I STILL BELIEVE: Manic Christian Dream Girl

The Christian propaganda romantic drama I Still Believe has lofty A Star Is Born-again ambitions. Riverdale’s hunkster lead KJ Apa stars as Jeremy Camp, a guitar-slinging Indiana boy who goes off to college and falls in love with the first cute blonde girl he sees — Melissa, played by Britt Robertson.

Jeremy also meets cute with Jean-Luc (Nathan Parsons), the eyeliner-toting lead guitarist for a Christian rock band — think Creed, but with even less edge — that Jeremy idolizes. The table’s set early for a classic Los Angeles rising-star musical romance, and for about 30 minutes, I Still Believe stays light on the Christian messaging and whips Jeremy and Melissa into likable leads.

Directors Andrew and Jon Erwin, though, don’t combine to form one Bradley Cooper, which makes I Still Believe about two Erwins too many and a couple of Coopers short. “I write love songs… to God,” someone says, and the way this thing is scripted, it could have been any one of the eight characters with speaking parts. I Still Believe could be easily restaged as a two-man play in a black box theater, and that version of the story would be a thousand times more interesting than the wannabe come-to-Jesus Star Is Born vibe the film is going for.

A Note on Propaganda

Like the Erwins’ previous drama, I Can Only Imagine, this one’s a biopic, as well as a snug entry into an ever-growing American Christian film canon. It’s the debut project from Kingdom Story Company, Lionsgate’s Christan production arm. Thankfully, though, I Still Believe is as subtle as Christian propaganda tends to come. To its credit, the film’s views of women, minority groups, and American foreign policy are noticeably more benevolent than fellow Republican-aligned Christian film industry kids God’s Not Dead and War Room. There are inexplicably few minority characters in the film, which explains how we stay out of deep racial water. I Still Believe is certainly the whitest L.A. has ever been.

There’s nothing wrong with propaganda, of course — the Avengers movies have been military adverts 25 installments strong, and they’ve made more money than the GDP of Trinidad and Tobago. I Still Believe, though, isn’t even well-made propaganda, unlikely to win any converts or even inspire filmgoers to either visit the website or buy the album plugged at the end. Yet I’ve read reviewers complaining that the film isn’t more religious. I suppose you can’t please everybody.

Religious cinemagoers and I can probably agree that the ground the film’s walking is well-trodden indeed. I’ve had my Confirmation for my Presbyterian church and attended Sunday school for most of my young life. I get how these stories usually work. The film would be more interesting if it stuck with the musical biopic genre and delivered a different kind of Christian drama, but instead it retreats to the teat of “God and faith in turbulent times,” a milk that’s been putrefying in cinemas for 100 years and hasn’t been fresh since D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. It’s a shame, because Apa and Robertson are young and hot enough to draw in the teen crowd, but the film just uses Jeremy as a newly evangelized pretty boy and Melissa as the manic Christian dream girl responsible for his conversion.

Melissa doesn’t feel like a portrait of a real woman — she’s just an attractive mouthpiece for mega-imperialist Christian dogma. She’s always in the right place at the right time, she flashes a huge, adorable, toothy smile whenever Jeremy gets annoyed with her, and her only fault is that she gets cancer — a fatal diagnosis the film tries to disguise as a character flaw.

Not that Jeremy is much more realistic. When Jean-Luc tells him that Melissa’s in the hospital and not looking too good, Jeremy is spending his winter break back home in Indiana. The guy drives cross-country in a snowstorm to be with his first-semester freshman-year girlfriend, he tells her he loves her, and he proposes to her. And though the “insurance scam” synapses should be firing off in Melissa’s brain, her drug-addled mind agrees to marry the man.

Though this is the kind of kneejerk romantic decision that’ll get you reprimanded in a modern animated Disney feature — “You can’t marry a man you just met” is how Elsa put it — Jeremy and Melissa turn out to be a surprisingly wholesome couple. But the destined-to-be-together schtick still rings hollow — we’re not all young hot movie stars, after all — and to make matters worse, I Still Believe insists that big, grand, expensive declarations of love are the only ones that matter. What’s a proposal if it isn’t done in a lavishly decorated chapel? What’s a wedding if it isn’t conducted on a beach that looks lifted from a postcard? And somehow, a scene or two later, she’s making a sandwich in an empty kitchen, and I realized these two kids somehow bought a house between scenes after Jeremy’s family made a big deal about barely being able to afford college in California.

Real human lives are much more tricky than doe-eyed Hollywood matchmaking would have you think. The thesis of I Still Believe is the same one espoused by Melissa in her hospital bed — that if one person is touched by her enduring faith in the face of immense suffering, then it’s all justified. But why not make the lovestruck teens relatable in the least? Jeremy and Melissa are hardly more three-dimensional than the Christian martyrs emblazoned on stained-glass windows.

Christianity has been powered by epic hero-worship stories long before the invention of cinema, but a theater is different from the pulpit. As propaganda, I Still Believe is hardly relatable, and as a testament to the real Melissa Lynn Henning-Camp, it’s incredibly superficial. The film spends 110 minutes in loathsome self-centeredness ordaining Melissa as a saint while refusing to add any layers to her character. And then in its closing minutes, the film shockingly bins her entire legacy, resulting in a project that feels more exploitative of her suffering than inspired by it.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Melissa.

The horse-blinder scripting doesn’t help. There’s a classic improv game called “Yes, and…” in which the participants keep a scene going by starting every sentence with the phrase, but I Still Believe is driven instead by the far stodgier game “And God.”

All Jeremy and Melissa talk about is God — even an early scene of Jeremy and Melissa flirting ends with Jeremy basically telling her it’s God’s plan that they f*ck. Besides that, they talk a little bit about love and a little bit about music. They spend 30 minutes in college, but we never have any inkling of what they’re studying. What’s the point of making a biopic specifically about these two if there’s no individuality to the way their story is told?

There are some much better faith-based movies out there that manage to present conflicted, fully realized characters while exploring the tenets of Christianity without being blatant endorsements of the religion — auteur masterworks like Tree of Life and Silence. But the much more down-to-earth Philomena, Stephen Frears’ absolutely wonderful 2013 drama, captures Christianity better than any of these films, simply by letting its characters be characters.

It very beautifully explores the Christianity of one woman — Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) — rather than Christianity entire. And it doesn’t preach, instead using narrative to test Philomena time and again and relying on her firm moral stance to do the right thing. It’s also the only Christian film in which Steve Coogan tells a nun to f*ck off. That willingness to have characters be imperfect separates the effective Christian drama from the ineffective, and I Still Believe fundamentally refuses to engage with the human story at its core, like a disgusted parent holding out a smelly, freshly relieved infant.

The film is also fatally faithless in the value of art besides as a mechanism to deliver Christian themes. I Still Believe is lit, shot, and edited like Grey’s Anatomy, with neither poignancy to the camera angles nor purpose to the composition. A brief lovey-dovey scene of Jeremy and Melissa lighting paper lanterns on a beach at night can easily play as the background footage for an Activia ad.

A film’s message and story should never come at the expense of its technical craft — if you’re producing propaganda, of all things, a mastery of the art of filmmaking would be more beneficial to you. Millions of people wouldn’t flock to see the Vatican each year if it weren’t an architectural and artistic marvel.

Happy Endings Abound, Improbably

Naturally, God cures Melissa’s cancer. And while the real Melissa might have been miraculously cured long enough to go on honeymoon with Jeremy, it’s treated with such a cavalier and condescending attitude in the film that what might have been an uplifting twist is instead a moronic deus-ex-machina, the translation of which is “a god from a machine,” appropriate given that most American Christian drama films end with one.

And in case you didn’t get it, Jean-Luc is there to gleefully preach on live radio, “There is literally no medical explanation! None! Whatsoever!” You don’t say. I Still Believe treats cancer as a bizarre bellwether of faith. The film’s blunt treatment of Melissa’s disease and mysterious recovery grotesquely imply that if God doesn’t cure your cancer, it’s because you don’t love Him enough.

God’s intervention is a substantiation of the wife worship the film is predicated on, as well as an alarming indication of what kind of life God deems worth saving. Melissa’s a perfect preacher and a loyal partner, relentlessly supportive and never seeking a life independent from her husband. As good as Robertson is at playing resolve, Melissa always exists at the whims of others. She’s a leading lady on a tight leash, with no more individuality than a marionette. And yet I Still Believe needs her — she’s the manic Christian dream girl who tempts lovestruck men toward salvation.

When I Still Believe was showing in theaters in early March and coronavirus was only beginning its march across the country, the ticket was hardly worth the medical risk that came with it. At home, I Still Believe hardly seems more appealing. I can’t help but think, though, that in 20 years we’ll see a Christian film about this disastrous epidemic. A romance starring two hot teenagers, one of whom contracts COVID-19, with the ultimate, asinine message being that if you love God enough, He’ll cure your coronavirus.

I Still Believe is now available on streaming platforms.