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DLW
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Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 6/11/2003 1:06 PM (GMT -6) |   | YT: Mr. Freeman, You Look Divine ...
<http://nytimes.com/2003/06/11/movies/MoviesFeatures/
11GOD.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=print&position=>
June 11, 2003
Mr. Freeman, You Look Divine
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
In 1898 a prominent black minister named Henry McNeal Turner wrote an
essay titled, "God Is a Negro." When even some of Turner's fellow
members of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination objected, he
replied in print that "every other race of people since time began"
envisioned God in its image. "Why should not the Negro," he concluded,
"believe that he resembles God as much so as other people?"
Some 105 years later Turner's premise has received unlikely, in part
unintended, confirmation in a big-budget Hollywood comedy. The new Jim
Carrey film, "Bruce Almighty," presents the black actor Morgan Freeman
as God. More specifically the movie evokes African-American theology by
showing God identifying with the poor and scorned, taking the forms of
a janitor and a homeless man.
Audiences have clearly accepted the notion: "Bruce Almighty," released
on May 23, made $100 million in its opening weekend to lead all films,
and by last weekend had taken in $170.8 million. Among black religious
figures and film scholars, Mr. Freeman's performance has provoked both
satisfaction and skepticism.
"It's significant because it would not have happened 20 or 30 years
ago," Professor James H. Cone, an influential African-American
theologian who teaches at the Union Theological Seminary in New York,
said in an interview. "The use of a black God reflects how much white
Americans can relax with the idea of racial inclusiveness, provided it
doesn't challenge their power."
The comfort level, Professor Cone went on, also attests to the
increasing exposure of white Americans to black Christianity, whether
by studying the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or by
watching ministers like T. D. Jakes and Frederick K. C. Price on cable
television.
The Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, senior pastor of St. Paul Community
Baptist Church in East New York, Brooklyn, lauded Mr. Freeman's
performance from his pulpit. "The spirituality of black people is being
depicted — not just our singing, our entertainment," Mr. Youngblood
said. "There's a sense in this movie that at the highest levels of
existence there are black people."
The film is essentially a comic version of the Job story, with Mr.
Carrey as a television newsman named Bruce Nolan who grows so depressed
and frustrated that he dares God to do something about it. Whereupon
God grants Bruce divine powers, which he proceeds to use on himself:
sports car, promotion to news anchor, revenge on sundry enemies. Only
then, omnipotent but unhappy, does Bruce realize that the purpose of
godly power is to dispense mercy and compassion to others.
Members of the creative team behind "Bruce Almighty" said the choice to
depict God as black occurred more from a desire to cast Mr. Freeman
than to make any racial or theological point. Steve Oedekerk, a
screenwriter who helped devise the film with Mr. Carrey and the
director Tom Shadyac, said their goal was to present God as "more
personal," less "generic and pious." Race did not figure in the
screenplay. But in discussing how to cast the film, Mr. Oedekerk said
in an e-mail message, the creative team focused very early on Mr.
Freeman for his combination of authority, wisdom and comic timing.
"We all knew having a black God was a choice that would be talked
about," Mr. Oedekerk noted, "but I don't think we were thinking it
would be as groundbreaking as it turned out being. I was personally
surprised by the attention this received. For me this type of casting
isn't as groundbreaking as it is overdue."
Reviewing the film in The New York Times , Stephen Holden wrote: "For
Mr. Freeman, playing God is a piece of cake. With his quiet, measured
drawl, which implies depths of good-humored wisdom, he may be the most
convincing screen sage Hollywood has these days."
The film's personal, impious God embodies some central premises of
black theology. The concept of God or Jesus being black was first
espoused by the writer Robert Alexander in 1829, when his "Ethiopian
Manifesto" called for a "black Messiah" to liberate the slaves,
Professor Cone said. Since then the idea was taken up by figures as
varied as Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, who
famously deplored the way "the white man has brainwashed us black
people to fasten our gaze upon a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus." Many
black ministers today cite the biblical verses that describe Jesus as
having "hair like lamb's wool" and feet the color of "hammered brass."
At least one film prior to "Bruce Almighty" featured a black God, with
Rex Ingram playing De Lawd in the 1936 all-black musical "Green
Pastures." The image of a Christian deity was implicitly altered when
the comedian George Burns, whom many viewers knew was Jewish, took the
title role in the 1977 movie "Oh, God!" and two sequels.
In "Bruce Almighty" the title character first meets God in the guise of
a janitor, wearing coveralls and mopping a warehouse floor. "People
underestimate the value of good ol' manual labor," God tells the
skeptical Bruce. For Mr. Youngblood that scene resonated with black
theology's view of Jesus as an oppressed man put on earth to free the
oppressed.
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of African-American and religious
studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said via e-mail: "Freeman's
God allows Bruce to work out his soul's salvation in trial and error.
That's part of black theodicy — the attempt to understand, better yet
survive, the existence of suffering and evil."
The praise for "Bruce Almighty" in black intellectual circles is not
unanimous. The cultural critics Gerald Early of Washington University
in St. Louis and Linda Williams of the University of California at
Berkeley said that Mr. Freeman is carrying on what Ms. Williams, in an
e-mail message, called "the same old tradition of the saintly black man
who is shown caring for the relatively trivial worries of white
protagonists."
Both scholars traced that line of cinematic characterization back to
Uncle Tom tending Little Eva in the 1927 film adaptation of Harriet
Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Sidney Poitier
took on several such roles in the postwar decades, particularly as the
handyman caring for a group of white nuns in "Lilies of the Field"
(1963). Mr. Freeman himself portrayed the moral instructor of a
self-absorbed white as a rich widow's chauffeur in "Driving Miss
Daisy," the 1989 screen version of Alfred Uhry's play.
"We have here another instance of a wise black person helping a white
person achieve insight, realize his humanity," Professor Early said of
"Bruce Almighty." "That's about as tired a Hollywood formula, indeed an
American culture formula, as one can get." He added, "Audiences
subconsciously were drawn to it, particularly white audiences who like
their black folk nonthreatening and supportive."
But even those who find the portrayal of a black god problematic laud
the performance itself. "If you're going to go the route of having a
black God concerned about a trivial white person," as Professor
Williams put it, "you couldn't get a better God than Morgan Freeman."
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