Breakthrough
Films like this are preaching to the converted when it comes to issues of faith. I am not one of those converted. Yes, I teared up at moments in this film as Joyce Smith prays boldly for the miraculous recovery of her 14-year-old son, John, after he has fallen through the ice, and is hanging on to life- this film understands what buttons it needs to push, and does it effectively. But “Breakthrough” also feels very telegraphed in how this story is going to go; it is said to be based on the “impossible true story,” and look, if you can’t figure out how this movie is going to end by the virtue that someone decided to make it in the first place, I’m not quite sure what to say.
This is a movie that explicitly calls on the power of prayer to heal when medical science can only go so far, and I don’t know if there are many film protagonists more believing in that than Joyce Smith, played by Chrissy Metz. She loves her adopted son John (Marcel Ruiz), whom her husband Brian (Josh Lucas) and her adopted on a mission trip. But John is very much a teenager, and still bitter about how his birth family did not want him, and not quite ready to let Joyce and Brian in; his oral family history report gives us that much insight into him. When he falls into the ice, it’s something that surely would have killed most people, and yet, he’s not only rescued, but he manages to come back from an hour of having no pulse, after 45 minutes of medical procedures have no impact, after Joyce prays passionately to God. Subtlety is not exactly this film’s strong suit.
It’s interesting that, in the past month, I saw completely different movies from Roxann Dawson’s film that touch on some of the ideas I laid out in this film’s premise, that find more interesting and honest ways of approaching them. “Shazam!” is basically a superhero origin story, but Billy Baston’s story is that of an orphan who is bitter about being an orphan, and desperate to find his birth mother, and, like John at the beginning of this film, he has a hard time accepting Joyce and Brian as his true family, even if they’ve raised him since he was a baby. The other film is “Them That Follows,” which deals with faith healing within a pentacostal snake handling community. A big tenant of their faith is that, if the snake bites you, prayer is the way towards healing, not modern medicine, and that zealous belief in God’s love is not dissimilar to Joyce’s here. In the last act of this film, we see Joyce speaking alone to God, and we get insight into why she believes so strongly as she does, and we see her repent in a way that will be tested when she goes back to her son’s room. It’s one of the most affecting moments in the film, and leads to the ending we see coming. Seeing how the two films deal with a similar idea is one of the great pleasures of casting a wide net in the type of movies we watch.
There is one thing I was quite taken by throughout “Breakthrough,” though, although it is something that is not a terribly essential part of the plot, though one that gives it more interest, to be sure. Joyce’s pastor is the film is Jason, a young pastor who came to Joyce’s church not long ago, and whose ways of approaching the ministry are more modern and geared towards engaging youth than the spiritual experience Joyce is used to. Jason is played by Topher Grace, and there are scenes after John’s accident between he and Joyce that are fascinating in how they explore the ideas of two diametric opposites on a spectrum as rich as a religious one meet in the middle, and come to understand each other better. This was my favorite part of the movie, and if more faith-based films had the courage of their convictions to explore it, maybe they would be able to engage more than just the converted with the message they try to impart in a film like “Breakthrough.”
