Billy: The Early Years
| posted 10/10/08
Billy Graham has appeared in many movies over the years, most of them produced by World Wide Pictures,
the movie studio that he founded through his evangelistic ministry in
the 1950s. But apart from a handful of parodies, no actor has ever
played him before, and certainly no film has tried to show what kind of
person he was prior to becoming the internationally recognized preacher
that he is today. So there was lots of fertile ground for Billy: The Early Years, the first major Graham biopic, to explore. Too bad, then, that the film does such a poor job of bringing his story to life.
Directed by Robby Benson (an actor-turned-director best known for voicing the furry prince in Disney's Beauty and the Beast) from a script by William Paul McKay (who produced the miraculous-survival-of-Israel documentary series Against All Odds) and Jana Lyn Rutledge (whose résumé includes the Canadian Christian kids' show Circle Square), the film does have one brilliant idea, but squanders its potential.
 Armie Hammer as Billy Graham  |
The film takes its cue from Amadeus, and
tells the story of Graham's life through the eyes of Charles Templeton
(Martin Landau), an old, hospitalized man who worked with Graham in the
early days but then lost his faith. Now, decades after abandoning the
ministry, Templeton is on his deathbed and giving an interview to a
reporter (Jennifer O'Neill) who wants to know what working with Graham
was like.
In an ideal world, this set-up would allow the
filmmakers to wrestle with questions of faith and doubt, with Graham
(Armie Hammer) on one side and Templeton (the younger version of whom
is played by Kristoffer Polaha) on the other. In an ideal world, this
set-up would allow the filmmakers to go deeper than the typical
hagiography; it would allow the modern viewer to get seriously involved
in Graham's life story and the issues it raises, far more than any mere
sermon could ever do.
But alas, this device never really works, for several reasons.
For one thing, despite the fact that old Templeton
narrates much of the 98-minute movie, young Templeton does not share
the screen with Graham until about an hour into the film (though we do
get brief glimpses of the young Templeton's own preaching, which he did
before meeting Graham, as an aside). So basically two-thirds of
Graham's life story is narrated by a guy who wasn't even there. This
gives us no opportunity to compare and contrast their characters, and
it causes us to wonder why the framing device was needed in the first
place.
 Martin Landau and Jennifer O'Neill |
Given that the film covers 15 years in Graham's
life—from his conversion as a teen at a revival meeting in
1934 to his landmark Los Angeles crusade in 1949—perhaps the
filmmakers wanted to use this device to smooth over the various
transition points, as the narrative hops from one episode in Graham's
life to another. But if that was the idea, it doesn't work. The movie
tends to skim the various bits and pieces of Graham's life story as
though it were offering a point-form synopsis of his biography, like
the sidebar in an encyclopedia entry, rather than telling a story, and no amount of narration can hide the fact that the film keeps things pretty superficial.
For example, no sooner does Templeton say that
Graham went to Bob Jones College, than we are suddenly sitting in Bob
Jones's office, watching him chew Graham out, without any first-hand
knowledge of the experiences on campus to which Jones and Graham refer.
The scene seems over-the-top as Jones yells at Graham that he will
"never! never! NEVER! amount to anything," and that his life apart from
BJC will be nothing more than "failure! failure! and MORE FAILURE!"
While Graham's autobiography—and several consultants who knew
Bob Jones—confirm that the scene is accurate, it still seems
overblown (and overacted) without the appropriate context.
That's but the tip of the iceberg in a screenplay
that is full of extremely obvious and heavy-handed moments, a film that
quickly moves from one highlight in Graham's life to the next. In fact,
the BJC scene is immediately followed by a glimpse of Graham's next
school, Florida Bible Institute, where the students apparently sat in
class and smiled like they were in a promotional video.
 Billy and Charles Templeton (Kristopher Polaha) |
I do like the scenes in which we see Graham rehearse
his preaching voice, yelling and waving his arms as he steps out of the
shower or walks down the hall. But when he actually preaches for the
first time, things get wildly over-the-top again, as the camera rushes
in on the churchgoers who clutch their Bibles and jerk their heads back
as though the sheer force of Graham's voice has knocked them over.
The film is full of other head-scratchers, too.
Early on in Graham's attempts to woo his Wheaton College classmate Ruth
Bell (Stefanie Butler), we can hear Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams' playing
in the background, presumably on the cafeteria's speakers. But wait a
minute: even if this choice of song were not woefully anachronistic
(the Grahams married in 1943, the song came out in 1963), would an
evangelical college really have accepted secular pop music so casually
back then?
And then there is the dialogue. When Templeton gives
a big speech announcing his agnosticism, he uses awkward expressions
like "I realize it to the center of my core"—and presumably
also to the middle of his hub and the heart of his nucleus—and
he says he can longer accept many of "the tenants, the fundamental
tenants" of Christianity. (Presumably he meant "tenets".) And when
Graham, disturbed by his colleague's professions of doubt, asks his
mother (Lindsay Wagner) what to do, she replies with one of the oldest
Hollywood clichés: "Listen to your heart, Billy."
 Director Robby Benson works with Hammer |
Without giving too much away, the film ends on a
couple of awfully muddled notes, as well. Throughout the framing
narrative, old Templeton—who suffered from Alzheimer's before
his death in 2001—keeps telling seemingly invisible people in
the hospital to "go away," and it is only at the end that we find out
what he is looking at. But then he suddenly starts saying other,
happier things, as if the filmmakers wanted to end on an uplifting note
and they needed him to have a deathbed conversion, rather than stay
bitter—the way that Salieri did at the end of Amadeus.
I haven't a clue whether there is any historical basis for this
last-minute change of heart for Templeton, but as drama, this sudden,
unexplained shift in tone is confusing, more than anything else.
And then there is our last image of the young Graham
himself. Some of the real-life Grahams have expressed concern that a
film about the preacher might draw attention away from the One being
preached, and the final scene—of Graham preaching and calling
on his listeners to come forward and give their lives to
Christ—seems like an attempt to address that concern. But
there's just one catch: the preaching in question is set at the Los
Angeles crusade of 1949, which is widely recognized as the point when
Graham became something of a national celebrity. So after Graham calls
on his audience to come forward, the film cuts to a shot from behind
his back, as he stands there with his arms outstretched, and a series
of flashbulbs go off. It might be going too far to say that Graham
eclipses Christ in this scene, but at the very least, the main emphasis
does seem to be on Graham's newfound status as the evangelistic
equivalent of a rock star.
The film does have its merits. The sets and costumes do a decent job of bringing the past to life, and Hammer
does a credible Graham impression, while finding some nice bits of
humor in the movie's more intimate moments, especially where Billy's
relationship with Ruth is concerned. But if the script isn't up to
snuff, none of the other stuff matters. And this particular screenplay
is nowhere close to that.
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