"The Preacher's Wife" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL December 14, 1996 I'm probably going to sound like the Grinch this morning, or Scrooge, or some other holiday season spoilsport. I know you're supposed to LIKE what's being billed as "The Best Holiday film in decades." And with a woman director and a woman in the title role who is an excellent singer and gets to sing a lot, not to mention one of my favorite male stars, Penny Marshall's newest film, "The Preacher's Wife," starring Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington sure sounds like a winner. Maybe it was me--I was tired and that affects my ability to watch a film attentively. Trouble was, nothing was happening up on the screen for about the first 2/3 of the film and not a great deal in the last third, so I kept drifting. It's not that I can't fall for treacle (the other night I watched the old '50s holiday film "White Christmas" on tv and surrendered to it as fully today as I did when I was a kid). It was no less transparent and obvious than "The Preacher's Wife" but somehow it was able to suck me in in a way that this newer Christmas film was not. Maybe it's the angel bit. I don't really understand the current rage for angels in popular culture. We see angel greeting cards everywhere. The bookstores are filled with gift books of angels. We turn on the tv and there are shows about angels straightening folks' lives out every week. There's a John Travolta film coming soon in which he plays an angel, too. In "The Preacher's Wife" we have Denzel Washington as the angel Dudley come down to earth to help out Preacher Biggs (Courtney Vance) who is in deep depression. His church is insolvent, his wife is feeling ignored and frustrated, he's not able to help the people he tries to help, and he's dull as can be when he gets into the pulpit to deliver a sermon, a failure overshadowed by the memory of his late father-in-law who was a silver tongued orator. In despair he calls on God for help, but, of course, doesn't recognize the help when in comes in the form of a neatly dressed young man with a dazzling smile who tells him he's an angel sent by HIM to help him. One of the problems with this film is that the expository sections, introducing the various characters and problems, are kind of chaotic. Either the writing, the direction or the editing (or a combination of all three) made it a bit hard to figure out exactly what was going on and who was who. Eventually it became clear, but that was kind of a distraction. Many of the sight gags didn't work very well (a page in the Angels' Handbook on how to use Windows 3.1). Another was that Denzel Washington didn't have enough to do. There were just too many shots in which he was called upon just to stand there and look sweet something he does very well, but too often. There were some efforts to get laughs from his supernatural powers, but not enough in the early parts of the film. There was an emphasis on his enjoyment of earthly pleasures (like pizza and beautiful women) but as an angel the latter, at least, were off limits. One of the main themes, of course, is the preacher's wife falling for the handsome stranger and he for her, but since Whitney Houston doesn't act very well and Denzel Washington couldn't be seen actually lusting after the wife of the man he was supposed to help that aspect of the film kind of fell flat, too. The most we see is Dudley imagining himself instead of Preacher Biggs standing in the wedding picture, and even this minor bit of lusting in his heart elicits a sharp thunder clap from the Almighty. (Maybe the upcoming angelic turn by Travolta will be better in that respect, it's being advertised with the slogan "I'm an angel, not a saint!") What does this picture have going for it? Lots of good gospel music. Adorable little kids. Nearly free of sex and violence, so you can take small kids or your aged mother (as I did) without fear of contamination or offense. It seems to be working as a crossover film, i.e., a film with almost a completely Black cast that is drawing a racially mixed audience. I have a hunch that this is actually going to be more popular with white audiences than Black. This is a remake of a 1947 film called "The Bishop's Wife" that starred Cary Grant as the angel and David Niven and Loretta Young as the Bishop and his wife and, although the setting is moved from white Episcoplian to an urban New Jersey African American Baptist, my sense is that the transformation is largely cosmetic and that all this may not ring very true to a Black audience. On the other hand, one of the things you don't expect a movie like this to do is "ring true." It's feel good fantasy--everything will work out well in the end and everyone, even the greediest of real estate developers, will have the milk of human kindness in his veins by the time the angel is back in his Heaven on Christmas morning. The only traces he leaves behind are the words of an innocent child whom the adults don't believe and a Christmas tree ornament in the shape of an angel in a gray flannel suit. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.