‘Miracles From Heaven’
› Rating: PG for thematic material, including accident and medical images. › Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.
The rise of the so-called “faith-based film” – typically low-budget films that are almost uniformly evangelical – has occurred largely in a bubble of its own like a sheltering harbor for Christian believers at that heathen meeting place: the multiplex.
“Miracles From Heaven,” a film whose title even Hallmark would blush at, is an attempt to expand the reach of the faith-based film a little beyond the flock. To do so, it has armed itself with two things: the star power of Jennifer Garner and a full barrage of sentimentality. The fate of a sick 10-year-old girl precariously hangs in the balance.
The film, directed by Patricia Riggen (“The 33”), is adapted from the memoir of Christy Beam, whose Texas family is jolted when one of their three daughters, Anna (played sweetly by Kylie Rogers), is found to suffer from a rare disorder that leaves her chronically unable to digest food.
“Based on real events,” is how the film presents itself, and some of its best qualities are in depicting elements of life – the frightful anxiety of parenthood, the struggle to find meaning amid hardship – that don’t often make it into the movies.