TheBluesader Classic: OH MY GOD!: FIREPROOF THE MOVIE IS ST00P1D

[Originally appeared Thursday, December 24th 2009 at 7:13am on my crappy Blogster blog.  Unedited to retain powerful awesome.]

Finally, a movie that isn’t afraid to portray the real America!  And by “real America,” I mean the perception everyone who voted for George W. Bush the second time has of themselves.

Before I tear into this drunken, limping baby gazelle, my integrity as an Internet movie-talking-about guy dictates I talk about the few good things anyone could say about this movie.  On TheBluesader’s Patented Sliding Scale of Christian Movies, Fireproof is a strong 8 out of 10.  A 10 would be Donald W. Thompson’s thrilling 1972 rockabilly-freakout A Thief in the Night, and a 1 would be Tim Chey’s 2002 direct-to-DVD Goliath pile Gone .  For those of you too unfamiliar with this shortbus film genre known as Christian Movies, an 8 out of 10 Christian movie is basically your average Hallmark Channel movie, minus the gratuitous nudity.  If you put Fireproof up against even the lamest Hollywood movie (just for the sake of argument, let’s use 2005’s Doom ),peoplemight say Fireproof is better shot and easier to follow, but that Doom has a better story and more believable dialogue.  Yes, I realize this doesn’t sound good.  But if it doesn’t, that simply means you haven’t sat through Gone .  With a rating of 8 out of 10, I’m basically nominating Fireproof for a Christian Oscar (which, if it existed, would be made of genuine Austrian crystal and have a really tiny Bible verse laser-etched in the center).

So what makes Fireproof an 8 out of 10?  Well, it was clearly shot and edited by someone who has at least seen a movie or really long music video.  The script was apparently written by someone who has heard of something called a “movie script.”  And the acting didn’t make me laugh so much I missed half the lines.  Kirk Cameron is certainly no Josh Meyers (there is only one Josh Meyers), but in Fireproof he demonstrates that after 30 years of acting he has learned how to not stare directly into the camera while pretending.  I can only assume he must have given pointers to the rest of the largely amateur cast, because a solid 90% of the time they also remember not to stare directly into the camera.  Basically, the entire cast deserves a finely cut Christian Oscar. On a brightly polished sterling silver chain.

Now that I’ve gotten all that vaulted praise out of the way, it’s time to go Hungry Crocodile on the remains.

Fireproof is the story of fireman Caleb Holt (Cameron), a moody peawit about to lose his wife because he has been a moody peawit the last seven years.  As Caleb can’t figure out what to do to stop this (because he is a peawit), his wife Catherine (Christian movie actress Erin Bethea) decides she wants a divorce. 

Complicating matters, Catherine has caught the eye of a doctor who works in the same hospital where she’s employed as an HR person.  I can’t remember if the movie actually says that she’s an HR person, but I figured it out when she walked on screen talking about how stressful it was setting up interviews, and then proceeded to not even pretend to work for the rest of the movie.  But the point here is that one of the doctors clearly wants to David her Bathsheba all night long.  Catherine, clearly suffering from Kirk Cameron In Her Pants Withdrawal, lets Dr. Wife-Stealer take her to lunch and make horn-dog eyes at her.  Because this is a Christian movie she doesn’t actually have sex with him, but because this is a Christian movie we’re supposed to think she might as well have.

Oh, and Catherine’s mother has had a stroke and Catherine visits her and cries a lot.  But this is only brought up at those times when the screenplay decides it needs to make Catherine look like less of a terrible, selfish person (which she otherwise is), so it’s barely worth mentioning.

The peawit Caleb Holt, not wanting his marriage to end but apparently having no impulse to actually do anything sensible and proactive about it, smashes a few inanimate objects with a softball bat and buries himself in his increasingly melodramatic firefighting.  In the midst of this, his father John (newcomer Harris Malcom) drops by the plot to lend a helping hand.  John suggests that before getting a divorce, Caleb should spend the next 40 days following a scheme John devised that will, in effect, help him trick Catherine into not hating him again.  John also encourages (some might say “browbeats”) Caleb into asking Jesus Christ into his heart, though he doesn’t explain why doing this would necessarily cause Caleb’s wife to suddenly stop thinking her husband is a moody peawit.  I guess the movie presumes I understand that an evangelical conversion mystically fixes complex relationship problems.  I’ve always heard that the divorce rate among evangelicals is about the same as the national heathen average, so I don’t know why the movie is so keen to throw Jesus at this particular problem and expects me to assume He sticks.  But as this particular point is not the only one the movie seems to expect me to take for granted, I’ll just add it to the pile.

Following his dad’s advice (because peawits rarely come up with their own ideas), Caleb decides to give the 40 day thing a try.  The rest of the movie is Caleb going out of his way – between dramatic firefighting, of course – to be nice to Catherine, while she consistently spits it back in his face and lets Dr. Wife-Stealer look at her like Eve looked at the apple.  When Caleb gets frustrated (and being a moody peawit, he does a lot), he calls Poppa John, who tells him not to get so frustrated, and to keep being nice to a woman who clearly hates him.  And so he does, to the tune of $24,000 in medical supplies for Catherine’s mother, and what is probably a $1,000 desktop computer which he smashes, yes, again with the softball bat. 

Apparently the computer kept forcing him to look at softcore erotica when he was just trying to masturbate to pictures of a yacht, and this made Catherine think she looked like a fetid cow carcass.  This is yet another plot point the movie expects me to accept without question, and one which makes me wonder just who the hell this movie thinks I am.

The following isn’t a spoiler, because, as this is a Christian movie not about the Crucifixion, you know this thing is going to have a happy ending.  Catherine finds out how much money Caleb has spent / flushed down the toilet on her account, and that he’s kept up this behavior for three days longer than his dad told him to (probably only because he’s a peawit and didn’t know what else to do).  Catherine, however, takes this to mean that her husband doesn’t actually want her to die screaming, and she decides to show her joy by making out with him in the firehouse garage.  She put on her engagement ring before she went down to the station and the movie took the time to show me that she’s been bawling since she pulled it out of her sock drawer, so I guess I’m supposed to assume the divorce is off and everyone lives happily ever after (by which I mean, Catherine gets pregnant that very night.  Because Muslims aren’t going to outbreed themselves, am I right?)

If you couldn’t tell from my award-winning objective plot synopsis (seriously, I just awarded it myself), Fireproof has a rather dim view of romance.  To state it plainly, this movie thinks men are oblivious tools who can’t be caring husbands until they’ve been tricked into going to church (why this should be the case is, again, not explained).  It thinks women are self-hating morons who will bed (at least, evidently want to bed) the first stranger who smiles at them, if their husbands haven’t spent enough money on them.  I realize that the movie itself doesn’t consider this a dim view.  The movie itself, and the people who made it, expect me to believe that its portrayal of marriage is so true-to-life that I will accept Jesus into my heart and buy my wife a new car before the end credits start rolling, for fear that she might already be dry-humping the guy in the pew across the aisle.  I’m not sure what bothers me most about this view: the blatant sexism, the fact that somebody actually believes this is how some people really act, the fact that they expect me to believe this is how some people really act, or the fact that maybe, as it applies to certain people, they’re RIGHT.

Fireproof did exceptionally well for a Christian movie marketed to Christians.  Why?  Is it just because it’s a rare Christian movie that doesn’t look like an intentional work of irony?  Or is it because a lot of Christians really do look at men, women and marriage the same way as Fireproof?   Are there people who really think this movie, with its shallow, self-obsessed characters, is the most accurate fictional representation of what goes on daily life since Everybody Loves Raymond went off the air?  Do certain Americans really hold this movie up and say, “Yes, this is who we are, and this is how we operate?”  I can understand certainly people praising this movie solely on the basis of its Evangelical Christian message.  There aren’t a lot of well-made movies out there that advocate this (a point that is very important to keep in mind).  But are there actually couples who interact like Caleb and Catherine, and believe that doing so is perfectly normal?

Clearly I assume there are, or I wouldn’t be so abjectly terrified that this movie is so damn popular.

Especially since Fireproof is not only sexist, but also racist.  African-American characters come in exactly three stereotypes in this movie: Fat, Funny Slang-Talking Guy (a fireman), Gossipy Woman with Sass (a nurse), and Sage Articulate Guy (another fireman).  You could argue that using three different black stereotypes isn’t a bad thing, since most Christian movies only use one, the infamous Noble, Charismatic Black Baptist Minister Who Sings and Fights Gangs.  And as it relates to Fireproof , you could also point out that every character in the movie, regardless of ethnicity, could be fairly called a poorly-conceived stereotype.  So why should I point out the black ones when there are plenty of white ones?

Addressing the first point: three times a negative isn’t a positive, it’s just a negative three times as big.  I don’t give bonus points to a movie that attempts to not be racist by being even more racist, and I don’t know why anyone would.  Addressing the second point: there’s a difference between a stereotype and a type of character we’ve seen before.  The white characters in the movie are certainly types that get used a lot – the Meddling Well-Meaning Parents, the Overconfident Rookie Fireman, the Needy Wife, the Idiot Husband.  But these personalities are not specific to any ethnicity.  Black men play idiot husbands as much as white men.  Black women play needy wives as much as white women.  But when was the last time you saw a fat, funny, slang-talking white guy character? Or a gossipy white woman character with sass?  These are personalities pre-packaged with ethnicity, just waiting for a bad screenwriter to scoop them up and sprinkle them into a script that could use a few black characters. Characters the writer can’t come up with on his or her own, because he or she apparently thinks black people are exotic energy beings from Neptune or something. 

To drive the point into the heart, these pre-packaged black characters are stereotypes, they are racist, and they are only used because the person who wrote the script is, willfully or not, a racist.  And sorry, but I assumed at this point in time we were all aware that black people are in fact human beings, and that anyone with a small amount of creativity should be able write an original black character, even if it happens to take a little bit of research (you know, the same amount of research necessary to create an original white character who may live a lifestyle that is different from the writer’s own).

So aside from being sexist and racist, what else is wrong with this movie?  Well, a lot.  For simplicity’s sake I’ll just list a few more problems:

-         For a movie supposedly about a firefighter, we sure don’t see a lot of fires being fought.  I think there are only three scenes in the whole movie when Caleb Holt and crew actually go out and do something with all their shiny equipment.  I know, this movie was made on a tight budget and firefighting scenes are expensive.  But the movie is called Fireproof , and it bills itself as being about a firefighter.  Let’s see more than 10 minutes of fires being fought, please.  Otherwise it looks like the writers made Caleb a firefighter only to have other characters continually point out how his marriage isn’t fireproof.   Which I sort of figured out the first time I saw his wife flirting with Dr. Wife-Stealer.

-         I understand that a Christian movie is more or less required to use contemporary Christian music as its soundtrack.  But I can’t think of a single time when the song that was playing fit the action on screen, in either its lyrics or its style.  And another thing: no sane adult listens to Christian rap-rock and likes it.  I don’t care if the character in question is supposed to be the comic relief firefighter.  This is too unrealistic to even be ironically funny.

-         While the people who made the movie understand that couples going through marital problems yell at each other, they don’t seem to understand how arguments actually work.  Caleb and Catherine’s fights are a mishmash of “you don’t respect me,” “do your own laundry,” and “damn that Internet porn.”  Which are all valid things to argue about.  The problem is, every fight they have sounds like all the above phrases were dropped into an Arguetron 5000 which then spit out what it assumes human arguments sound like.  Even people having a stupid argument try to advance whatever point they’re trying to make.  Yelling “Internet porn!” and countering with “Respect!” isn’t an argument, it’s an acting exercise.  How am I supposed to sympathize with these people when they don’t sound like real people?

-         If I were asked to diagnose the real problem with Caleb and Catherine’s marriage, I would say that they’re two young people with a lot of disposable income in a very big, nice house, who literally have nothing to do all day but pick at one another.  They don’t seem to have anything in common to talk about or do except sex, so when they’re not doing that, they just start screaming to fill the chilly silence.  The movie never brings this up as a possible theory, and I know why.  If two people share nothing but an income and liking sex, they probably shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place.  Catherine should divorce Caleb and focus on having fun and advancing her supposed career, and Caleb should thank God that the nagging is finally over, get a nice little apartment, and focus on buying that yacht he’s always touching himself to.  If my theory were right, that would be the real happy ending to this story.  Being a non-Crucifixion Christian movie, Fireproof needs to end with Caleb and Catherine reconciling, so it blames Internet porn, has Caleb smash the computer and buy his wife’s forgiveness, and then melts away all the lingering issues with a public kiss.  This is a movie, so I suppose Fireproof can get away with oversimplifying things.  Not as far as I’m concerned, obviously, but I wasn’t the intended audience.  So like me being on the fast road to hell, I guess it’s my fault for thinking.

-         One last, small thing.  The final kiss of the movie is not between Kirk Cameron and Erin Bethea.  Kirk Cameron refused to kiss anyone who wasn’t his wife, so Mrs. Cameron was flown in to kiss Kirk for the final scene, which was then filmed in silhouette.  Now I have no problem with Kirk’s fellow Growing Pains alum and baby-momma Chelsea Noble, which I freely admit is only because I know nothing at all about her except that she’s fantastically hot.  And as far as the scene plays out in the movie, I never would have known that Kirk wasn’t kissing Erin Bethea except that the Internet told me so .  My only problem with this, then, is that I find it rather creepy.  I’m not sure why and I suppose it isn’t even a real problem.  But the same could be said for Mormon underwear , and I’m certainly not going to be getting near a pair of those inexplicably terrifying things any time soon.

So that’s Fireproof .  A great Christian movie, but still a Christian movie, so not a good non-Christian movie.  If you voted for Dubya in 2004, you’ll probably like it anyway.  If, like me, you voted instead for that world-hugging Communist bastard John Kerry, you probably won’t like it.  If you’re the latter, skip Fireproof and read the Bible instead.  You’ll get the same message, and while it still won’t make any sense, at least the Bible has more realistic dialogue and a lot more action sequences.