It should not really surprise anyone that God himself has been reduced to a jokey folkloric character in Jim Carrey’s new movie, Bruce Almighty. God is, after all, the most successful fictional character of all time, having long ago escaped the pages of his bestselling, ghost-written autobiography, The Bible, and taken up residence in the communal imagination
In the movie, a huge hit in the United States (we’ll get to that later), God is played by Morgan Freeman as a kind of tricksy oddball, inhabiting a deserted warehouse somewhere in Buffalo (New York state). He comes into the picture when the titular Bruce, who has suffered a series of nasty setbacks in his career, curses God and challenges him to do a better job of running the world — that is, running Bruce’s career. God sends Bruce a few cryptic SMSs (whatever happened to annunciatory angels? Or to the ‘still small voice”? What about a whirlwind?) and Bruce finally finds him in his empty warehouse, where God hands over his powers to Bruce to see if Bruce can improve on the deity’s performance record.
So Bruce gets to be God for a while. This is a potentially brilliant idea (who has not had some similar fantasy?), but what it means for Bruce is the ability to perform some dumb-ass tricks, mostly malicious. He is also overwhelmed by all the prayers people are sending out, and has to concoct silly ways of getting them answered. Surely the supreme being, omnipotent and omnipresent, has a large enough mind to deal with the huge stream of prayers? Apparently not. God is supposedly taking a holiday, leaving Bruce to run the universe, except that (in direct contradiction of what seemed an important plot-point) God reappears whenever necessary to set Bruce back on the right path.
The right path, it turns out, is for Bruce to stop using his supernatural powers for selfish, malicious ends. Bruce takes the point, along with a couple of useless homilies of the ‘everything happens for a reason” variety, and goes on to use his supernatural powers for even more selfish ends — to get his wife back. She (played by Jennifer Aniston) has left him because he has become impossible, though it was hard for this viewer to tell in what way Bruce had become more impossible than he was before he became God, when he was just an infantile, face-pulling, rubber-limbed joker uttering a stream of stupidities.
If there is a moral lesson at the heart of Bruce Almighty, it is hopelessly muddled. Religion is supposed to help us deal with suffering or it’s good for nothing. God, here, is little more than a fairy godmother to Bruce. No wonder God has no time to solve the Israel/Palestine problem in his homeland, or deal with starvation in Africa, or stop any of the rest of the incessant cruelty humanity visits upon itself. He’s too busy keeping a TV reporter in Buffalo happy!
Christians around the world should be protesting about this movie instead of things like The Last Temptation of Christ, which actually had a meaningful theological issue to explore. Perhaps I, as a devout atheist, should be pleased. Monotheism was one of humanity’s very worst ideas, and in Bruce Almighty the idea of God is revealed as nothing more than pathetic wish fulfilment.
But what’s worrying is that people are buying it. In a big way, too. Bruce Almighty knocked The Matrix Reloaded(another piece of religiose hokum) off the number one spot in the US, and stayed there, so it seems to have touched something in the American psyche. It’s certainly not a hit because it’s funny. I’m all in favour of blasphemy, but it’s not much help here. Bruce Almighty is about as funny as being nailed to a cross.
Perhaps what finally killed it for me was the moment when Bruce is encouraged to accept his role as reporter of exceedingly pointless activities on the part of Buffalo citizens. ‘Look, Bruce,” says his boss, ‘you’re a good reporter — you make people laugh.” What a blow for all the TV channels that failed to make us laugh about September 11! What a pointed critique of the reporters in Iraq who couldn’t squeeze a chuckle out of us at the gruesome death of Saddam Hussein’s sons!
Now I’m not a reporter, and I place as high a value as anyone else on the ability to make people laugh, but if we took this even slightly seriously, we’d be lost. As lost as Bruce, and God, in the moral and comic vacuum of this dire, dire movie.