In the forthcoming comedy Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey stars as Bruce Nolan, a discontented television reporter. When he is passed over for the job he covets, he turns his gaze heavenward and curses God. And lo, God appears in the form of Morgan Freeman, endows Bruce with divine powers, and tells him that if he thinks he can do the job any better, here’s his chance. So far, so high-concept.
What is worth noting is that in this role Freeman joins what is a very select group: performers who have played that most mysterious of parts, God, on film. Portrayals of Jesus Christ have abounded, but the Lord Himself has only rarely graced the silver screen. Everyone has their own idea of God, and Hollywood is usually keen not to cause offence, especially when it’s trying to sell the world an otherwise innocuous summer comedy.
Judaism adheres to the second commandment (“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above”), and Islam takes the same view. Christianity is not so strict. Filmmakers usually get round the problem of depicting the Almighty by having some- body deputise for Him, such as the heavenly administrator Mr Jordan in Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) and its remake, Heaven Can Wait (1978), or Gabriel in A Life Less Ordinary (1997). Alternatively, they can employ a figure not named as God but open to interpretation as Him, such as the Judge in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and the Supreme Being in Time Bandits (1981).
More commonly, they favour a disembodied voice. It was in 1936, in the film adaptation of the 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Green Pastures, that the Lord — or, as He is here, “De Lawd” — made what was arguably His cinematic debut, played by a notable black actor of the day, Rex Ingram. A series of Sunday-school stories brought to life by an all-black cast, The Green Pastures presents what is to modern sensibilities a rather racially stereotyped view of the gospel religion of the Deep South — heaven is depicted as a cotton plantation, and Babylon as an insalubrious backstreet bar. But, made as it was by Warner Bros in the face of planned boycotts by many Southern theatre owners, it was undoubtedly a brave project in its day.
The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, or Hays Code, had stipulated that “no film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith”, and so effectively confined God’s fledgling movie career to overtly religious dramas such as The Green Pastures.
Filmmakers, however, came up with increasingly inventive ways to feature Him indirectly. In The Next Voice You Hear (1950), Mr and Mrs Joe Smith and their fellow residents of Anytown, United States — though, significantly, not the viewer — hear the voice of the Almighty emanating from the radio every night for a week, and, though fearful at first, soon find themselves responding to His pronouncements.
It was perfectly acceptable for the Lord to make His presence felt in the Biblical epics that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, though nobody was prepared to render Him as a physical entity. In Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), God is a deep, intimidating voice. This was credited to Delos Jewkes, though a rumour persists that it was actually that film’s Moses, Charlton Heston, who spoke the lines. Again, in John Huston’s The Bible (1966), only the Almighty’s resounding tones are heard — this time supplied by the director, who also provided the voice of the serpent and played Noah to boot.
The Ten Commandments was perhaps God’s greatest hit, nominated for seven Oscars and grossing the equivalent of more than $750-million in North America alone in today’s money. The Bible, however, a decade later, flopped both critically and commercially, signalling the end of the big-budget religious extravaganza. “A bad film of a good book,” quipped one reviewer at the time.
In the 1970s, with the Production Code defunct, and perhaps as a light-hearted riposte to the fashion for satanic horror (The Omen, The Exorcist) during that decade, the Lord popped up for the first time in a comedy. Carl Reiner’s Oh God! (1977) has genial, wise-cracking old-timer George Burns playing the Almighty as, well, a genial, wise-cracking old-timer. Fleshing God out using an actor whom audiences knew to be Jewish might have seemed a risky undertaking, but Burns’s good-natured portrayal was never likely to offend anybody.
There were even sequels: Oh God! Book II (1980) and Oh God! You Devil (1984), which bore the gimmick of having Burns also play Satan. Unfortunately, these movies seemed to open the door to a ragbag of weak comedies and fantasies. In God We Tru$t (1980) had Marty Feldman as a Trappist monk and God voiced by Richard Pryor. In the flop fantasy Two of a Kind (1983), the Lord, here a glowing light with the voice of Gene Hackman, decides to annihilate the errant human race, and it is only if bank robber John Travolta and corrupt teller Olivia Newton-John can be reformed that He will reconsider.
Later that decade, in what was no doubt intended as an arch-piece of casting, former Moses Charlton Heston got to play the man upstairs in yet another barely remembered comedy, Almost an Angel (1989).
We waited for years for another screen portrayal of the Almighty, and then, possibly as the result of some pre-millennial fervour, three came along at once. Val Kilmer supplied His voice in the hit animated take on the Moses story, The Prince of Egypt (1998), and that same year Sandra Bernhard rattled off a few one-liners, in voiceover, as God in a little-seen romantic farce starring Rob Lowe, One Hell of a Guy.
Rather more newsworthy was Kevin Smith’s Catholic satire Dogma (1999), which languished in limbo for months before release, Disney-owned Miramax coming in for much criticism from conservatives for this satire about an abortion clinic worker who is a female descendant of Jesus Christ, trying to prevent two fallen angels re-entering paradise. When God appears, at the end of the film, He (for the first time on screen, not counting Bernhard’s vocal contribution) is a She, played as a serene, smiling flower child by the then queen of twentysomething angst, Alanis Morissette.
By contrast, Bruce Almighty is ruffling few feathers, and the film has turned out to be God’s (as well as Carrey’s) most successful project for quite some time, on course to gross well over $200-million in the US alone. And the fact that it presents the Lord as a black man — though, of course, it is not exactly breaking new ground in this regard, The Green Pastures having given us “De Lawd” almost 70 years ago — has generated little controversy. In fact, many black religious leaders in the US have praised the picture for its choice of deity, claiming that its box-office success demonstrates how comfortable white audiences now are with African-American spirituality.
That may be true to some degree, but the reality behind this portrayal is probably rather more prosaic. While Bruce Almighty‘s God does embody some of the main tenets of black Christianity, identifying as He does with the poor and dispossessed, His appearance here as an African-American owes more to the simple wish to cast Freeman.
Steve Oedekerk, one of the film’s writers, says the creative team’s principal aim was to present God as a more “personal” and less “generic and pious” figure, and that His being black was not a demand of the screenplay. Rather, it was on account of Freeman’s track record in playing authority figures (president of the United States twice, for instance — Deep Impact and The Sum of All Fears), together with his gift for conveying wisdom and sense of comic timing, that Freeman was cast.
Some commentators, however, have criticised Bruce Almighty for merely fuelling the cinematic tradition — extending back to Tom ministering to little Eva in the 1927 film adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — of the virtuous black man tending to the relatively insignificant problems of a white lead. Freeman, some might say, has played such a part before, in 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy.
And the reason that white audiences in particular have been drawn to this movie is, according to cultural critic Gerald Early of Washington University in St Louis, that, subconsciously, they “like their black folk non-threatening and supportive”.
US critics are generally in agreement that Freeman is suited to this role. “If God were to take human form,” commented USA Today, “one imagines he might be just like Freeman.” Freeman’s God — a non-denominational, almost secularised sage in a white suit — seems a terribly safe one, being as He is reduced to a plot device in a star-driven Hollywood “what if?” scenario.
Somehow, one can’t help feeling that the vengeful Old Testament theatrics employed by Mr DeMille were, if rather less sophisticated, rather more arresting. — Â