It started with a bestselling book: "Heaven Is for Real" (2010), the account of Colton Burpo's near-death experience, during which the four-year-old allegedly briefly visited heaven before being wrenched back to life through the miracle of modern medical science. The topic is very big-hearted in many respects, and the film attempts to follow suit. There is a lot to be said about trying to make a sincere film these days — though it does depend on the topic. In any case, it requires a certain amount of courage (or perhaps ignorance) to produce, as director Randall Wallace has, the cinematic equivalent of a Christian rock song.
"Heaven is for Real," both entices and repulses viewers in a similar fashion. On one hand, it is a well-produced and aesthetically sound movie. There are beautiful shots of the Midwestern countryside where aerial panoramas capture crop fields in all their grandeur. Vivid gold stalks sway beneath enormous skylines, while clouds pass by casting serene, mile-long shadows. And, really, these sights are lovely in a banal sort of way. Then the movie happens.
Anybody who has seen the trailer for "Heaven is for Real" can see why this film might be slightly sickening. The trailer is a concentrated dose of everything rotten about this film. It's a breakdown of all the scenes in which Colton (Connor Curum), innocently iterates facts about relatives he couldn't have possibly met or mentions seeing things as they were occurring during his surgery — extrasensory knowledge he chalks up to one event: going to heaven. Delivered together, these assertions pile up into a cringe-inducing tableau that is simultaneously casual and forthright in the tackiest way possible. Worst of all, these moments are out of place in a film that is — surprisingly — halfway decent without them.
These bright-eyed comments about heaven are couched within a story about a Midwestern family going through tough times. The buildup to the big event (Colton's near-death experience and subsequent visit to heaven) is part of a narrative that moves organically from scene to scene.
Greg Kinnear plays Todd Burpo, a pastor and jack-of-all-trades, whose only flaw is his unbridled generosity, which is slowly burying his family in debt.
When his son nearly dies and starts talking about his trip to heaven, Todd becomes obsessed with reevaluating his faith and the idea of heaven itself. This revelation has unpleasant consequences for Todd. People ostracize the family, his church begins to doubt whether he's qualified to preach and a visit to a therapist turns into an unpleasant encounter with a cold, secular buzzkill.
Surprisingly, the beginning of the movie doesn't even feature the Burpo family. It starts in Lithuania, where a young girl with the calm visage of a serial killer is painting a single eye in the middle of a canvas, and ends by showing the same girl finishing a portrait of Jesus she has painted from a vision. When Colton sees the portrait online, he confirms with groan-inducing aplomb, "Yep, that's him."
Such trite scenes are intercut with surprisingly deft comedy and even a bit of compelling drama. The first 30 minutes of the film don't even mention the movie's lofty claim about heaven's existence, and if you walked into the movie knowing nothing about it you'd think you were simply watching the plight of small town America and the nuclear family play out on screen. Unfortunately, nothing can make up for contrived shots of Colton gazing sweetly into the distance where there are birdhouses coincidently shaped like a crucifixes.
Overall, "Heaven is for Real" is bland, sugarcoated dogma with high artistic production value. By attempting to logically confirm heaven's existence, it compromises Christianity's grounding in faith and sends a one-dimensional message that the film tries to pass off as complex. It's not hard to see why this movie, which proselytizes in all the cheesiest ways and tries to affirm the literal existence of heaven, still reeks of religious propaganda.
