Review: The Third Miracle
Starring Ed Harris, Anne Heche, and Armin
Mueller-Stahl.
Directed by Agnieszka Holland.
Based on the novel by Richard Vetere.
Ed Harris is a priest who is not sure he believes in God. He’s even less sure that he wants to be a priest anymore. He seems the perfect skeptic for debunking a miraculous bleeding statue of the Virgin Mary. A least his bishop thinks so. The Church hierarchy takes a dim view of these things, and in truth there’s something desperately depressing about the parishioners’ uncritical eagerness to believe. Set in Chicago in the 1970s, these are people who go to church every Sunday and beat their kids the rest of the week The bishop lives in a mansion and talks like a corporate manager. Which, of course, he is. Harris’ priest in the guy in the middle.
If there’s one word that sums up this movie, that word is unsentimental. The Church is convincingly portrayed as a hard-nosed institution, part corporate board room and part military barracks. Spontaneous religious faith takes the form of a pimp crossing himself or a junkie raising his eyes to heaven to give thanks for a dollar bill. Father Frank could pass for Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe, walking the mean streets of the city in pursuit of the truth-- God knows why, for all the good it will do either him or anyone else. He is driven to follow his conscience, and following his conscience will likely make him miserable.
Enter Roxanna (Heche), the adult daughter of the woman who is up for sainthood (the aforementioned statue is supposedly bleeding the deceased woman’s blood). It’s bad enough having a mother who’s literally a saint; add having been abandoned by her at age sixteen while she went off to serve God and the Church, and you’ve got one embittered young woman. Roxanna and Frank have a lot in common, as they discover after initially bristling at each other. They become drinking partners, and well on their way to becoming involved. Roxanna is as tough as brass; she’s had a lot of pain in her life but she doesn’t expect anyone to cry tears for her. Just like Frank. So the last thing Frank wants to do is hurt her. Problem is, he’s still a priest. Doing the right thing is impossibly complicated. (In the theater where I saw this movie, there were two little old ladies sitting behind me. During the scene where Harris and Heche are kissing, and slowly sinking to the floor in her bedroom, the two old dears where whispering “no, no!� just as I was thinking, “yes, yes!�)
I won’t reveal which of us got our wish.
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