“An Interview With God” is a film that was released last year. Perry Lang is the director of this piece written by Ken Aguado. Brenton Thwaites plays Paul Asher, a journalist who recently worked as a war correspondent coming home to a crumbling marriage, with the unique opportunity to use his gifts to get some answers from the Almighty. David Straitharn has the daunting task of portraying God and handles it pretty convincingly. Morgan Freeman is considered one of the most recent definitive cinematic representations of God, but I also liked Straitharn’s version.
The set-up is that Paul has three meetings scheduled with this unassuming gentleman who claims to be God. He has thirty minutes to ask whatever question he wants each session. He also demonstrates the resistance many of us tend to exhibit when God wants to help us through difficulty and tragedy.
A lot of Christian films of this sort tend to be burdened with some clunky dialogue. Although this film isn’t entirely free of that, it does have some very compelling moments and a few interesting twists as to what is really going on in Asher’s troubled personal life.
God does have the somewhat frustrating technique of answering questions with questions in this one, but it doesn’t fail to hit home. This is one of the more poignant efforts to encourage knowledge of Scripture and to stay engaged with God.
The film does get into the common but often short-sighted questions such as why bad things happen to good people but still manages to not try to leave at one pat answer.
This isn’t a film with a large budget obviously, but of course it doesn’t need it. Christian films can come off as a little naïve and simplistic at times, however this one has a little more complexity to it.
I don’t know this film hits the bulls-eye for this genre, but I don’t know if any film does that for any genre anymore. I was glad that I took the time to watch this one.
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