(REVIEW) “Redeeming Love” combines the worst parts of faith-based films, romance films and gritty dramas into a hilarious Frankenstein’s monster of a misfire that underscores the difficulty the modern Western imagination has in integrating faith with other topics that matter.

The film is based on the 1991 Christian romance novel by evangelical author Francine Rivers — who contributed to the screenplay — that loosely retells the biblical story of Hosea. The story centers on Angel, a cynical prostitute in the gold rush of the Old West who hates God, all men and herself — until she is pursued for marriage by a farmer named Michael Hosea. Through their clash of worldviews and personalities, Angel begins to think she might be able to reconcile herself to all three. 

Full disclosure: I was a huge fan of the “Redeeming Love” novel growing up. I never was a fan of Christian romance novels or content in general. But as a young Christian teenager wrestling with puberty, it was the only work of fiction I had encountered that allowed me to honestly attempt to integrate my faith, my sexual desires and my desires to act heroically against the evil I saw in the deeply broken world. Most Christian fare — including popular films by the Christian production company Kendrick Brothers behind “War Room” and “Courageous” — stayed away from sex and romance for the sake of keeping things family friendly.

And when they dealt with it, it was “safe” and “cute” and didn’t reflect my experience of sexual desire. Similarly, most Christian content tried to whitewash the gritty world and downplayed active heroism in favor of passively relying on God to fix things. But they did not integrate obedience to God or a Christian ethic into their world. The character of Michael Hosea that “Redeeming Love” created was a man who desired and admired Angel the way I admired the girls I liked, who managed to — with struggle — submit that desire to God’s standards, and who knew how and when and how to deal with evil when he saw it.

Of course, my relationship with “Redeeming Love” has gotten more complicated over the years. Some of the ways that Francine Rivers answered how to integrate faith with sex and the heroic life have not held up to my experience. The main thrust of the story shows Michael Hosea wooing Angel by regularly paying for her time at the brothel while never having sex with her because God told him he was supposed to marry her. I’ve discovered from painful personal experience that as a Christian man, you should almost never place yourself in a situation where you will be tempted sexually simply because you think you can help the person. And a quick glance at the news shows that my experience is not unique.

Most people — even godly Christian men — are not going to listen to their better angels in that situation. Also, having spoken to more Christian girls about their experiences with men, I think it’s safe to say that a man who says, “God told me to marry you” — particularly when it’s a woman who’s drop-dead gorgeous like Angel is supposed to be — should probably not be taken seriously. That’s not to mention some of the other problematic messages to women that are emblematic of both secular and religious romance novels: questionable consent in the genesis of their relationship, an idealized masculine figure who can solve all your problems, etc. 

But for all its flaws, “Redeeming Love” did wrestle with balancing faith, sexual desire and gritty heroism of life in a way very few even tried to do. And it did so honestly.

The “Redeeming Love” movie does not.

The “Redeeming Love” movie is a hysterically terrible mishmash of everything bad in faith-based films, romance/soft-core porn films and gritty dramas. The film shoots and scores everything in one tone, like a music video or perfume ad, regardless of whether the scene is happy, sad, dark, horrifying or hilarious — a problem we’ve happily seen the Erwin Brothers grow out of. Usually, this just makes the film extremely boring, but sometimes it makes you feel like you’re going crazy from the cognitive dissonance — like when Angel is getting abused and the camera is still looking for the most beautiful and sentimental way possible to shoot the scene. 

This schizophrenic incoherence between the film’s message and filmmaking is one of the more bizarre problems of the film — and that problem is everywhere. Often in scenes where we’re supposed to be horrified by Angel’s life as a prostitute, the filmmakers still go out of their way to make the situation look really sexy, which undermines the horror and instead inspires desire.

Then there are the other typical problems in these kinds of movies. The leads are both pretty actors with zero chemistry (despite Abigail Cowen being excellently cast, Tom Lewis doesn’t give her much to work with) and no real time spent developing their relationship. The dialogue is cheesy and dull and on-the-nose, the way you’d find in a Christian film or a cheesy romance. The film shows more explicit sex and gritty, dark material than it justifies. There was one scene where Angel and Michael Hosea’s brother have sex, and while the film doesn’t show the act, it shows much more of the buildup and immediate aftermath than I though necessary — surprisingly, given how I wanted a gritty story.

I feel the problem is that while the book tries to grapple honestly with integrating the topics of faith, sex and gritty realities, the movie tries to please the audiences for faith, romance and gritty content. Of course, this has been an utter failure, with the movie making a measly $3.5 million in an uncompetitive box office month and sitting at a terrible 11% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Of course, anyone who knew anything about those audiences would have told them this was a fool's errand. The audiences for faith-based films, romance films and gritty dramas are completely different audiences with completely different value systems that do not feature much overlap.

Faith-based audiences primarily value comfort and safety. They want movies that will make the world feel safer by showing how the things that are scary and painful can be explained through a Christian worldview or solved through Christian obedience. That is why so many of the movies follow the plot of “pray and obey, and your problems go away” — “Facing the Giants,” “Fireproof,” “War Room,” “I Can Only Imagine,” “American Underdog” — or deal with how the problems of suffering can be explained with a loving God — “Courageous,” “The Shack,” “I Still Believe,” “Breakthrough.” They also try to show as little as possible of anything that could make the world less safe, such as too much sex — which might invite lust — or any of the darkness in the world that might scare them or make them uncomfortable. You can get away with some content issues if it’s for the sake of the message, like the graphic depiction of an abortion in “Unplanned.”

Romance audiences primarily value fantasy. They want their sexual and romantic fantasies that they can’t have in reality to be presented onscreen so they can have them satisfied by proxy. This is why people who accuse Hallmark movies, softcore porn like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” or ‘90s Nora Ephron films of being unrealistic depictions of love that encourage toxic relationships are missing the point. They’re supposed to be unrealistic because these movies exist to give people what they can’t have in reality: getting drop-dead gorgeous, famous, noble or toxic people to love them desperately and tell them they’re beautiful, giving them access to their hearts and their bodies without consequences. And if they could have it in reality, they wouldn’t need these movies. For the record, this is the kind of fantasy that C.S. Lewis criticizes in “An Experiment in Criticism.”

Gritty drama audiences primarily value gritty realism. They want the movie they are watching to be as close to a real and unfiltered representation of what real life is like as possible. This is why they want to show the dark, the ugly, the brutal and the gritty — whether it’s nudity, violence, language or complicated stories with no easy answers. In fact, often the audiences for such films have a dislike for answers, which they believe are dishonest to life and minimize life’s complexity.

You can easily see why trying to please all these audiences at once wouldn’t work. The fans of gritty dramas would hate all the answers to questions given in the story that faith-based audiences demand. Faith-based audiences are turned off by too much uncomfortable content. The romance fans are annoyed that so much time is spent on faith and the consequences of sin that they don’t get as much of the fun in the romance as they want. The romantics want to be titillated; the faith-based and the gritty dramatics think that’s in bad taste. The faith-based and the romantics want to soften the grittiness to make a feel-good story; the gritty dramatic thinks that’s dishonest and manipulative. The romantics and the gritty dramatics want to show more; the faith-based wants to show less. 

You can see the difficulty with balancing these needs between the Christian film and the romance film in the emotional incoherence of the ending. We spend the whole movie building up the relationship between Michael Hosea and Angel. Yet in the third act, we have to sideline their plot in order for Angel to be on her own so she can reconcile with God while Michael Hosea gives a convoluted excuse for not trying to rescue her. Then at the end, she seemingly gives up the work that God gave her — helping young girls — in order to be Hosea’s wife again. And when they get back together, they play a song of love that was written about the love between God and us as if it’s about a man and a woman.

The result is a movie that tries to find a middle ground and ends up pleasing no one. In the words of Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes”: “A good compromise leaves everybody mad.”

That said, it’s hard to blame the filmmakers for trying to give the film a wider appeal. Gritty and dark faith-based fare typically doesn’t do well with either Christian or secular audiences. Just look at the box office for “First Reformed,” “Silence” and “Calvary.” So why did the book “Redeeming Love” work then? Well, partly because it was a book and not a movie. Christians tend to be more forgiving of the written word than they are anything with pictures — moving or otherwise — because the former, you can regulate a little more with your imagination, and the latter, you are forced to imagine the story the way the filmmaker wants you to, even if it causes you discomfort and harm.

This is a tragedy because film is a powerful and important medium for shaping our imaginations — and they’re being shaped by movies all the time. Many, many years after the fact, I still haven’t found many stories to help my imagination integrate the values of faith, romance and heroic realism in my life. And that’s a problem because when my imagination doesn’t integrate them, they compartmentalize them, and I live my sexual life without it being integrated with my religious beliefs, and my logic and my faith live in separate places in my head and decision-making.

The values of the faith-based crowd, the romance crowd and the gritty drama crowd all become toxic if left on their own. Faith-based desire to make the world safer by making sure it fits within a Christian worldview can easily bring lies about the world we live in. Romantic desire to satisfy our fantasies can prevent us from seeing the value in realistic, healthy relationships and make us pursue toxic relationships. Gritty drama desires to see reality honestly can make us confuse the limited reality of our experiences — and the larger narratives we’ve absorbed without realizing it — with larger truths about reality. 

We can see the consequences when this happens in our culture. When religion and sex are not integrated, we get a religious culture that oppresses sexuality and a secular culture that treats sex as something meaningless — as this one Christian woman, hurt by both experiences, wrote for the New York Times. When religious people can’t integrate their religion with the gritty darkness of the world, they have to take secular worldviews to make their decisions about politics, business and culture. We get our worldviews on political and cultural issues from political pundits and YouTube self-help gurus because our religious leaders are not talking about them in a compelling way — leading us to have views wildly out of step with our faith and with others within our faith without seeing the contradiction. Dr. Tim Keller is one religious author compellingly trying to help Chrsitians integrate those things, but he’s swimming upstream.

There are Christian romance films out there that try to integrate faith and romance. Most of these still make the film the most “safe” version of romance they can, and ones that don’t resonate with the actual experience of most Christians I know. Most of them also involve a Christian and a non-Christian falling in love and the non-Christian eventually accepting Christ through their relationship with the Christian love interest — “The Resurrection of Gavin Stone,” “A Week Away,” “Home Sweet Home,” “Christian Mingle,” “The Farmer and The Belle.” This gets audiences to cheer when someone accepts God and the couple gets together at the same time. 

The answer, as with anything, is to keep trying. The more writers, filmmakers and creatives work to tell stories that integrate these important parts of the human experience together, the more likely we will have stories that do so well, which can then be a model for other artists and the culture at large. And our imaginations and world will be better for it.

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.com, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers.