Despite
the fact that nearly the entire plot of
Blue
Like Jazz is preoccupied with its main character’s loss and eventual
recovery of his Christian faith, its director, Steve Taylor,
insists
that it is not a Christian movie. In distinguishing
Blue Like Jazz—based on Donald Miller’s best-selling
semi-autobiographical novel—from Christian films, Taylor has in mind overtly religious
films such as
Facing the Giants,
Fireproof, and
Courageous. Unlike these
films,
Blue Like Jazz contains more
humor, is less intent on evangelization, and makes an attempt at engaging
secular culture. In another, less welcome way, in terms of box office receipts,
Blue Like Jazz has also distinguished
itself from explicitly Christian films. Whereas these films
have seen long and lucrative runs in theaters,
Blue Like Jazz nearly disappeared after
a modest opening weekend. Part of the problem with
Blue Like Jazz is that it is not complex or subtle enough to appeal
to a secular audience, so it ends up appealing to a sub-sub-culture, liberal
Christians disaffected from what they take to be the constraints of Southern
Evangelicalism.
Blue Like Jazz
is the coming of age story of Donald Miller, a smart but sheltered Texas
Southern Baptist, who becomes disillusioned with his faith after he discovers
that his own mother is having an affair with his church’s married youth
minister. Prodded by his secular father,
who supplies him with a collection of jazz albums, the most notable of which is
John Coltrane’s Love Supreme, he
heads off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a bastion of academic
liberalism. Surrounded by stridently secular students, Miller casts aside his
Christian commitment and becomes immersed in a culture that celebrates all the
things Miller’s boyhood church warned him against.
The
gap between Miller’s former and new life comes to the fore late in the film and
resolves itself with a confession of faith that involves mostly apologies for
how Christians have behaved. Some
Christian critics have objected that while Texas-style Christianity comes under
severe criticism in the film, the liberalism at Reed does not receive anything
like the same treatment. That’s true in
a way; for example, liberalism is not subjected to the sort of mockery that
Miller bestows upon the liturgical kitsch of the church of his youth. An early scene in which a pastor uses a prop
(a piñata in the form of a cross) to make a point about Jesus is amusing. He has the kids come up and gather round the
altar, beneath the piñata; when it shatters, candy comes flowing out. He draws out the lesson for the children: just
as the piñata had to be broken so that the kids could get the candy, so Jesus
had to be broken for us to receive his blessings.
Although
there is some truth to critics’ objections, what is striking about the film is
its isomorphic depiction of Texas religion and Northwest liberalism. In a comical way, Miller juxtaposes Christian
bumper stickers with liberal bumper stickers.
Both groups enthusiastically paste stickers all over their cars as a
reflection of an in-your-face effort at evangelization. One Texas bumper sticker asks, “Are you
following Jesus this close?” and another observes, “Stop, Drop, and Roll Won’t
Work in Hell.” But the liberals are as
devout and dogmatic as the Christians they disdain. One car at Reed sports the quip, “Abstinence
Makes the Church Grow Fondlers” and another mocks “I Found Jesus, Drunk in my
Backseat.” Clichés supporting environmentalism
and alternative lifestyles abound: “Gashole” is scribbled in the dirty window
of an old, gas-guzzling car.
Miller-the-author’s
attention to these rival sound bites, comfortably pronounced in communities
utterly immune to self-criticism, is astute and humorous. Yet, Miller-the-character is not nearly so
witty or self-aware. The film wants to
be all about tension and resolution. But the main character is all
surface. For most of the film he seems a
sort of Zelig-like character, settling unobtrusively into whatever environment
he happens to find himself. Miller’s early faith seems mainly a matter of
following the conventions of his local church.
Of course that is shattered when he finds himself in a very different
sort of community. So he learns to join the crowd in making moderately clever
put-downs of religion. At one point, he
glibly and falsely tells other students, “My dad’s partner is in rehab.” As
depicted in the film, Reed is the paradigm of the university as envisaged by
populist right-wing Christians—a place of unrelenting animosity toward God,
tradition, and the South. “Get in the
closet, Baptist boy,” a lesbian girl tells him.
He claims he’s floating in a sea of individuality and while that may be
true on the level of personality, Miller’s Reed is a sea of intellectual
uniformity.
In
one sense, Miller does at Reed what he did in church: he fits in. He admits as much toward the end when he
confides in another student that he hid his faith because he wanted to be
liked. Miller wants to widen the circle
of likability, to include liberals. But
when he proceeds to confess that he’s tired of being a hypocrite and a coward,
the testimony rings a bit hollow. Miller
has shown no signs of internal conflict or deep struggle. The period of his play-acting at Reed comes
off as gentle farce and it is, in its way, entertaining. But it is not the set-up for tragic tension.
What
is also striking about the film is how utterly absent from Miller’s Reed is the
notion of college as an arena of the serious exploration of ideas. Moving from the Baptist world of Texas to the
liberal, even atheistic, world of Reed does force Miller to confront opinions
alien to his initial views. But these
are articulated as nothing more than slogans.
In the seminar discussion of Homer, an author in Reed’s famous core
curriculum, students do indeed engage in a lively exchange. But they have precious little to say about
the book itself and the professor seems quite content to let the students go
around the room opining their views of religion and politics. There is disagreement here but it’s not
informed by the assigned text or by much of anything other than personal
testimony. In this respect, Reed is the
mirror image of personality-drenched Christianity, rooted in individual
testimony, that Miller left behind in Texas.
The
repeated allusions to jazz and, in particular, to John Coltrane’s Love
Supreme do nothing to enhance the complexity of the film. Indeed, Miller seems to spend most of the
film supposing that this album, the greatest religious jazz album ever made,
represents secular complexity, despite the fact that its religious nature is
palpable in the very title of the album and even more explicit in the
sub-titles of its four parts: "Acknowledgement," "Resolution,"
"Pursuance," and "Psalm."
The
filmmakers see the need for something more than what passes as Christian film
these days, yet it is not clear that films such as Facing the Giants, Fireproof,
and Courageous deserve utter
dismissal. Their popularity indicates a longing among the movie-going public
for something more and other than what mainstream Hollywood provides in the way
of entertainment. It is true that these
films are often artistically crude, and not just in the sense that their low
budgets preclude the possibility of expensive sets, sophisticated camera work,
and top-notch editing. The story lines
themselves are flat and predictable, with plots that seem less the result of
genuine imaginative vision than they are extended illustrations of Christian
preaching. Even as they play upon
emotions in saccharine ways, they forget that the peculiar role of art,
particularly in a visual medium like film, is to move by showing, not just by
saying. It sometimes seems as if
Christian filmmakers think that if they simply invoke Jesus endlessly and weave
that into a story, they have done their job.
Miller knows this is not enough. He knows that art needs humor. He also understands that Christian art must
engage, encompass, and transform rival worldviews and alternate artistic
visions. But, like his Christian
counterparts, he suffers from impoverished theological and artistic
sources. The film begins with a caricature
of the Gospel, moves on to the farcical liberalism of an elite university, and
ends by proposing a kind of mediation. The result for the film is the opposite
of what Miller had hoped. Instead of
reaching a wider audience, the film seems to have reached only a sub-culture of
a sub-culture.
Blue Like Jazz is not nearly blue enough and it’s actually nothing
like jazz.