will perform a miracle if enough pressure is put on Him, in effect a God you can do a deal with. But any student of the Book of Job knows the ominous truth that human beings are powerless. God will do what God will do, regardless of what man wants. The sense of a God who can be manipulated by enough good people doing enough good things lends a saccharine edge to a story that seems, at times, almost cartoonish in its upright brightness. Irony is absolutely nowhere to be seen, nor a true sense of wonder. God does the job. Full stop. Good old God.
What would have happened if a miracle hadn’t occurred is not examined. As this is a true story, I’m not really allowed to say that the film might have been a lot more interesting if God hadn’t done the job. A miracle occurs and Brycen is healed, but the maddeningly upbeat tone bleaches out all nuance; the only serpent in this paradise is cancer and that has its head firmly stamped on.
The problem with making a film out of a true story is that the story part is already neatly tied up. Perhaps if this had been billed as a documentary rather than a movie I would have liked it more. But the relentless flatness of the characterisation is disappointing and the pre-ordained ending, given away in the title, makes its presence felt from the opening scenes. Brycen is appropriately astounded at his miraculous recovery but he soon melts back into his bland high-school, baseball, prom-partying bubble, driving off, La La Land-style, in his vintage automobile.
It’s also a curiously masculine film. The only woman of any importance is not Brycen’s mother, Nicole, or the BVM (who doesn’t get a look in), but Marilyn, the cancer nurse who looks after him, all of which adds up to a film which feels oddly Protestant in tone, although its subject is a Catholic.
In The Pope’s Exorcist, a portly Russell Crowe, with a clerical haircut, grizzled beard, heavy Italian accent and a Roman cassock, is back on our screens playing the titular character in this film, the real-life Father Gabriele Amorth. Fr Amorth claimed to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms. Crowe, who researched his subject at the Vatican, was apparently taken with the purity of Amorth’s faith and his rather good sense of humour, nicely on display here.
Drawing on Amorth’s memoirs and case files, the film focuses on the case of a possessed American boy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) who has recently moved to the semi-derelict abbey of St Sebastian in Castille with his mother and sister (don’t ask). The solidly handsome but unnamed Pope (Franco Nero) is concerned about the case for reasons that aren’t entirely clear and sends Amorth off to investigate.
The abbey looks like it’s been repurposed from a different film – Great Expectations, perhaps – but the naïve Americans who have just arrived in their cobwebby new home are understandably taken aback by all the racket after dark. The electricity is on the blink and there are lots of jump scare moments before the possession proper even takes place. The construction workers leave – too scary – and the scene is set for the arrival of Crowe on his Ferrari scooter and his exorcist box of tricks.
Amorth soon discovers that the boy’s possession is linked to an ancient secret the Catholic Church has tried to keep for centuries, concerning Asmodeus, who fell from heaven along with Lucifer, landing in this Castillian wilderness.
Once Crowe is installed in the boy’s bedroom the demon throws everything he’s got at his antagonists, Amorth and a local priest, the comely but useless Fr Matthew Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto). The special effects budget is massive: we have all the usual tropes – spider-walking across walls and ceilings, lights flickering randomly, explosions, shattering glass, visions, levitations – which, in my view, serve to diminish the sense of palpable evil. Is the devil really that predictable? Since the Exorcist, Hollywood has clung to the idea there is no better way to portray demonic possession. Shame, really. I prefer the Henry James take myself.
Fr Amorth’s invincible faith is not quite as demon-proof as he’d thought. There are some rather bewildering flashbacks to Amorth’s war career as a partisan that add little to the case in hand but which old Asmodeus, voiced by Ralph Ineson, seems to think hold the key to his defeating Amorth. Apparently, Amorth is vulnerable because even though he’s confessed his sins, they still weigh on him. As a full-time priest in the exorcism business, you’d have thought he would have dealt with this rather obvious chink in his armour, but no.
Director Julius Avery longs to get us out of the gloomy curtain-swathed bedroom into the Stygian catacombs beneath the abbey, where Crowe’s exorcist predecessor is holed up as a skeleton in a cage, having lost a previous battle with Asmodeus.
Back in Rome, Franco Nero has a stroke brought on by his telepathic connection to what is going in the basement of the abbey, where Fr Amorth and Fr Esquibel are valiantly reciting prayers, holding hard until Asmodeus perishes in a cloud of smoke. The lights go back on and everything finally goes quiet, at last.
<em>Miracle at Manchester and The Pope’s Exorcist are in cinemas nationwide.</em>
