Dennis Quaid’s Promising ‘The Hill’ Film Doesn’t Survive ‘Follow Your Dreams’ Cliches
(REVIEW) “The Hill” has a lot to offer to faith-based families in the first half of the movie — but the second part is crushed under the weight of its cliches and terrible “dreams versus faith” message.
The film tells the story of Ricky Hill, a preacher’s kid with degenerative spinal disease who nonetheless shows an incredible love and talent for baseball. As both a boy and a young man (the young man version played by Colin Ford), he must overcome his physical challenges and the disapproval of his father (played by Dennis Quaid) to pursue his dream to become a professional baseball player.
“The Hill” has many of the the charms of your typical faith-based film (which happily is much better than it used to be). It has that classic comfortingly nice, if basic, cinematography and some solid dialogue, too. Even where it falls into cliches and message-y pandering, those elements don’t overstay their welcome as much as in Christian films of the past. It tells a true story that gives some feel-good thrills of seeing someone with genuine hardships overcome them to achieve their dream.
READ: ‘The Chosen One’ Proves (Again) Why We Still Need Faith-Based Films
Where “The Hill” shines above the average faith-based film — or movie in general — is with its authentic and nuanced portrayal of the Hill family (at least in the first half of the film). The family is exactly like the religious families I knew growing up, where God was at the center of all their everyday experiences and the bad members were always balanced by the good.
When good times happen, they praise God and give thanks for his providence. When bad things happen, Hill and his family wrestle with what God wants them to do in that situation. They all believe in following God but also always argue about what that looks like. Sometimes, that leads to conflict, but it’s conflict based on a shared belief. (This is the second movie I’ve watched this year to do this so well, the first being another Dennis Quaid faith-based drama, “On A Wing And A Prayer”).
The same especially goes for the portrayal of the father, the Rev. James Hill, played with heart-rending nuance and empathy by Dennis Quaid. In the first half of the movie, the filmmakers really take a bat to the far-too-often purely villainous portrayals of the dad who won’t let his son follow his dreams. In “The Hill,” the same dad who stands in the way of his son’s dreams is also the one who gives his son every reason to admire him. The same dad who won’t let his son play baseball also nurtures his son, teaches him, sacrifices to provide for his family and stands up for an abused woman in his congregation. It makes figuring out whether in a particular scene the dad is right or wrong difficult. It’s navigating this complexity that is some of the most compelling stuff of the film.
Even the question of “should you follow God or follow your dreams?” is taken seriously (at least in the first half of the movie) in a way that it isn’t in most movies — Christian or secular. The whole family agrees that they should follow God over their own desires — but the conflict comes in how they know whether their desires are put there by God or are in conflict with Him. This part of the movie really made me excited because it’s a deeply difficult question that every Christian with a dream struggles with, and that a smart, thoughtful movie could help Christians figure out how to navigate with discernment.
Unfortunately, all this thoughtful nuance crashes to an abrupt halt when Ricky Hill asserts at the midpoint of the movie that he can follow God and do baseball because he knows he is meant to do both — because, first, God gave him the desire and, second, he’s good at it.
It almost goes without saying that this is a silly reason to know that something is God’s will. There are plenty of things you can love and can be good at that can be against God’s will. Murder, for example. (“I was good at it, and I liked it” was Walter White’s answer to why he sold meth in the series “Breaking Bad”). Even with benign things, they can be bad if they take you away from more important responsibilities to people who depend on you. For every daughter who resents her dad for becoming abusive because he gave up on his dreams — as Ricky Hill’s love interest, Gracie, talks about in this movie — there is a daughter who resents her dad for chasing his dreams instead of being a good and dependable father to her, for example.
It isn’t that Ricky Hill was wrong to play baseball. I’m sure he was right to follow his passion. But the reasons the fictionalized version of him gives for how he knows its God’s will are so profoundly weak and harmful to anyone watching. And yet, they are treated as a mic drop moment that ends all possible objections.
Part of the reason this is so disappointing is that navigating faith and dreams is one of the most important questions modern Christians face. Therefore, we desperately need works of art that struggle with it deeply and honestly.
Jean Twenge, celebrated author of the book “Generation Me,” wrote in her new book “Generations” that the single most important reason millennials are abandoning religion is because it runs counter to their higher commitment to defining the meaning of life for themselves, which runs counter to the church’s claim that you must give up that power to God.
Charles Taylor, author of “A Secular Age” and widely considered the leading authority today on secularism, calls this competing faith “expressive individualism.” And clearly, this is the faith that is winning — or, if you want to be more cynical, has already won.
It is therefore not surprising that we have gotten quite a few faith-based movies that have dealt with this topic in recent years but rarely discern well the difference between dreams and God’s will. “I Can Only Imagine” has an abusive and unaffirming dad. “American Underdog” tries to treat the topic but makes so little sense that it’s hard to determine any meaning from it. “Dreamin’ Wild” largely sidesteps the topic but implies that dreams are the most important thing as long as you’re also kind to your family.
What’s interesting is that Christians I’ve talked to have better answers to this question than the movie portrays. In my interviews with musical artists Donnie and Nancy Emerson (from “Dreamin’ Wild”) and even Ford, who plays the older Ricky in this very movie, they said they know that their dream is from God or that they aren’t putting their dream before God,
One can have skepticism that Christians truly know how to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit from their own desires, but that commitment to submit your desires to God’s voice and to develop your inner ear to that voice through time spent in prayer and reading the Bible at least shows a willingness to attempt to differentiate between the two and submit to God over all. Faith-based movies would be better at dealing with the issue of God versus dreams if they just dealt with it with the thoughtfulness that actual Christian artists do.
Obviously, it’s not like Hollywood is doing much better. Disney still manages to churn out simplistic follow-your-dreams stories where any parent who stands in the protagonist’s way is just obviously wrong, like in “Moana,” “Luca” and “Turning Red.” Every so often, it come up with a movie that bucks the trend — such as “Soul” or “Coco” — but only very gently. This would be an opportunity for movies about faith to add something to the conversation that isn’t already in it.
The other reason this treatment of the topic is disappointing is that it affects the overall quality of the film. Once Ricky pronounces the matter settled that God wants him to play baseball — almost as if the film knows what a vapid and misguided reasoning that is — the movie loses all the rest of its complex nuance in its themes and characters.
When the movie time-jumps to an older Ricky still trying to play baseball, everything and everyone becomes a parade of “follow your dreams” cliches with every tired trope in the book, from the speeches to the almost giving up to the third-act breakup. It is all extremely dull and tiresome until the father apologizes to his son for not affirming his dreams. By then, you’ve turned off your brain and are just counting how many more beats to the formula is left until the end. When you build your conflict on complex honesty, you get great art. When you build it on facile platitudes, you get bad art.
In the end, “The Hill” is a movie that shines when it subverts or wrestles with the tropes of the inspirational follow-your-dreams genre and falls when it is consumed by them. Hopefully, future filmmakers will struggle with these worthy ideas better to all of our benefit.
“The Hill” is in theaters starting Friday.
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. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.