Higher Ground (Monday, August 29, 2011) (77)

Higher Ground is the directorial debut of actress Vera Farmiga (it was written by Carolyn S. Briggs and Tim Metcalfe, based on Briggs' memoir). After seeing the film I hope it's the last film she directs as well. It is the story of Corinne (Farmiga), a woman growing up in the '60s in a typical, poor, somewhat broken house. She and her younger sister Wendy are sent to the evangelical church in their town where she's introduced to "giving herself to God" and whatnot. She's a bookish girl and only discovers boys in high school when one of them, Ethan, asks her to write a song for his band.

The pair quickly fall in love and by the time Corinne is out of high school she has a baby and is on tour with Ethan's band. After a terrible tour bus accident (see: Metallica), Ethan and Corinne decide to devote their lives to God. When they grow up a bit more (grown Ethan is played by Joshua Leonard), they join a hippie evangelical church with rather repressive rules (women must obey men totally and cannot seem to be teaching them anything, women have to wear very conservative clothes) but are happy with their friends in this community.

Time moves along and after a series of sad things happen to Corinne (her best friend gets cancer) she begins to question her faith and her marriage more and more. At a crossroads, she has to figure out if this is the direction she wants her life to move in or if she would rather have a more secular, worldly life.

The biggest problem with the film is that Corinne, as a main character, is a total cypher and gives us almost no perspective on her own life. It's never clear how faithful she really is and if she had doubts earlier in life. We see her struggling with speaking in tongues (something that her church doesn't believe in, but her best friend does) and we see her praying for help with certain things, but we never really understand if she's not faking it the whole time. Our view of her is entirely on the outside of her psyche, she's as much an object here as the furniture in her house.

It's a weird thing to watch a film about a person of faith and not get any sense of the depth of their faith or their subjectivity (if a man had made this film I would say it was a bit misogynistic). Forget Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, Dreyer's Ordet or Bergman's Winter Light; this is a movie about the surface of faith that thinks its a deep work.

The pacing of the film is very hard to deal with as it moves along quickly through time. From one scene to the next we're in 1969, we're in 1975, we're in 1980 and on and on. But all this change for what? We never really see a development or growth in Corinne (she might have just been faking it the whole time... we never know). I really don't think this obscurity and uncertainly is the point of the film either; I think it's the result of a bad script and bad direction.

Farmiga, as an actress is fine, but her character is rather monotone; Leonard and Norbert Leo Butz (who plays the young pastor) are very good; Nina Arianda who plays Corinne's grown sister Wendy is wonderful as she always is. It mostly seems like Farmiga, as a director, doesn't seem to know well how to tell a story with different formal and technical tools. (Silence and lighting are great, so is the use of a diary, in such a story.)

Above all else, I don't really care about Corinne or her life. She's boring and average and doesn't seem to have any story that is compelling in the slightest. A story about a religious woman who falls out of of love in midlife with her high school sweetheart? I've seen that a million times before.

Stars: 1.5 of 4