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A $17 million opening weekend is chump change in the Marvelverse, but it’s big bucks for an unheralded movie with a budget under half that amount. Even Variety seemed caught off guard when I Can Only Imagine was outdone in this weekend’s ticket sales only by Black Panther and Tomb Raider, with a per-screen average much higher than either Wakanda’s ongoing bid to monopolize America’s moviegoing attention forever or Lara Croft’s return to the multiplex hunger games.
If you’re tempted to mutter that Christianity is the ultimate presold superhero franchise, ask yourselves the last time a movie aimed straight at America’s evangelicals has significantly dented Playboy’s consciousness. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is the obvious answer, but that was 14 years ago. Besides, Gibson’s celebrity—not to say, attention-grabbing megalomania—guaranteed that The Passion of the Mel would be a polarizing big deal nationwide. At least outside the Bible Belt, where its protagonist is a beloved superstar, I Can Only Imagine had no such surefire box-office traction. (For a faith-based film with an opening weekend as strong as Imagine‘s, one needs to go back to 2014’s Heaven Is for Real, which pulled in $22 million.)
Imagine is the story of how MercyMe frontman Bart Millard—played well by Brody Rose in childhood, and even better by J. Michael Finley as an adult—came to write the title song, which ended up as the most-played contemporary Christian single of all time. If you’ve never heard of them, him or it, thank or blame our current cultural divide. A friend of ours who’s spent 30 years in the music business had never heard of them/him/it either, even though keeping tabs on radio hits is her specialty. “I Can Only Imagine” was a ginormous one, but off her secular radar.
What the movie’s about is how Millard got inspired to write the damn–sorry, darn–thing. His dad (Dennis Quaid, who comes on like a baseball bat with stubble until Finley finally clobbers him with a real one) was an abusive jagoff who finally found Jesus, inspiring their reconciliation in later life. Up to then, Millard had been just another bohunk on the regional concert circuit, with “worship” songs included in his repertoire mainly, at least so far as we can tell, to vary his band’s secondhand sound. Then Dad kicked the bucket, Millard started scribbling a lyric about being left agape at the Pearly Gates, and presto: triple platinum, an achievement the movie’s end cards treat as the equivalent of beatification.
Squaring the Sermon on the Mount with the venom of Donald J. Trump’s presidency on a daily basis must be pure hell for any sincere Christian.
Believe it or not, though, I Can Only Imagine isn’t nearly as bad as that description might make you callous hipsters guess. A lot of the time, it’s just a standard, not too ramshackle, reasonably winning music biopic, made interesting mostly by the relative novelty of the milieu. As inspirational tales go, the movie’s version of how Millard came to write his Big Song isn’t awfully different in tone or method from the kind of sports flick that climaxes with an underdog winning the Big Game, and it may not be totally irrelevant that Millard only turned to music after a football injury ended his chances of becoming a gridiron star to please surly old Dad. Since moviegoers are suckers for this brand of uplift in all sorts of other, less explicitly religious–but equally sappy—contexts, why should fundamentalist Christians be deprived of its charms?
Oddly enough, because the movie wasn’t intended to attract a crossover audience–although it may get one anyway–it’s even less preachy than you’d expect. I Can Only Imagine’s target demographic is already intimately (or do we mean wearily?) familiar with God, Jesus, Scripture and the push-pull of sin and redemption as features of everyday life, so the filmmakers–who are similarly minded—don’t need to explain a whole lot. They can take faith as a given, and/or treat it as a shared language, instead. As a result, any secular humanist marooned in the theater is likely to feel the same fish-out-of-water isolation Mike Pence would in a gay bar.
If it’s fun to think that Pence might emerge a more tolerant and less panicked man than he was when he went in, the same equation holds true on the other side of the cultural divide. One unexpected attraction of I Can Only Imagine is that it isn’t hostile to nonbelievers; at that level, it’s the anti-Passion of the Christ, a movie designed to foment and inflame division. That’s simply because nonbelievers don’t exist in this movie’s world, even (or especially) as snooty villains. Thanks to that presumably deliberate omission, it’s a surprising and even touching pleasure to see fundamentalist Christians the way they see themselves, and hopefully even behave among themselves–like decent, flawed, confused but humane folk, animated by love rather than spite or bigotry.
If you ask us, one explanation for the movie’s unexpected success could be that even right-wing evangelicals are itching by now to embrace a movie that reminds them they’ve got kindly and appealing values–like a belief in forgiveness, for instance–and not just acrimoniously MAGA-hatted ones. Its adrenaline highs aside, squaring the Sermon on the Mount with the venom of Donald J. Trump’s presidency on a daily basis must be pure hell for any sincere Christian, turning a couple of hours with Bart Millard into a soothing reprieve from all that Fox News sound and fury. (Fellow faith-based film Paul, Apostle of Christ will also help test that theory when it joins the box-office fray on Friday.)
Of course, the benign mood would go right out of the window if I Can Only Imagine introduced, say, a single LGBT rep, or an illegal immigrant, or a pro-choice activist, or even a token Jew. (There must be some in Nashville’s music scene.) But only one African-American character appears onscreen, and she’s the beaming teacher who cajoles Bart into singing in public for the first time–only to vanish from the storyline, not even rating a thank-you shout-out at the end.
She’s a welcome sight just the same. Still, it probably goes without saying that the movie fudges on any number of details we snotty secular humanists might be curious about, even if the target audience won’t give two hoots. For instance, the real Bart Millard had a football-playing older brother who might have divided Dad’s wrath, but he’s omitted from the script to simplify both the father-son conflict and its joyous resolution. More insipidly, we’re asked to believe that Millard never so much as eyed another woman on the road once he and his childhood sweetheart (played by Taegen Burns and then Madeline Carroll) were temporarily estranged. One sexless peck on the cheek is all the action he gets between sixth grade and their wedding day. In a movie about redemption, does it make sense for the hero to be so inhumanly sinless–not even tempted to stray?
That kind of evasiveness makes the screen Bart a nearly impossible character to sell convincingly, which is one reason Finley’s hugely likable performance is the movie’s–gee, what’s the right word?—salvation. I Can Only Imagine is his first acting job, and let’s hope enough intrigued bizzers see it that it won’t be his last. He’s totally unpretentious and amazingly good.
On the other hand, we have to confess to a deep wish that we’ll never have to hear Millard’s Big Song again, even though we undoubtedly will. Right, “I Can Only Imagine” is the biggest Christian hit ever; right, it’s why the movie exists. And its utter awfulness is not to be believed–which is the perfect payoff, in a way. Call us cynics, but we always knew there was a reason we were better off being able to hum “Amazing Grace” and leaving it at that.