‘Where We Started’ Is a Picture of What Christian Cinema Could Be

Exhausted from the road, a failed actor checks into a cheap motel. He calls his wife to tell her he won’t be in, and, unsurprised by her indifference, hangs up and lies down on the lumpy mattress. He’d sleep, but the light pouring in the window is keeping him up. So he steps outside, and just past his door is a beautiful woman smoking a cigarette. Where We Started offers a reminder of how prosaic sin frequently is: it’s neither murderous villainy nor forbidden secret pleasures, but simply broken people breaking themselves a little further.

She seems just as lonely as he is.

A banal moment, maybe. One predictable in its consequences, and maybe not one for the “family friendly” set, but it’s human. It feels real, and it’s a reminder that temptation waits for all of us, even those of us who see ourselves as “good people.”

It’s also the beginning of Where We Started, a simple indie film produced in part by the Christian school Baylor University — and one that got me to thinking about what it means to make a “Christian movie.” Where We Started is a quiet film with only two named characters that takes place in the space of less than 12 hours, and nothing explicitly “Christian” is ever mentioned — and yet, by the end, I found myself shedding real tears for the tragic weight of sin.

The film follows its two characters — wannabe actor Will (Matthew Brumlow) and bored housewife Nora (Cora Vander Broek) — from the parking lot to a diner and back to their rooms as they wrestle with what they both know they want to do and try to ignore the act’s inevitable consequences. Along the way they discuss their failing marriages, their unfortunate careers, and (mostly) John Hughes movies.

It’s not a film anyone would mistake for ambitious, but what it does it does well: it allows the viewer to step inside the two characters’ minds for a couple of hours and understand why they yearn so desperately for a moment of human connection. It leads the viewer to yearn for the climactic moment of adultery while simultaneously dreading its coming — and in that small but fundamental sense, it can be considered a success.

It’s also a picture of what Christian cinema could be, if only Christians had a bit more imagination.

As I was watching Where We Started, my mind kept returning to this piece, which appeared on ChristianCinema.com back in October, curiously unsigned but attributed to someone who worked on Left Behind (emphasis mine):

[I]t’s ridiculous to call out the production and story quality of [Left Behind]. Every single disaster movie ever made has mediocre character development,  contrived plot lines that enable people to escape death…, cases of bad acting and weak dialogue…, and a combination of both quality and mediocre (or even poor) CGI. Left Behind is absolutely true to its genre, and it’s the closest we’ve come to duplicating a successful Hollywood film model.

At the time I read this, I was struck by the two assumptions at the core of the piece: (1) that a “Christian film industry” ought to exist, and (2) that it ought to look like Hollywood. These two assumptions are so foundational to the piece’s argument that I wonder if the author was even aware of them. But they are assumptions. Does there need to be a whole separate category of “Christian” movies? (And to what end? Evangelism? Preaching to the choir? Emptying the pockets of the faithful?) And if there is one, why should we expect its movies to look like Hollywood’s?

After all, there are examples of great cinema from around the world and throughout history, many of which bear no resemblance to big-budget Hollywood movies at all. (What about the German expressionism of the 1920s? The Japanese samurai movies of the 1950s? The American indie films of the 1990s?) Drawing from the limited palette of “whatever’s popular right now” is at least part of what’s wrong with Christian cinema: we’re aping tricks without understanding them, like a teenager who thinks he’s ready to start a band after learning four power chords.

Where We Started, for its part, is at times almost laughably amateurish, but because it never presents itself as anything other than a quirky indie drama, these flaws tend to be endearing instead of distracting. The viewer wants it to succeed because it’s scrappy, as opposed to rooting against it because of its hubris. And because it arrives at its conclusion honestly — letting the characters guide the action, as opposed to putting them on a predetermined track toward an obligatory conversion scene — I think it will win most viewers over, Christian or not.

Let me briefly touch on one of its flaws, though, because this one did come close to being a deal-breaker for me early on, and I think it’s instructive on the subject of how not to tell a story.

I’m referring to the aforementioned John Hughes motif. The film’s two characters keep bringing up his ’80s teen movies throughout the night, as an illustration of the central theme that pop culture gives people unrealistic expectations for love and relationships. This is fine as a theme, but the film simply ignores the rather glaring fact that its characters would both have been in diapers when Hughes films were lighting up marquees. Compounding this is the film’s occasionally stilted dialog, and in fact, Nora first brings up Hughes for no apparent reason at all, in what might be the most awkward line ever written: “Yeah, When Harry Met Sally — pretty good movie — but y’know who still gets me? John Hughes.”

This might seem like a small thing — and it is — but I bring it up as an example of how all the sincerity in the world will only get you so far if you don’t have the basics of storytelling down. It’s frustrating in part because it could have been dealt with through just a couple of lines (maybe the characters both had siblings who were ten years older and introduced them to Ferris Bueller et al?), but instead the film just expects the viewer to accept it. It’s a small thing to suspend disbelief over, but it’s annoying that we have to suspend our disbelief at all.

This sort of hiccup is frustrating because it is small (and therefore easily dealt with). It distances the characters at a point in the story when it’s crucial that the viewer become ingratiated to them. After all, the ultimate moral value of a drama like this is empathy — allowing the viewer to appreciate the universal and very human longings that lead to sin. A story about two horrible people having an affair is just a boring one, but if those characters are made sympathetic, the story becomes compelling.

Occasional hiccup aside, Where We Started actually does this very well. Once I put the John Hughes issue out of my mind, I found myself swept up in the story and the characters, yearning for them to be together but knowing they never could. In fact, it was ultimately the film’s ending that won me over. I’ll avoid spoilers, but the plot is resolved neither with divine condemnation nor idyllic wish-fulfillment, but with the simple gravity of adulthood. It’s a reminder of how prosaic sin frequently is: it’s neither murderous villainy nor forbidden secret pleasures, but simply broken people breaking themselves a little further.

This, ultimately, is the success of Where We Started. It won’t wow viewers with amazing special effects, but it does manage to find some wisdom in the mundane — which is arguably a much greater accomplishment.

Note: Where We Started is currently available for viewing on Amazon Instant Video. It’s free to Amazon Prime subscribers.