She’s a young person, with credits dating back only to 1998, whereas Miss Clara is at least in her seventies. Abercrombie’s performance is thrilling, and is all the more impressive for its theatrical artifice. It’s as if the movie’s director, Alex Kendrick, an ordained minister who formerly practiced, had filmed most of the movie in the dusty black and white of the Kansas scenes in “The Wizard of Oz,” and brought it to glorious Technicolor when Miss Clara is onscreen-or even when she’s merely heard in voice-over. Ultimately, Tony’s finances will take a downturn he’ll learn a little humility and a little compassion, join Elizabeth in Bible study and fervent prayer, and both of them will become more devoted parents and hands-on companions to Danielle. Elizabeth and Tony spend a lot of time and energy on their work and, apparently, little of it on Danielle, whom they adore but-in the terms set within the movie-neglect (they don’t attend her double-Dutch events or know anything about her team).Įlizabeth and Tony are driven to succeed, but they pursue success-money, security, praise-as an end in itself they live passionless lives, and the main subject of the couple’s marital discord is her desire to provide financial help to her sister, whose husband is unemployed. They’re encased in a sanitized suburban wasteland, living in a mini-mansion of impeccable impersonality. None of these accomplished people has any discernible interest in books, movies, music, television, politics, or pop culture at large. Yet the movie contrasts her religious energy with the cultural void in which the rest of the action takes place. Elizabeth sells real estate and seems to do little else Tony is a pharmaceuticals salesman who spends lots of time at the gym working out and playing basketball (he impresses his teammates by doing standing backflips) their ten-year-old daughter, Danielle (Alena Pitts), an excellent student, spends her free time as a competitive double-Dutch rope jumper. Clara Williams is no soft-spoken elder though gentle and tender, she’s a sparkplug of brisk energy whose positive outlook and wry humor are matched by an oratorical extravagance that wouldn’t be out of place in a Pentecostal pulpit. Miss Clara asks Elizabeth for an hour a week of her time, for a religious study session-and it quickly catches on with Elizabeth, who begins reading the Bible on her own, establishes her own “war room” in a walk-in closet, and, by fighting on the side of Jesus, ultimately (as if it were a surprise) saves her marriage.īut this bare-bones synopsis of the movie hardly gets at its peculiar blend of blandly palliative wish-fulfillment and exuberant, nearly possessed fervor. Stallings), do little together but fight, and Miss Clara’s response is that it’s normal for couples to fight-but that the important thing is to learn how to fight, and then she reframes the problem, asking Elizabeth whether she’s willing to fight for her marriage. Elizabeth says that she and her husband, Tony (T. The terms in which Miss Clara phrases that struggle, though, are inspirational in themselves. It’s actually a converted closet, the walls of which are festooned with her handwritten citations from the Bible, and which she calls her “war room.” It’s where she goes, she says, to strategize to fight her own battles, and, pressing Elizabeth about her commitment to prayer and to Jesus, exhorts her to try praying in order to save her marriage. That’s when Miss Clara reveals to Elizabeth her favorite room in the house.
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