Directed by Richard Pearce
Written by Janus Cercone
Cinematography by Matthew F. Leonetti
Edited by John F. Burnett, Mark Warner, and Don Zimmerman
Music by Cliff Eidelman
Produced by Michael Manheim and David V. Picker
Starring
Steve Martin as Jonas Nightengale
Debra Winger as Jane
Meat Loaf as Hoover (Bus Driver)
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Matt (Grift crew)
Liam Neeson as Sheriff
Lolita Davidovich as Marva
Lukas Haas as Boyd
. . .
"Take it from me, babe, you can't have it both ways."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
This is that movie where Steve Martin plays flamboyant yet fraudulent faith healer Jonas Nightengale. Jonas does all the bits. He dances and twitches and gesticulates his way through a mixture of musical theater kid routines cross-collateralized with a knockoff version of Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. He does the thing where he puts his hands on someone’s head and then they fall to the floor, writhing and hollering as though they’ve been zapped with a holy ghost power orgasm. The lame shall walk with but the laying on of hands. The sick shall be restored to health. The grieving will know their loved ones precede them into their Father’s House. The poor shall be enriched-or, y’know, get a lead on some day labor. And the drunkard shall lay down his bottle. Jonas extemporizes borderline word salad sermons about the grace of a loving God whilst cold reading the desperate wishes of audiences full of the used, the abused, the addicted, the injured, the unemployed, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised. Those collection plates overflow with dollar bills. Martin, with his peculiarly intense brand of sincere insincerity, wrings every last drop out of the character. From the beginning we see him as a S-tier Bullshit Master for the Ages . . . and yet it’s hard not to fall for him. It’s the purity of his devotion to the act. He knows very well that there is no God, but I believe Jonas believes in his performance of faith with every ounce of his being. This bizarre contradiction of a character is the primary reason to watch Leap of Faith.
The setup is ambitious. A Biblical tent revival takes its act on the road, playing the large population centers, and raking in that Cash American. We get plenty of coverage of the earthly logistics of this heavenly operation: a couple of buses, a semi truck, and a beater of a pickup to navigate local roads once they’ve selected a target and erected their big tent. It’s the circus, all right.
You’d think they would just use holy ghost power to teleport themselves around the Bible Belt, but they use gasoline power like the rest of us-which is relatable, I guess.
We see how Jonas’s crew operates. They have a computer database full of detailed population demographics. Portable concealed walkie talkies facilitate clandestine communications. Preshow shills work arriving audience members for juicy bits of exploitable intel. Audience plants juice the action of the crowd with a timely “Amen!” or “Praise the Lord!” if things get slow. The show proper features terrific singing and music courtesy of a Black gospel choir. When Jonas-a floridly narcissistic white boy who practically fucks the spotlight-takes the stage it is sort of impressive that he works as hard as he does considering all the priming of the audience. Jonas could half-ass it and still make a mint.
The second most interesting character is Jane, who operates a high tech computerized command center backstage. Jonas’s big tent is fitted out with a cleverly concealed array of surveillance cameras. Jane’s monitoring the live feeds via stack o’screens, and she feeds prompts to Jonas through a semi-concealed earpiece. The grift crew has already spotted prime marks and noted down where they’re all sitting in the audience. Jane functions as both mission control and as Jonas’s second brain, helping steer his cold reads’n’riffs in the right direction. Jane shuns the spotlight but she is the secret costar of the big show. She’s played with mischievous flair by Debra Winger.
On a personal level, Jane and Jonas have intriguing chemistry. They’re not romantically involved, which is a refreshing screenwriting choice, and yet there’s a strange spark between them. They both seem to get turned on by the spectacle they produce. The two of them together create a special somebody that neither of them could ever be on their own. Alone Jonas is a cut rate jiveass hoofer, but Jane’s computer nerd skills transform him into a “mind reading” Super Christian. As things develop, Jane starts to doubt the morality of manipulating poor small town people coping with drought, failing crops, deindustrialization, and a secularizing world that seems to be condemning them to obscure, desperate little lives. Jonas, at first, blithely accepts that people with no material hopes are easily bamboozled by promises of Heaven, but Jane helps to rekindle his conscience.
Jane’s other interest is in hooking up with the hunky-yet-skeptical sheriff played by Liam Neeson. At first, she seems to want to bang him out so he won’t revoke the big tent’s permit; later she seems to like him if not exactly love him. None of this quite amounts to as much as it should, but Winger and Neeson bring enough nuance to their roles to paper over the sketchy writing.
Jonas’s crisis of conscience is sparked by his encounter with a kid named Boyd, who was gravely injured in a vehicular crash. Boyd’s exercising vigorously as a form of physical therapy to get off his crutches. Jonas and Boyd’s dialogue is amusing as it ironically points up the profound immaturity of Jonas’s character. To no one’s surprise, Jonas incorporates Boyd into his show, even if he ends up feeling shitty about using an injured kid as a prop.
The rest of it is suffused with unrealized potential. A possibly colorful supporting cast is ruthlessly edited down to the bare minimum-though both the editing and cinematography are so slick you kinda want to forgive the screenplay and direction for their faults. An insipid subplot about a conflicted romance comes across as a bore when measured against the Mission Impossible-esque tricks and tactics of Jonas’s grift crew. The ending seemingly tries to con We the Audience into believing in miracles after ninety minutes of deconstructing the faith healer’s hustle. Maybe that’s the point: a con buried inside a con. My guess is that the production decided to play it both ways by debunking faith healing but then tossing in a “miracle” at the end to avoid offending the Religious Right. A more charitable reading is that Leap of Faith’s larger point is that, yes, the faith healer is trying to con us . . . but we are also conning ourselves when we seek to fervently believe in the miraculous. One cannot exist without the other. Overall, Leap of Faith needed a tougher point of view. The expansive Robert Altman ensemble cast version of this movie-if one had ever existed-would’ve been fascinating.
Leap of Faith tries to have it both ways even as it knows it can’t, which is too bad. It’s still a very entertaining watch. Jonas-the contradictory character at its heart-lingers in the mind even as the rest drifts away fart-on-the-wind-style.
