Sorry I didn’t get around to reviewing some new horror films, but I had some work and family issues come up. So here’s my review of “The Reaping,” first uploaded on August 12 of 2007. You probably weren’t reading this blog back then anyway, so it’s new to you.
By the time The Reaping slouched to its inglorious climax—beginning as it did like a hybrid of The Exorcist and Star Trek 5: The Really, Really Bad One and then moving on to feature Divine Retribution—I couldn’t help but think that more movies should end with The Almighty smiting the evildoers. Seriously, how can a movie end better than that? I mean, yeah, the cavalry coming over the hill is rousing, and Han Solo deciding to join the rebellion and saving Luke’s bacon just in time to help him destroy the Death Star is a crowd-pleaser, but what truly beats The Big Guy taking center stage and dispatching the baddies? What better way is there to establish who is Good and who is Evil than to have Maker of Heaven and Earth weigh in on the matter?
And in the case of The Reaping it pretty much takes the guidance of He Who Created All That Is Seen And Unseen to untangle the mess of a movie that is, at its core, deeply, deeply confused. The Reaping doesn’t know whether it wants to be a serious enquiry into religious conviction or a condemnation of a faithless world. Likewise, it doesn’t know whether to pander to Red State religious literalism or to stereotype and ridicule Bible Belt fundamentalism. Hell, for most of the movie it can’t even decide if God is a good guy or a bad guy. Thankfully, the climactic battle solves that last question–God is a good guy–and drops the rest in favor of schlocky exploitation.
<In The Reaping, multiple-Oscar winner Hilary Swank plays Kathryn Winter, a professor of Miracle Debunking (wow, that’s gotta be an easy class) who ends her lectures by saying things like: “The only real miracle is that people still believe in miracles. Okay, I’ll see you Monday. Have a great weekend everybody!” Winter debunks miracles with a passion, since she is carrying a Great and Secret Pain. At some nebulous point before the movie began, her husband and daughter were sacrificed by some Sudanese people in the hopes that it would end the famine that wracked their land. Since then, Winter has ceased believing in God, because she cannot see how a good and living God could allow her family to be killed in such a way (the question of how God could allow the famine and genocide of that region to occur is never broached, since in this movie religion—like politics—is strictly local). Anyway, Winter and her assistant (played by The Wire’s Idris Elba) are asked to investigate a weird phenomena in rural Louisiana town. One of their rivers has turned to blood and they’re a bit alarmed about it.
The town is one of those Hollywood visions of the Deep South—not the Deliverance version, but the other one—everyone speaks in a thick accent, wears seersucker suits and hats and probably drinks nothing but mint juleps. They’re also all religious fundamentalists whose church is a quaint, old structure with fire and brimstone quotes on the sign outside (just a side note here, why is it when Hollywood envisions the religious fervor of Jesusland, they default to 19th century churches and not the infinitely more frightening mega-churches that have by-and-large taken over the Bible Belt?). This small town is soon beset with the various plagues of the Old Testament. The river has indeed turned to blood. Frogs fall from the sky. Livestock get sick. The grilled seafood dinner made for Winter by the resident hottie is spoiled by vermin (I don’t recall this plague, but had the ancient Egyptians owned Hibachis it probably would have been included on this list). The lynch-happy town population believes that God is punishing them because an evil little girl that lives in the woods killed her brother in the very river that turned to blood. Now, if this seems a pretty trivial reason for God to get all bitchcakes on the town, the screenwriters thought of that too. So they add “Oh, and by the way…her family are part of a Satanic cult.”
Okay, so we have the various plagues and the Evil Little Girl. The movie more or less circles in this holding pattern until the overstuffed finale wherein Winter is convinced that she is actually God’s warrior angel (Archangel Michael is apparently on vacation or was called up to Iraq or something) and she sets off the kill the Evil Girl. But wait! Evil Girl is actually God’s killer angel and she was attacked by her Devil-worshipping brother, but God killed him and turned the river to blood. The rest of the plagues were the work of Satan, who is really bent about the girl living. Make sense? No? Well, too bad. Anyway, the cult attacks Winter and Formerly Evil Little Girl, and that’s when God unleashes his fury upon them. The baddies are smitten (smote?) and Winters gets a replacement daughter for her troubles. Pretty good deal for a couple days’ work.
Like most horror movies of the past 30 years, The Reaping very much wants to be another Exorcist—that is, a thoughtful, intelligent horror movie. The problem here, as it was with The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Stigmata, and the various Exorcist sequels, is that the film is very, very dumb. Winter’s journey back to faith takes place over the phone in a brief conversation with a priest friend of her (Stephen Rea, literally phoning in his role). The existence of God is demonstrated by His standing against the forces of Satan, nothing more. The miracle of life, of our just being here, is never even acknowledged, nor is the greatness to which humanity can aspire. In this film, God and Satan are just chess players, and humanity simply game pieces with little in the way of agency.
The Exorcist, by contrast, put genuine thought into the existence of God and Satan. The book begins with an excerpt from an FBI wiretap of some mafia killers who describe in gleeful detail the torture and murder of an informant. The prologue concludes with “Auschwitz…Dachau…Treblinka.” Author William Peter Blatty’s point is clear: why would Satan need to possess a little girl to assert his power in this world when there is so much evidence of evil already? This is one of the main theological struggles of both book and the film. Father Damien Karras is losing his faith not because of some contrived personal horror, but because of the trivial hurts and indignities he sees every day: the despair and doubt he hears when counseling his peers, the homeless he encounters everyday on the street, his inability to take care of his dying mother (the latter is especially excruciating when his uncle rudely points out that if he hadn’t become a priest he’d be a rich psychologist who could afford to care for her better). Likewise, Father Merrin–the Exorcist of the title—sums up Satan’s design in the most elegant and shattering way: “He wants us to view ourselves as animal and ugly, unworthy of God’s love.” And that may be the best indictment of The Reaping: for a movie about humanity’s relationship with God, there’s no mention at all of His love for us—just His wrath.
No, scratch that: The best example of vast gulf between The Exorcist and The Reaping is in the scenes in which the heroes go forth to do battle. In The Exorcist, Father Merrin is a black silhouette emerging from the fog into the light of a streetlamp outside the family’s Georgetown brownstone. He pauses, looks up at the building. The scene cuts to a shot of the possessed girl. Her bloodshot eyes widen. Old enemies sense one another and anticipate the rematch. In The Reaping, Hilary Swank gets her marching orders from the resident hottie, who also hands a knife to use to kill the little girl. She tucks it in her belt at the small of her back and climbs a flight of stairs. The camera remains fixed on her ass the whole way up.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: If Satan’s presence can be detected anyplace, it’s in the fact that Hilary Swank, winner of two Academy Awards for Best Actress, chose to star in it. In fairness to Hilary, though, the pickin’s for strong, unconventionally-attractive actresses are awfully slim. And it’s not like she did Catwoman…
