Lest my ambivalent tone be misconstrued, I count myself among the fans of both, ableit for different reasons. I did not engage with the books at all until I was teaching American literature and filling in gaps in my education. My specialty in graduate school was Early-American Literature, and Wilder did not publish until 1937. I came to see her not as a chonicler of the American westward expansion, but as an important conduit through which the modern imaginative picture of the nineteenth-centruy pioneers was formed. Although she was closer in time (and actually lived through) the events she chonricled, I found her relationship to them akin to Hawthorne’s relationship with Puritan New England. The books presented in broad strokes an emblem for a time period that, while not a fabrication, was too often thought of as being the representative example of the time period rather than one person’s general impressions of it. Wilder’s books have also been important for me as an exhibit in the argument that American literature marginalizes women authors both by funneling them to genres with less prestige (especially juvenalia) and then dismissing their accomplishments and contributions because they happen to be accomplished in those genres.

I did not engage with the 70s show until I was preparing a conference paper early in my career about Christian fiction directed toward adoloscents. I approached it with hefty cynicism, suspecting it might be a prototype of what I later dubbed “evangelical pornography” (see Chapter Two of Inconspicuosly Christian Film Criticism). Instead, I found it wholesome without being grating, something that was (apparently) liked by Christians but not directed to them or marketed to them exclusively in the way that so many films of the nascent Christian film industry were. About the same time David L. Cunningham directed and Katie Ford wrote a six episode miniseries that made many of the same moves the Netflix series does, ostensibly to make the the material a little less whitewashed in its portrayal of history. Interactions with the Native Americans are highlighted more than they were in the show. Dr. Tan, the African-American doctor who appeared in one chapter of one book in the Little House series is given a featured role.

It bears repeating that these are changes in emphases and not fabrications. The books are composed of vignettes that are loosely tied together by theme, character, and location. They lack the focus and depth of modern novels, which perhaps makes them better suited to be adapted to serial television than into more concentrated films or mini-series. The racial stuff is not grafted onto the material, but it is cherry-picked from it. The result of such cherry-picking is to highlight the ways the past was a distant mirror, with people more or less like us, dealing with the same issues we have to deal with. Caroline walks out on a racist neighbor who refuses to let the store’s black owner join the women’s society. Charles declines to administer fronteir justice to a pair of horse thieves, saying violence never did much good. Our lives, individually and corporately, are chock full of contradictions and changes, making it possible to paint drastically different pictures depending on which details are highlighted and which are elided. The Ingalls family is a little too perfect for my taste. The parents, especially, came across as idealized versions of the figures Wilder draws in her books.

The picture painted of the Ingalls family here is one of nearly unfailing moral rectitude. I am hard pressed to think of a single example in the show where one of the parents does something knowingly wrong or where their instincts fail them. The kids are susceptible to the pressures of teasing, and maybe Mary envies the nice dresses of her wealthier coutnerparts, but there is never really any situation in which Mary and Laura don’t know what the right thing to do is nor much doubt about whether they will do it. Evil exists in the world of Little House, but it abates in force the closer it gets to the family. Even the cruelty of nature, such a powerful part of On the Banks of Plum Creek (which features a locust attack and a snow storm as scary as anything Jack London ever penned), feels more asserted than felt. Sure, the whole enterprise starts with a dangerous river crossing, but that is treated as an exceptional event rather than a daily does of “and this could easily kill you.”

Yes, Ken, fine, but what are you saying? Is the new series any good?

I think that mostly depends on what you bring to it and what you hope to get out of it. I would not subscribe to Netflix just to watch it, but if you already have the streaming service, it is entertaining fare, on par with Anne With an E or Heartland. It’s safe, and sweet, and virtuous, and if it all looks and feels a little too pretty, if the clothes are all a bit too neatly pressed and the hair and make-up a little too perfectly applied, there’s always fifty back seasons of Survivor to provide a reminder that living in the wilderness is not the romanticized adventure our collective memories and imaginations make it out to be. Winsome isn’t bad in small doses. I enjoyed the new Little House, but after six episodes I was ready for it to be over.

Perhaps the easiest of those features to articulate and exemplify is the memoir’s literary emphasis. The word “Lolita” is every bit as important to the title as the word “Tehran.” This memoir is not merely a chronicle of life in Iran after the Islamic revolution, although it is that. It is also a chronicle of a life devoted to literature and a test of the premise that literature can and does matter in some significant way, even in, especially in, places like Tehran. The memoir is structured around four books that Nafisi taught to her students when teaching, to a group of women (it feels dismissive to call them a book club) when she was not at the university in any offical capacity. The film keeps these divisions, but discussion of the books themselves is reduced to one or at the most two scenes, with the lessons in it drawn so broadly that they lose much of their power. Does The Great Gatsby celebrate the decadence of Western capitalism or critique it? Are the women in Pride and Prejudice as constrained by their patriarchal environments as the Iranian students are by their own? Do I even remember what the teacher or any of her students had to say about Daisy Miller or Lolita herself? The novels become shorthand signifiers for the big ideas the women are wrestling with, not deep wells of inisight or experience from which they (or we) learn.

These are not superficial questions; they are deep ones. But the film never really conveys the intoxicating intimacy and power of such sustained dialogues. A single debate over a novel’s theme is different than a weeks long series of debates, discussions, and contemplations. The contents of the novels, while raising timeless questions, is a context for shared relationships, shared lives.

From such interactions, intimate friendships are formed. But this is another place where the film pales in comparison to the memoir. The other women, besides Nafisi, are nearly indestinguishable. One of them has been tortured, and while the scene is horrific, it becomes a distinguishing event — something that happened to her — rather than something that we see as central to how she approaches life. Over a period of twenty years, Nafisi has many interactions, and the single greatest way the book is superior is that Nafisi the writer is able to give them voice, personality, and identity. They all blur into one another in the film. Erich Auerbach comments in the opening of Mimesis that the absence of change, the relative flatness of characters, is the biggest distinguishing feature between mimetic realism and epic stereotypes. Odysseus, despite all that has transpired between the end of the war and his nurse’s moment of discovery, is emotively, behaviorally, and psychologically the same as he ever was. Auerbach compares the representation of Odysseus to that of King David in the Old Testament. Both have extraordinary things happen to them; only one seems to carry the memory of those past experiences in his present affect.

Director Eran Riklis faces a challenge, of course, in that film is a visual medium and a group of people sitting around talking about books is not the most cinematic scenario to try to film. I get that; I really do. But that’s not to say it can’t be done at all. Films like A Man for All Seasons, Before Sunrise, or The Social Network are all dialogue-driven movies that are nevertheless riveting. But the fact that Riklis and Marjorie David are given screenplay credit suggests that Nafisi had little to no input on how the story was shaped or re-shaped cinematically. (Her writing credit says only “Based on the novel by….”) David’s previous writing credits are almost all for serial television, which might explain the tendency to contract big ideas into emblematic scenes in which the key idea is verbalized rather than demonstrated. I hasten to add, such a writing style is not inherently bad or inferior; it just does not serve this material well.

I still love the memoir. The film is not terrible, but I think it foregrounds what the book treats and background (the Iranian revolution and its broader societal impact), which pushes to the background what the book foregrounds (the ways in which the book dicussion group builds the relationships and helps the indvidual women process what is going on around them).

To call something a hagiography typically means one of two things: a profile presents the subject as without fault or blemish, and/or it does so in a tone of reverence. People who don’t share the exalted view of Oliver as a person or poet are not only wrong, they are blind, ignorant, unenlightened.

I should clarify, I guess, that I like Oliver’s poetry. If I didn’t, I would not have watched the documentary. It doesn’t transform me into a transparent eyeball or motivate me to sound my own barbaric yawp, but I am grateful for the reminder that everyone’s life, including my own, is wild and precious. What I am less a fan of is … fandom. Other people’s enthusiasm for a thing, be it poetry, music, a sports team, a movie, a book, a friend, rarely deepens or enhances one’s own. Oh, I’ve been to enough rock concerts and church services to acknowledge that the enthusiasm of a crowd can be infectious and can make it easier to participate in whatever celebration one is witnessing regardless of one’s own relationship to the thing(s) being celebrated.

Oliver was apparently a lesbian (or queer, if you prefer), a personal detail that I did not know and which at least one of the interviewees asserts often provokes suprise in her fans when they find out. Whether or how her sexuality influenced her life or poetry is less clear. John Waters, who worked at a book store run by Oliver’s partner, claims that Oliver in her partner were very much “out” but not public advocates for gay rights. Ada Limón goes so far as to reject the concept of “civic duty” (self-reflexively noting the irony of such a sentiment coming from a poet laureate). She, like most all the interviees, comes across as ready and willing to go to bat for Oliver against any potential personal or professional criticism.

Like everyone, I suppose, Oliver apparently liked some of the consequences of being elevated to celebrity status, especially the financial rewards, while disliking others. Like all thought work, writing can appear to be an easy discipline, especially if one doesn’t understand the time spent in contemplation and observation. In one scene, a woman crying at a public reading begs Oliver to read the poem “The Journey.” The poet graciously complies, though we do not get the reading itself at that moment or much reflection on whether such an interaction was normal or exceptional. Her readers adored her and she was, apparently, gracious with them. We do get readings from several poems, including “The Journey” elsewhere, but that particular scene, like too much of the film, is centered around people trying to articulate how much the poetry means to them, personally.

The closest the documentary gets to an insight comes in a claim (unsubstantiated, but it sounds reasonable) that Oliver is a favorite of people who don’t otherwise like or read poetry because her words spark emotional recognition among readers who have been ripped apart by life, who need and find comfort. Whether that assessment is accurate or not, I do not think it is the unreserved compliment it is offered as. The quality of accessiblity — being comprehensible and meaningful to the widest common denominator of people — is assuredly a reasonable metric by which to evaluate art. Is it the only one? The best one? Like so much of the documentary, the claims here are not so much false as casual and superficial.

I don’t dislike Mary Oliver nor any of the people who offered testimonials to her greatness. I just found those testimonials so effusive, so relentless, so of a piece, that after the first thirty minute I found myself pushing back against the tide of parise lest I drown in it.

The story itself is not without dramatic potential. Two brothers and a sister stage an intervention for their eldest sibling, an alcoholic who speaks to their absent, presumed dead, mother, which may or may not be a sign that he is entering dementia. Forty years earlier, the siblings’ mother abandoned them, charging the eldest (Kier) to care for his younger brothers and sister and admonishing the next eldest son (Ronan) to help his brother keep the family that she was leaving together. In the four decades that pass between the opening scene and the movie proper, one brother, Mickey, migrates from Boston to California to become a priest and the sister, Fiona, is surrendered to foster care. The adult Fiona participates in the intervention even though she hardly knows any of them and Kier is wracked by guilt at giving her up.

That summary hints at a writing problem. It is both sketchy and vast, saddling the present moment in the film with a lot of backstory that does very little other than explain how we got to the intervention. There is a real difference between backstory in stage drama and family history in real life. The former tends to be treated here as a mystery that explains a character’s motivations and actions. There is nothing wrong with the assumption that people are influenced in their behavior by things that happened to them long ago. But when those traumatic events or family narratives become the totalizing answer for every feature of a person’s identity, those characters get reduced to stereotypes. Ronan is the enabler. Mickey’s religion was and is an escape. There is no sense in the movie that these characters could have made different choices or might have developed and changed in their reasoning for and attitudes about those choices over forty years. It doesn’t help, either, that the Irish drunk is itself a stereotype, since the film leans into its Boston setting, ostensibly to provide some differentiation between this family and any other family dealing with abuse, abandonment, or addiciton.

One could argue that stereotypes, like all generalizations, are grounded in common experiences. There is some truth in that. All Saints Day hovers around the fringes of insight in the way it illustrates how our explanations, justifications, and rationalizations so easily become prisons of our own making.

That is another way of saying the material is not itself the problem, but the staging contributes to and accentuates its biggest weakness, which is that its too generalized, not specific enough. The film proper at no time feels like the culmination of a forty year story. It is more like a short story — focused on a single incident — with more and more backstory piled around the edges as a means of character explication. A stronger screenplay would, I think, tell us less and let us infer more. The arguments between the siblings sound too much like dramatic exposition and not enough like people operating under the influence of the traumas we are told they experienced.

How is that related to the screenplay’s original life as a stage play? It has been, admittedly, hundreds of years since play writers felt bound by Aristotle’s unities of time and place, but there is a stage tradition going back to the Greeks of narrating exposition and concentrating the play proper around dramatic action. I do not even claim that style and structure is inherently wrong, just that it may be wrong for this material, because the events depicted are not particularly dramatic in and of themselves. This may be why the screenplay keeps trying to wring emotion and drama from the past, offstage, setup. Were All Saints Day a novel — had I spent significant time with any of these characters — I probably would have found it easier to invest emotional energy in the outcome. But imagine attending an intervention for someone you hardly know — an acquaintance, a co-worker, a distant cousin. There would be solemnity prompted by the seriousness of what you were doing, but the emotions would be far more blunted. Even if the characters are fictional, it is far easier to generate some empathy and concern for characters you have spent a signficant amount of time with. I don’t mean this comparison to be catty, but the intervention for David Silver in Season 4 of 90210 is more dramatically effective than this one. And the reason is not because the things said to him on that soap opera by the characters who care for him are markedly different from what we hear in just about any dramatization of an ntervention, but because the stories told by those who love him are part of the viewers’ shared history with the character, not just summaries of things the character did offscreen.

If the screenplay is the weakest element of All Saints Day, it should be acknowledged that the acting, directing, and production values, keep the film from sinking entirely. Don Swayze (yes, he’s Patrick’s brother) is given some bombastic scenes (such as one of an early drunken fit where he screams at absent parents) yet manages to hold back enough to allow us to share his brothers’ hope that there is some part of his consciousness that is still reachable. Jeff Berg, Chad Doreck (listed as Döreck on his IMDB page), and Aly Trasher all appear to understand that with this much yelling going on, they need to find and lean into quiet moments lest the audience feel too assaulted by volume. Although the film was reported to have been shot digitally, the lighting and production values make it look more like commercial films than does a lot of indie fare shot on video, so kudos to director Matt Krinsky and cinematographer Sam Krueger. There is enough quality work on display here to make the critic long for some verdict in between “fresh” and “rotten.” It is hard for me to recommend a film that did not engage or entertain me, but I see enough artistry on display here that I would probably check out the cast’s and crew’s subsequent work.

Bailey Madison plays Leah, a woman old enough to have lost hope that the modern dating scene is anything other than a pointless wasteland of frustration and disappointment but young enough to not yet be reconciled to the idea of settling out of despair. When she threatens to tap out of the dating ring, her Aunt Gigi (Annie Potts) makes her a wager that if Leah goes on forty dates and doesn’t end up with a suitable partner, Gigi will pay her rent and student debt. Once the wager is underway, all that is left is to guess which of the forty will be the magical one. For the record, that will be Mason (Joel Courtney).

Roger Ebert is generally credited with the observation that the central problem of a modern romantic comedy is not how to get the lovers together but how to keep them apart. In an age and culture where most heterosexual characters have the freedom to love who they wish, it is increasingly difficult to make one or both potential matches oblivious to the chemistry and fit the audience needs to see in order to root for them to get together. Typically this is accomplished by making one or both of them idiotic, either refusing to recognize the qualities of the other or ignorant of some horrible deficiency in a current partner that makes them temporarily inaccessible for a new relationship.

It is to the credit of Sarah Howard’s screenplay that we get neither of these common tropes. Howard goes the Jane Austen route of bad first impressions (the original title of Pride and Prejudice). The key point for me, however, is that the fault lies a bit more on her side than his. She has a couple of relatively small misreads and judges him harshly even though the viewer can see that he is not the jerk she has him pegged as. Once she knows better, she is in the middle of her string of dates and just cares about quantity over quality. The sooner she can get to number forty, the sooner she can ditch the dating thing entirely and not have to waste her energy on a series of losers.

If the film breaks the genre mode a little by allowing Leah to be less than perfect, we forgive her because we certainly empathize with her feeling that the dating scene she is so anxious to ditch is a soul-crushing grind. But even in making dating systems, rather than any one date, the antagonist, the film still treads lightly. We get just enough of the other dates – guys too cheap to pay, too narcissistic to care, too eager to let her breathe, that we understand Leah’s desire for something more authentic. Too much of this would play well as satire but would risk turning into a commentary on men as opposed to one on dating. By letting Leah be a bit of a jerk to Mason, at least to start, the film suggests that some of the most annoying habits, by men or women, are not so much intrinsic to their gender as it is the eventual byproduct of putting yourself out there until there is not enough of you left to interest yourself, much less a stranger.

In most romcoms where the plot is generic or the characterization slight, it is typical to say that success rides on the “chemistry” between the potential lovers. Madison and Courtney are likable enough and capable of knowing what flirting looks like. I doubt the movie works if they aren’t young and hot, and I do get weary of the genre conceit of the most beautiful people in the world wishing they could find someone, anyone, who will love them for who they are. Imagine how hard it is for those of us who don’t look like models and Hollywood stars. Still, misery loves company, and hope springs eternal. At heart, the message of the movie is one I can endorse – dating can suck, but so does loneliness. And if you stop looking for what you want, you’ll never find it.
Oh, and the more people you are nice to, whether you think of them as potential mates or not, the more likely you are to have and recognize a connection when life does put someone compatible in front of your face.

I preface that to say, I hope respectfully, that the details of someone else’s addiciton and recovery are far less interesting, in my experience, to the rest of the world than they are to the addict himself (or herself). There are, of course, storytellers who are so good at their craft that they can make otherwise undramatic or unlikable people engaging. Lauren Greenfield does as much in The Queen of Versailles. There are also those instances where some iteration of a common experience is so exceptional that it warrants interest because of how it happened or who it happened to. In the sports analogy, the reason the details of Tiger Woods’s golf round are so much more dramatic than the details of my own have nothing to do with the intrinsic interest of the sport itself. Have their been interesting, dramatic, or engaging films about addicts? Yes. That doesn’t mean addicts as a general rule are particularly insightful about their addiction or the ways they present it to the world.

The synopsis for Màquina in the press notes begins, “When a father consusmed by acholism agrees to join his son on a journey through psychadelic-assisted addiction treatment in Colorado…” The documentary (and the rest of the press notes) is a bit more forthcoming that Pujol is seeking treatment for his own addiction and is joined by his father. But the way the opening of the synopsis suggests that the film is more about the father’s addiction (and his son’s response to it) feels more than just coincidental. Pujol calls the film a “personal reckoning” that is “rooted in my own experience” of a “father-son relationship shaped by generational trauma and substance abuse.” Only in the Q&A does he acknowledge his own addictions. When he talks about his own addiction struggles, they are always welded into a larger narrative of “family trauma” or contextualized by mitigating circumstances: he was “shooting a TV show that was eating away at my soul.”

I am not Pujol’s sponsor. Heck, I’ve never been to an AA or NA meeting. But I have read enough Al-Anon literature and been around enough addicts to know that one’s refusal to accept personal responsibility for one’s own addiciton should be a huge red flag when interacting with those in recovery. The addict rarely if ever comes out and directly blames another for his addiciton, but the lifelong habit, crusted over into a survival skill, of habitually deflecting blame should be familiar to those who have had to spend significant times with an addict, even one in the early, imperfect stages of recovery. The pattern of blaming others does not mean that the desire for recovery is insincere, but an unwillingness to confront it or call it out has, I am sure, slowed or derailed many a recovery journey.

If this were only Pujol’s story, it might be easier to marshal sympathy for the horrible nature of these experiences regardless of how he presents them. But the documentary struggles at precisely this point. Once Pujol makes the decision to make it as much about his father as himself, he turns the film, subtly but tellingly, into one that appears to be saying, “this is the reason for my addiction” rather than “this is my response to it” or “this is my attempt to overcome it.” He struggles to show his dad the same sort of empathy that the film calls on us to show him. In one exchange, son tells father, “You have a story for everything [….] You have an excuse for everything” and, most tellingly, “You want to get angry at others for pointing that out.” In the same section, but in a different exchange, the son tells his father, “It’s time to jump off the f—ing cliff or die.” It is a raw and real reaction, and it would have packed more weight if it had not carried the rider that is attached to so much of the film — how the father’s recovery efforts pale in comparison to those of his lecturing son. “I’ve suffered,” he wants his dad (and us) to know. Consequently, “I can’t be concerned with whether you drink or not.”

And so the cycle continues. There will be, no doubt should be, those who might read this and chastise me for asking the same question of Pujol that he so angrily flings at his father: why should I care about your suffering from an addiction rather than the suffering your addiction has caused others? It is not an unanswerable question, but it is one that the film is curiously uninterested in seriously engaging. Perhaps it is too much to expect of someone in the early stages of recovery to be able to focus on anything other than his sobriety or number of days clean. I found myself, more than once, wishing Pujol had made a documentary about how and why the television series he mentions in the press notes was “eating [a]way at my soul” and how that experience related to his bottoming out and deciding to seek treatment. IMDB says he filmed seven episodes of One on One with Kirk Cameron, and I could only imagine how interacting daily with that particular brand of Christianity might enhance rather than ameliorate the kind of existential despair that someone in a tailspin would be exepriencing.

In the end, however, we can only rate the film we have been given. I found Màquina tiresome, and while a part of me wishes I were more universally tolerant or patient with addicts (hell, with everyone), I found it impossible to give to Pujol what he couldn’t give to his father. I hope both their recoveries take. Who knows, maybe some day with time and maturity and reflection one or both of them will have something more engaging to say about the process than that it was painful and that the rest of the world is to blame for it.

1. Is it about Christians?
2. Is it made by Christians?
3. Is it made for Christians?

While these questions are broad enough and ambiguous enough to allow argument about particular titles, they are meant, at least when I use them, to be descriptive rather than pejorative. To say that Holy Irresistible is not a Christian film is to say nothing, at first, about its quality. It is worth saying, though, to help illustrate why it shares some of the problems that plague that genre even as it avoids most of that genre’s worst artistic offenses.

The loose plot premise — Ivy (Ian Gregg) is attracted to a Christian girl, Sadie (Leah Merritt) and so tries to pass as Christian to get close to her — is really just a variation on the standard romantic comedy trope of a relationship built on a big lie. One of the ways that this film pushes past the clichés of that romcom trope is by having both Sadie and her pastor father immediately see through Ivy’s imitation of surface-level Christian mannerisms and lingo. While the eschewal of the most common romcom variation of the so-called “idiot plot” is welcome and nudges the film toward moral seriousness, it also foregrounds a bigger problem that plagues most comedies for or about Christians: it’s not that funny.

I have mentioned elsewhere when discussing the intersection of Christianity and comedy that it is particularly challenging to write comedic treatments of religion not only because Christians are reluctant to laugh at themselves but also because they refuse to countenance others laughing at them. In literary historical terms, satire generally falls into one of two categories. The first, Horatian satire, is typically directed toward an audience of those who are also the subject of satire. It is meant to induce laughter through familiarity and reform through mild embarassment. The ideal response is something like “it’s true, we are like that and now that I see my/our behavior through another’s eyes I admit that it can be silly sometimes.” The second category, Juvenalian satire, is more caustic. The target is a group separate from the audience, and it is meant to induce scorn or ridicule. The desired response is something closer to “aren’t those people ridiculous — join me in laughing at them.”

Returning to my opening paragraph’s classifications, it is important to note that neither Ivy, the character, nor Pamela Corkey (the director), identify as Christian. Corkey describes herself (in the press notes) as a lifelong “devout atheist” who became aware through suffering of the “sacred in everything” and who identifies with her main character’s anger toward the “universe.” Since the film is not made by Christians exclusively nor about Christians exclusively, it isn’t really possible for it to be Horatian. If anything, the Horatian satire is directed towards Ivy’s atheist friend who is more militantly anti-Christian and who Ivy confronts when he perceives the friend is unable to distinguish between those who hurt him and those he is trying to punish for that hurt.

But neither does the film appear to have much interest in being Juvenalian. It feels like there is a fear of offending here, which is toxic to comedy. On either side of the tribal divide, sources of conflict are safely exemplified and carried out by surrogates rather than the main characters. Sadie and her dad both stand up to homophobic bigotry, (rightly) confronting hateful protesters with the gulf between their actions and the Bible’s teaching. Ivy stands up for Sadie and her dad to his friend, meaning neither of the main characters has to grow, examine themselves, or wrestle with tough questions about their own conduct. Holy Irresistible bends over backwards making sure that neither the main Christians nor the main atheist are hypocrites, and in doing so pushes any real-life disagreements or grievances to the periphery. It’s a “can’t we all get along?” treatment of religious tribal wars. There is, of course, a guest Pastor who is more virulently homophobic — hmmm, I wonder if he is a closeted, self-hating homosexual himself?

I am Christian, so I am perhaps not the best audience to critique the film’s treatment of atheists or skeptics. (Aside, I don’t capitalize “atheist” here because Corkey does not do so in her director’s statement.) The screenplay leans very hard into the psychoanaltyic explanation for atheism, claiming that the atheist is more often than not one who is angry with God rather than one who sincerely disbelieves in His existence. That the film relies on this characterization so much made me wonder if screenplay might have been written from a Christian’s perspective. (The early references to Dostoevsky also fueled that interpretation as I know more Christians who see The Brothers Karamazov as illustrative of their doubts than atheists who see in it an explanation for their belief system.) With a screenplay that appears to have a Christian perspective on atheism and direction that admittedly has an atheistic/skeptical perspective on Christianity, the film ends up lacking a consistent point of view that would serve it’s non-comedic themes or allow it to move from superficial comedy to something more dramatically and thematically meaningful.

It’s not that the militant atheist who is fueled by his own anger at God (or “nature” or “the universe”) doesn’t exist. I once met a very vocal professed atheist who admitted to me in a quiet moment that he was really just pissed at Christians because the mom of a girl he liked would not give her permission to date him. But, especially in Christian movies, it’s such an overused, tired, stereotype that I would be hard pressed to blame any atheist for gritting his teeth at it wherever it pops up. That problem is compounded here because Ivy’s rejection of God never registers as much heat as its root cause might allow. I want to be clear and honest here. The opening two minutes are pretty strong precisely because they are dark. A Christian driver singing a praise song is intercut with a child obliviously riding a toy bicycle in the street. The editing here conveys standard foreshadowing, and the horrific nature of the potential consequences gives the scene very real tension. (Alfred Hitchcock once opined that more terror was conveyed by knowing what you think it going to happen than by being surprised.) Was the film really going to go there?

It seemed daring to offer up a Christian who would not just be the target of an atheist’s misplaced, prejudiced, anger, but actually at fault for a very real injury or death, even if the that outcome was not intended. Were the scene to play out the way the editing suggested it would, one could easily understand why grieving parents would harbor rage not just at God but at Christians who claim to represent Him yet also claim to be oblivious to the ways their actions hurt others. As bad as the outcome that we get in the movie is — the boy on the bike ends up witnessing his parent’s death rather than being hit himself — the film still softens it by not showing us the key moment that understandably traumatized him in his young life. More importantly, having Ivy displace his anger from the driver to God feels too abstract to be credible, elides years of Ivy’s suffering from the consequences (we are mostly told the impact it had on him rather than shown it), and lets the driver off the hook. “Acts of God” is a euphemism for activities (such as accidents) which we think are random or for which we cannot reasonably lay blame on any indvidual. Ivy blaming God would make more sense if the opening wreck were truly an unavoidable accident caused by mechanical failure, happenstance, weather, or whatever. The film seems a bit too timid here. Perhaps it is afraid of letting us see too much of the actual pain caused by the Christian characters lest we share any of the atheist’s resentment toward the God who allegedly favors them.

As an aside, I would say I see the same problem in the treatment of Ivy’s gay friend. We are told — and can easily believe — how much he has been hurt by Christian homophobia, but Christian anti-gay bias gets abstracted to namelesss crowds of shouting bigots with hostile signs or the straw man caricature of Pastor Haggass. The film rarely invites us to empathize with those who suffer (be they Christian or atheist) by calling on us to witness their suffering. That’s even true of Ivy’s “terminally ill” aunt, Rad (Lea DeLaria) whose suffering is implied through props (artificial oxygen, wigs or bandanas connoting the loss of hair) but never really shown to us. One could argue, I guess, that she is putting on a brave face for those she loves or that she doesn’t want to be pitied as a victim (who the hell does?), but even in scenes where she is alone, I never sense any real pain behind the bravura.

None of these observations are meant to convey that Holy Irresistible is awful. I mostly think its reach exceeds its grasp, which is, in its own way, admirable. The actors all do the most with what they are given. I thought Merritt stood out in particular, making Sadie something more or other than the stereotypical pastor’s daughter. She is neither the repressed rebellious teen acting out against her restrictive environment (Footloose) nor the pure emblem of virtue that has no real inner life of her own (Cruel Intentions, Valmont, etc.). Sadie was actually a much more interesting character than Ivy, and her character’s treatment made me wonder if Holy Irresistible might work as a double feature with Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl. Both films are directed by females who profess to bring an outsider’s eye to films about Christian communities. Perhaps because The Starling Girl has a female protagonist it does a better job at showing the trauma characters experience at the hands of Christians being fueled by systemic issues (most notably patriarchy) that pervade their subculture rather than always and only being the product of a few bad apples or over-the-top hypocrites.

Ultimately, though, while it was easy enough to find elements to praise here and there, I have to admit that film seemed to care so much about not demonizing any of its subjects that it ended up playing it too safe. The biggest descriptor in the press release that I take issue with is “edgy.” To me, that adjective describes films like Monty Python’s The Life of Brian or South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, works that straddled the line between offensive and hilarious, only managing to get away with the most scandalous parts because they were so damn funny. At its best, Holy Irresistible‘s depiction of Christians attempts to channel early seasons of The Simpsons, but it’s closer to the show’s representation of Reverend Lovejoy than its depiction of Ned Flanders. It elicited a few weak smiles, particularly when Ivy receives a cheat sheet of Christian catch phrases and what they meant, but no real laughs. As social satire, its arrows were too scattershot to land much, and when they did, their tips too blunted to ever sting.

I spent most of my post-screening contemplation trying to decide if that lack of belief stemmed from writing issues or acting issues. Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz — in what I thought were more difficult roles — struck me as playing actual characters. They did not always say what I expected, but the actors found a way to deliver the lines that made me accept that a character might say what they were saying. Seth Rogen, on the other hand, felt to me like an actor I was familiar with delivering lines. Olivia Wilde was more convincing in spots than Rogen, particularly once the other couple arrived, but her character still occasionally said and did things because the plot needed her to say and do them and not because I think someone like that character would act that way.

Then again, I have never been in the situation these characters were in — that of being invited to participate in group sex. If I were in such a situation, my responses would be predicated on different backgrounds, values, and experiences than those of these characters. So I am not entirely sure where the assumptions about believability come from. The Invite is a comedy-drama hybrid, and some comedy is built on exaggeration, even farce. As a result, I am not even sure if I am supposed to find all of their responses believable.

The above probably would have been less of an issue if The Invite picked one lane (sex comedy or marital relationship drama) and stayed with it. But that blending of genres is what makes the film interesting. If all one wants to see is the final stages of an embittered marriage, one can watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or a Marriage Story. If one wants to see an unhappy person deal with the awkwardness of sexual attraction or availability one can rent just about any Woody Allen flick.

All that makes it sound as though I was down on the film, but I really wasn’t. I laughed fairly consistently at the middle part (the increasingly flustered responses of the protagonists as they are confronted with something outside their comfort zone), and I felt some emotion at the last act (the same couple being forced to interrogate what has led them to the point that they want the non-monogamous sexual experience). It all works…sort of. But neither the humor nor the pathos lands with the emotional impact that they would if these characters were even just a little more nuanced. Stripped of the comedy elements, the film is about as deep as an Esther Perel TED talk. Taboo subjects are broached, and there is some leaning into the awkwardness prompted by taboos, but the taboos themselves are never really explored beyond the preliminary (and obvious) admissions that is difficult to enjoy sex if you don’t like your partner and aren’t enjoying your life.

Also on the positive side, I noted a lot of small touches that one sees from confident directors, writers, or performers. I sensed that there was something going on with Wilde’s mise-en-scène, making The Invite one of those films that I honestly wished I could watch again more carefully before having to file a review. The use of editing and camera proxemics struck me as purposeful,particularly in conveying Angela’s (Wilde’s character) emotional isolation. I liked the way in which rote interactions revealed small things about characters without them always having to be verbalized. For example, even though Hawk (Norton) and Piña (Cruz) are visitors, Hawk ignores Joe’s prohibition against playing a certain record, making Joe actively rather than only just verbally, stop him. That character trait is repeated when Angela says the bedroom is not part of an apartment tour and Hawk walks right in anyway. Are these tests to see if denials of consent are rhetorical habits or sincere laying out of boundaries? Is Hawk pushing boundaries deliberately to test their limits or is he correctly intepreting half-hearted protestations as formulaic?

Other small details, though, seemed pointed enough to imply they were meaningful without really providing enough clues as to why they might be so. Why do we get one (and only one) scene outside the apartment? Is this meant to singnal that Joe is the proagonist? To give us external verification of some aspect of his personality? Is it important that Angela and Joe have a daughter even though she is never seen and rarely mentioned except to explain why she is not home?

The end of The Invite is painful with glimmers of hope, which is probably the most honest and believable part of it. It is tempting to say that the evening brought the marital issues to a head, but really it just forced them to address things that were already at a head but that Joe and Angela had been simply choosing to live with rather than to name bluntly. Or…rather…there are moments early in the film where some of the relational dynamics are addressed bluntly, but they are done so in the form of accusations and barbs that are never replied to. Their relationship is like a tennis match of all serves and no volleys. Is it credible to think that one speech from a relative stranger would be enough to get them both to say aloud what are the plain implications of their conduct? Is it plausible or possible that these characters could and would take such a painful infleciton point as the first step in a hard journey of rediscovery? Like so many of the questions The Invite made me ask, I am not sure how to answer. There is a lot of talent on display here, but its in service of a screenplay that thinks it is edgier than I thought it was and one that is ultimately less profound than some of the best episodes of In Treatment.

My uneasiness on a first viewing is that this exchange seemed to pointedly take the focus away from Margaret and make the story as much Barbara’s as hers. There was an important point conveyed here (more on that in a second) but that point struck me as anachronistic in a film that was otherwise striving for 1970s period detail. In the book, Chapter One begins after the move, so we get only Margaret’s characterization of the move rather than watching it play out. And eleven year-olds are not always reliable narrators.

That last point is important because in the book Margaret characterizes her understanding of the reasons for the move as for mom’s pleasure/convenience, even if they are at her child’s (and husband’s) expense. New Jersey is better becasuse dad “could commte to his job in Manhattan.” Since when is a commute a plus? It is better because Margaret “could go to public school” even though she doesn’t want to. Finally, though, it is a place where mom “could have all the grass, trees and flowers she ever wanted.” Margaret, the narrator adds, “I never knew she wanted that stuff in the first place.”

In other words, in the opening chapter Margaret implies that they are moving for mom — that she and dad are sacrificing their own desires for something that Barbara wants. Kelly Fremon Craig, who also wrote the screenplay, implies that mom is herself ambivalent about the move, highlighting as positives things she may not want “in the first place”in order to model for her daughter the positive attitude required of most women in patriarchal socieities. I don’t have an issue with this interpretation; it strikes me as almost certainly correct. But I think it is significant that Blume has Margaret — at least in the first chapter — fail to see it that way.

One might argue that since the novel is a bildungsroman, Margaret only comes to understand her mother’s (and her own) place in the patriarchy upon maturity. But Margaret, even at the end of the novel, appears to still be stuck in a blaming mode. In her report about religion to her teacher, Margaret says that “if I should ever have children I will tell them what religion they are so they can start learning about it at an early age.” She adds, “Twelve is very late to learn.” Allowing Margaret to choose her own religion, like allowing her to go to public school, is perceived by her (and perhaps by most readers) as something she is told is for her benefit but which is actually for her parents’ benefit — they don’t have to face the discomfort of making a contentious decision.

If such a reading feels unduly harsh towards Barbara, I don’t disagree. The adult Blume may very well see as clearly as the adult Craig does that Barbara has so normalized and internalized the patriarchal expectations of her society that she she is forever taking the blame for things not her fault. Some as yet uneradicated part of her self, can’t bring herself to justify things to her daughter by saying, “Because that’s just the way things are.” Beyond that, though, Blume is brave enough as a writer to remain committed to Margaret’s 11-12 year-old consciousness, even if doing so risks never making manifest through epiphany what is still there in a dozen latent details: Margaret’s negative feelings for her mom, while neither fair nor accurately directed, are the product of something more than just adolescent brattiness.

I would argue that Craig’s screenplay is not wrong (at least not entirely) to suggest this is a painful story about how systems, be they systems of thought or behavior, get passed from one genration to the next. A consistent motif in Margaret’s prayers, in the whole book for that matter, is unfairness and unworthiness. The holidays become a stress specific to Margaret because she has to choose between Christmas and Hannukah, leaving her unable to enjoy either. (And exemplifying how religious systems in general, not just one specific system, make her life harder.) Margaret prays for God to “let” her get a good grade on a test so that He can be proud of her. Her antipathy towards rules is perhaps best exemplified when she is asked to join Nancy’s secret club and cannot think of a single rule to add to the charter. Margaret is frozen in part because she does not want to disappoint anyone. But to make no decision that would disappoint another is to have no desire of your own. And that sounds an awful lot like the same complementarian bullshit that leads her mom to make the best of the move rather than to answer Margaret’s questions honestly. To be female in this world is to prioritize others’ potential disappointments over your own wishes or even needs.

Where Craig’s screenplay is a bit harder to defend as an adaptation is in the parts where Barbara steps out of the periphery of Margaret’s consciousness and becomes the focal point of our attention. She paints a bird. She says “no” to a PTA assignment. We see her write the Christmas card that brings her parents back into her family’s life. Her husband, Herb (Benny Safdie) is a bit more supportive in the movie. In the book he “hollers” at her when he finds out she has send them a card. He “shakes” their letter at his wife and asks her how they got the address, implying that either by his edict or by mutual agreement, she was forbidden to write to have contact with them. (Bonus points if you see the rhetorical absurdity of linking “mutual agreement” and “forbidden” in the same sentence.) In the book, he casually invokes centuries-old antisemetic cruelties, claiming that her parents want to check Margaret to see if she has “horns.” The film does include the detail of Herb having Playboy magazines in the house, which Maragret knows about, and which contribute to her self-consciousness about her own preubescent body. The film portrays this as a one-off mention, allowing all the girl’s club to look at the magazine. It even mediates some of the potential blame by having Nancy insist that Maragret get it and bring it to them to show, making her the proximate cause and Herb only the remote cause of whatever impact such material has on his daughter’s (much less his wife’s) self-esteem. Craig portrays Herb and Barbara as an affectionate couple. The book, in other words, is a bit rawer and a bit blunter in the way it depicts cracks in this relationship. Those cracks, in turn, contextualize Barbara’s capitulations to patriarchy — could she be making the best of an impossible situation? By contrast, Barbara in the film comes across as lacking in self-esteem without any fair attempts to answer what the root causes of that lack might be. The only thing standing in between her and self-actualizaiton is the will to say “no.”

Small but material changes from the book bothered me on a first viewing. What a revisit clarified is that that the film works as an update of the material more than as an exact representation of it. It would be admittedly hard to limit a film to Margaret’s consciousness, and doing so might make it less accessible. The book is written for adolescents. The film, perhaps by necessity, needs to make room for the adults that the adolescents who read the book grew into. Works like Jane Austen’s Emma or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are able to provide an adult’s perspective on their childhood, and they are all the more poignant for the authors’ admissions that children, while poignantly aware of their own victimizations, can be naive about the ways in which they inflict pain on others. These books are about female childhood but with adult narrators. To Kill a Mockingbird and Ridley Walker have child narrators, but they are books about plot rather than character. Margaret, at least in the novel, is more akin to Holden Caulfield or Huck Finn; they are adolescents narrating about themselves, with authors skillful enough to trust the audience to see those things it might be unrealistic to expect a true child to recognize. In Holden’s case, his own mental illness. In Huck’s case, his unspeakable cruelty to Jim. In Margaret’s case, the disproportionate blame she places on her mother for the situations in which Barbara has the least power to address and alleviate.

A film that was singularly focused on Margaret could have engendered greater recognition from adolescents, but if the modern adolescent is more self-aware about patriarchy — and I expect she is — it could just as easily have had an opposite effect, leading contemporary feminists to blame Margaret for the sin of having been eleven in the 1970s when kids, girls especially, were not taught to advocate for themselves or speak out about feminist issues. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is about a girl who can’t wait to be a woman. She prays to get her first period. She practices using pantiliners. And she pleads with mom to let her wear a bra. In perhaps the film’s best moment of capturing the timelessness of its themes, Margaret, after finally getting fitted for a bra, admits that she immediately wanted nothing more than to take it off. “Welcome to womanhood,” Barbara says wryly. This exchange is also Craig’s, not Blume’s. In the book, mom asks if Margaret likes the bra and her daughter replies, “I guess.” Like so much of the book, what passes between mother and daughter is unspoken. Margaret’s embarassment is so palpable, her descriptions of her mother’s care tend to fly under the radar. If book mom is less self-aware than movie mom, she is nevertheless present, far more careful about her daughter’s frail emotions than I remembered from my own childhood readings.

Adolescent readings, like all adolescent experiences, can be emotionally powerful. But they are not nuanced, and they are often powerful precisely because they lack complexity. By making Blume’s novel more intergenerational, Craig might be guilty of shining a spotlight on what Blume leaves lurking unobtrusively in the shadow, the ways in which Margaret’s traumas (micro and macro) are so broadly relatable because the forces that contribute to her shame, pain, and anger are so ubitquitous. What is so powerfully instructive, finally, about the film,is not that it felt forced to update the material in some small ways but that so much of it could be transcribed from pages fifty years-old with little to no change.

You’ve come a long a way, baby.

This film was voted onto The Arts & Faith Top 25 Spiritually Significant Films Directed by Women — #25.

Even before I bought the Arts & Faith domain from Image Journal in 2018, there was consistent chatter at the site (which was then a message board of the kind that replaced e-mail listervers in popularity in the late ’90s and early ’00s) about how much of the conversation was dominated by men. The first Top 100 produced after I bought the site, published in 2020, had only about eight films directed (or co-directed) by women, and that was only after jurors voted to limit the list to one film per director in order to encourage greater diversity. We discussed doing a Top 25 list (or even an alternate Top 100) devoted to films directed by women but decided instead to see if a concerted effort to be more inclusive would show progress in the next election cycle, culminating in the 2025 Top 100.

It didn’t.

Much of that history was summarized six years ago when I wrote the post “Crawling Towards Diversity” for The Porch. As new members joined the community and my colleague Lindsey Dunn offered to act as project leader for 2026 Top 25 list, consensus built that it was time for the community to spotlight the contributions of women to the canon of film titles we indvidually and corporately found “spiritually signifcant.” The project culminated in the release of this list in June 2026:

Auteur Theory

“Spiritually Significant” has always been a slippery term, and the addition of a genre or theme focus to Top 25 lists has served to heighten my own awareness about how much and how often we use labels to gloss over differences of style, approach, and rhetorical effect. When we did move musicals, I figured we would not have to argue about what qualified as a musical, but we ended up discussing concert films, filmed depictions of stage plays, and films that used soundtracks to tell a story. Discussions of documentaries forced me to consider where a line might be between documenting and recreating. Themes like Crime and Punishment forced me to question who gets to define what is a crime.

On the surface, Films Directed by Women seemed to be clear cut as a theme, even if it did necessitate some heat checks regarding the inclusion of non-binary or transgender directors. What surprised me about my own deliberations was how much the category brought to the surface long-held reservations about auteur theory in general. The notion that the director is the primary dirving force, the “author” of the film, has never been without skeptics, even if it has been widely embraced in my lifetime. The very act of limiting lists to one film per director carries with it an endorsement of an auteurist classification system. I liked the idea of giving attention to female-centered films, but…it felt off to me to think of Tim Robbins as the “auteur” of Dead Man Walking or that Gabriel Axel had more to do with the spiriual significance of Babette’s Feast than did Karen Blixen.

But as the list came together, I also wondered if the problematic and eclectic nature of auteur theory might be film’s way of marginalizing the contributions of women in the same way genre divisions so long kept down female novelists. Sarah Orne Jewett wrote “regional” fiction; Mark Twain was somehow exempt from the associations that accompanied being relegated to that lesser genre even though his dialect and description is as central as Jewett’s. Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, or, yes, Judy Blume, all saw their accomplishments undercut by saying they wrote juvenalia. Try dismissing C.S. Lewis or A.A. Milne that way and see how far you get.

The counterpart to the auteur is the studio director, which may account for some of the recency bias of this list. Even in the nominations we saw big holes of representation for titles between 1950-1990, perhaps because fewer women were able to achieve the kind of professional, studio success that allowed them to call their own shots or shepherd their own projects. Catherine Hardwicke points out in Miss Representation that she was only tapped to direct Twilight because it was a low budget genre film nobody expected to make oodles of money. When it was successful, when the franchise became valuable in a commercial sense, the reins for sequels were handed over to men. Those scrambling to make a name or a living in the profession are seldom given can’t miss projects with award-winning aspirations. There were nominations for this list of films by Ida Lupino, Amy Heckerling, Penny Marshall, and Martha Coolidge, but more often than not, those working within a (studio) system can’t always get the same recognition as those who finally knock down some of the doors their predecessors were banging on.

It would be a mistake, however, to think the Top 25 list simply echoed the court of public opinion. Conspicuosuly absent are films from notable auteurs Chantal Akernman, Claire Denis, Kathryn Bigelow, Gillian Armstrong, Kelly Riechardt, and Joan Campion, to name just a few. While I am allergic to being contrarian for contrarian sake, I actually came to believe that these absences were less a scandal than an opportunity to celebrate. I wondered before this project — I wonder still — how many casual filmgoers could name twenty-five different female directors and how long it would take for them to do so. Tokenism is real thing in canon-making, and the diversity of this list pleases me far more than would a carbon copy of titles that had already appeared in the Top 100, even if the absence of Bright Star, The Queen of Versailles, An Education, and Outrage sting.

A Different Way of Looking

We live in culturally — and spiritually — divided times. Lists such as this one — and the beauty and insight of the films on it — can be vandalized by thoughtless or careless stereotypes about what women artists depict. For me, the beauty of this list lies in its diversity. There are films with narratives that revolve around men. There are films with narratives that revolve around women. There are stories about the young and the old. Intimate portraits are made of relationshiops between daughters and fathers and daughters and mothers. We see adult women wrestling with how to relate to their partners, their allies, their lovers, their friends, and their oppressors. Perhaps what ties these films together for me is less a shared subject matter than a deep curiosity about the world that can be found in all sexes but, if I am honest, feels like it is practiced more consistently by women. The actress Geena Davis, again in Miss Representation, responded to the Hollywood assumption that men will not go see films about women, by reflecting on how deeply strange it was to her that one half of the world could profess little to no interest in the other half. It takes a moral sensibility and exercised imagination to put oneself in the shoes of another, the act from which almost all spiritual growth, emotional maturity, and moral courage blossoms from tiny seeds to mighty, maejstic oaks. Film is, metaphorically, the forest of enchantment through which I have wandered most of my adult life. Here are some of the trees in that forest that I have too often rushed by in my hurry to return to a favorite haunt. Climb them, look at them, marvel at their towering strength or willowy grace. Carve your lover’s initials in them as you remember time spent together in their shadow. Some of them have been in that forest waiting patiently for you since the day you were born. Do not take them for granted, and never forget to give thanks to the ones who planted them.