Evangelization at the Movies

I'm not typically weepy, but one particular movie always makes me cry. Okay, I’m putting it mildly; it turns me into a blubbering mess. Even walking through the family room, catching a few seconds of it on television can produce a quick lump in my throat.

The movie in question? Because of Winn Dixie, a 2005 film based on the novel of the same name, featuring a stray dog found in the grocery story (thus the name) and starring Jeff Daniels as an itinerant store-front preacher raising his daughter as a single father in a small Florida town.

Obviously, my man card is in jeopardy. It is not the crying—heck, Jesus himself wept—it’s the context. My tears might be excusable if wept in a man’s movie like Braveheart, with Mel Gibson’s agonized cry of  “freedom,” or Brian’s Song, with Billy Dee Williams’ halting “I love Brian Piccolo.” But crying in Because of Winn Dixie? I might as well cry over an ABC after-school special.

So how to interpret my tears?  Ironically, I tend to weep not at sad events in movies but at the beautiful ones: Celie reunited with her children in The Color Purple; in Dances with Wolves as Wind in his Hair declares his undying friendship, or in The Passion of the Christ when Mary’s maternal love recalls the falling boy Jesus as she sees her adult Son collapse beneath the cross. 

What, then, is so touching in Because of Winn Dixie? Despite having the title role, the dog was cute but forgettable. The movie was stolen by young Opal, played by Anna Sophia Robb, the girl who not only adopts the dog but has a remarkable capacity for finding beauty in people society has judged and dismissed; Miss Franny, a lonely librarian who has never married; Gloria Dump, a recovering alcoholic that other kids think is a witch; Otis, an ex-con who runs a local pet store; and Mr. Alfred, the grumpy landlord at the trailer park. 

Rather than judge, as most of us do, Opal actually listens to people; she is genuinely interested in them and their lives. She see goodness in them, and hears the stories that no one else takes time to hear. All this amid her own lingering brokenness, being raised by her preacher father after both of them were abandoned by her alcoholic mother when she was a young child.

By embracing the intrinsic dignity of everyone’s story—weaknesses and all—Opal’s love effectively unites all these misfit characters into an unlikely community, culminating in a party of her new friends gathered at Gloria Dump’s house. And that’s typically when I lose it.

At their best, movies embody virtues that our human hearts were made for, the echo of original goodness still latent in our sinful hearts. Yet part of the poignancy rests in our knowledge of how far we’ve fallen. We live in an age of contrasts—more “connected” than ever via social media and yet desperately lonely, quick to judge, and unable or unwilling to engage anyone we don’t find useful or whose friendship doesn’t correspond with our natural affinities. 

I see in Opal the love I often lack. Anybody who knows me—especially my family—can attest that I can be so focused on a task at hand that, whether intentionally or subconsciously, I treat others like benign or annoying distractions. Thus, the person who interrupts my plans is someone to deal with as quickly as possible in order to move on to more important things.

But the heart of the gospel is that people are ends in themselves; with their own inexhaustible mystery worth savoring. Thus, we apply to all what Blessed John Paul II called the personalistic norm: “The person is a good toward which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.”

In our call to evangelize, our good news means nothing if we do not embody God’s love to persons; treating them not as a means to an end, or even worse, an obstacle to our mission; no matter how noble our mission. We must see them—even those we find inconvenient or irritating-—as ends in themselves, infinitely loved by God, each with a story and unrepeatable mystery.

Do you want to be an effective witness to the love of God, leading others toward that communion for which we are all hard-wired? You might pop in that movie; Opal is a great role model. Just be sure to have plenty of tissue.