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Conversations With God

2006, Movie, PG, 109 mins

Conversations With God: Review

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD
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Stephen Simon's reverent account of the awakening of Neale Donald Walsch, author of a series of best-selling books, focuses on the personal crises that left Walsch (Henry Czerny) destitute and despairing but also prompted him to forge the personal connection with God he parlayed into a spiritual self-help empire. The film opens in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1995, as Walsch addresses a generally adoring audience about the message of his book: That the God of his title is the God of all faiths, not one; that God helps those who help themselves; that God is about unconditional love, not fear of retribution. It then flashes back to Portland, Oregon, 1990 — the year Walsch breaks his neck in a car accident, loses his job and quickly finds himself homeless, hungry and humiliated. Walsch has always worked in radio, but his age and neck brace make him a tough sell to employers. When he does finally find a gig — just one afternoon a week at a local station, but it's a start back up the ladder — even that small shred of hope is pulled out from under him: He arrives one day to find the door padlocked and a bankruptcy notice stuck to the glass. In his darkest hour, Walsch rails at God, demanding answers to his most heartfelt questions. And God answers, a disembodied voice who counsels Walsch in the night as he scribbles feverish notes on yellow legal pads. Those notes eventually become Walsch's books, and the film continues to flash back and forth between the years of Walsch's success and the lean years that forced him to re-examine his values and reconnect with his spiritual self, pairing harsh misfortunes with the spiritual lessons learned. The film is clearly a labor of love for longtime producer Simon, and just as clearly preaches to the converted: It's secular hagiography at its least subtle. Czerny bears more than a passing resemblance to the author (which renders snide allusions to his "Christlike look" moot), but his performance is surprisingly one-dimensional — the colorful characters Walsch encounters during his down-and-out period may be cliches, but they're far more vivid. To Simon's credit, the sequences in which Walsch tries to crawl back into middle-class comfort after his precipitous slide into the gutter have a bitterly realistic edge, but overall the film feels attenuated: The same messages are reiterated in sequence after sequence, and individual scenes run much longer than required to make their point. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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