Praising Raising

Good faith at the MFA; bad faith at the Oscars

I'm here to tell you, friends and neighbors, that the placebo works. Say amen! That's what the befuddled scientists have discovered recently: in test after test, the placebo really does make people feel better. Believe your disease is going away, brothers and sisters: you might be on the pearly road to being cured.

And better than a pill: the help of God and Jesus! Say hallelujah! The placebo effect moves from the hospital to the Southern revival tent in James Rutenbeck's look at itinerant faith healers, Raise the Dead, a lovingly made documentary playing February 25 and 27 at the MFA. Instead of criticizing the healers' see-through tricks and sham promises, Rutenbeck seems to indicate that, in their warped, unscientific way, these shaky Elmer Gantrys are, by laying on hands, actually doing some good.

When his Holiness-Pentecostal preachers go into their ersatz Jesus act -- curing cripples, pulling people out of wheelchairs, sending cancer patients into a state of ecstasy and reinvigorated hope -- this Waban-based documentarian observes without criticizing or commenting. "Revivalism, like jazz music, is a distinctly American phenomenon," Rutenbeck testifies in the press kit for his movie.

There's no need of preachy voice-over, so there isn't any; Rutenbeck shows persuasively that there is real community here, everyone gathered together under a revival big top. Even if the sick remain sick, and the dead stay crypt-bound, it's a heck of a lot of joy that all these country people achieve singing and shaking in the presence of the Lord. In fact, Raise the Dead is a bit nostalgic: it romanticizes, as the older evangelists do, the bygone days after World War II when thousands of souls gathered to pray under a then-mammoth tent. (Before the religion of TV?)

Raise the Dead gets away with its pro-preacherman POV, I think, because the ministers under scrutiny don't exactly seem like money-mongers. In fact, they're quite poor, still on the back roads of West Virginia, none with a greedy, greasy TV show or a 900 number squeezing people's cash. They're down there in the sawdust actually rubbing elbows, shaking withered hands, asking Jesus' help to make these people whole. There's not a Pat Roberts or Jimmy Swaggart in the lot.

The film's central character, a 79-year-old lifelong evangelist named Richard Hall, is an especially appealing personage. With his funereal suits, his shiny false teeth, his fake smile (which has become over decades a real one), and his Pat Reilly hair, he has a kind of clumsy dignity. Flannery O'Connor would have liked him, this ever-passionate soldier of the cross, and I do too.

Filmmaker Rutenbeck, also a veteran Boston-area editor (for Nova, The American Experience, and the feature Home Before Dark), seems steeped in documentary history. Am I imagining subtle influences here of some of the best? The Maysles brothers' Salesman, Jean Jordan and Steve Ascher's Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern, the rural American documentaries of Werner Herzog. Even Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control could be factored in. The way Morris's contemporary lion tamer, Dave Hoover, lives humbled in the shadow of his deceased mentor, Clyde Beatty, so Rutenbeck's protagonist, Richard Hall, feels that the glory days of revivalism are past and gone, with the car-accident end of the great William Branham.

Never heard of him? In his heyday, Branham, an illiterate son of a bootlegger, rivaled the slick drawing power of Oral Roberts. Only Richard Nixon's pal Billy Graham -- taking over football stadiums instead of tents -- drew bigger audiences. Rutenbeck has uncovered an astonishing piece of faded documentary footage showing Branham at work on a stage, a Houdini of the instamatic Christian cure.

Let's note the expert cinematography of Stephen McCarthy, who has a real feel for Southern backways images, and a fine soundtrack, moving between Nicholas Cudahy's Herzogian original score and old-time mountain-music records. The Lord praise folklorist Alan Lomax's field recordings of Almeda Riddle!

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The Academy Award nominations make me feel from the moon, they are so far away from what I admire in cinema. Hated Life Is Beautiful, and I'm indifferent to the supposed power of Saving Private Ryan and the alleged charms of Shakespeare in Love. Even The Thin Red Line, loved by most of my artsy film-critic friends (the Phoenix's Peter Keough was one of the few doubtful voices), doesn't move me, beyond the miraculous cinematography.

Filmmaker Terrence Malick seems in a time warp from 1966, when hetero male modernism reigned supreme. Obviously, this genius boy has never heard of theories about the Other: that there's something queasy about seeing women as extensions of male consciousness (all those flashbacks to the wife-on-a-pedestal), and seeing Third World people as "natural" (his white soldier boy longing to merge with the islanders). Also, The Thin Red Line does the same hypocritical thing as Saving Private Ryan: alternating flashy battle scenes in which we root for the Americans with chest-beating melodramatics about how "War is hell!"

And, oh, that fatuous voice-over! Genius Malick could have used a Hollywood rewrite.