The Shack (2017)

The Shack (2017)

IMDB Rating : 6.6/10 (as on 26.03.2017)

After suffering a family tragedy, Mack Phillips spirals into a deep depression that causes him to question his innermost beliefs. Facing a crisis of faith, he receives a mysterious letter urging him to an abandoned shack in the Oregon wilderness. Despite his doubts, Mack journeys to the shack and encounters an enigmatic trio of strangers led by a woman named Papa. Through this meeting, Mack finds important truths that will transform his understanding of his tragedy and change his life forever.

Initial release: 3 March 2017 (USA)

Director: Stuart Hazeldine

Adapted from: The Shack

Writers: John Fusco (screenplay), Andrew Lanham (screenplay)

Stars: Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, Tim McGraw

Music director: Aaron Zigman

Producers: Gil Netter, Brad Cummings

PG-13 | 2h 12min | Drama, Fantasy

IMDB link Here

A Crisis of Faith and a Trip to God’s B&B in ‘The Shack

First things first: “The Shack,” a Christian-themed movie with laudable ambitions, will resonate with lots of people who feel Hollywood does not generally understand or care about their world. That said, a bit more editing to remove some of the airiness would have made for a better film.

The movie, based on William P. Young’s best seller and directed by Stuart Hazeldine, is about the spiritual journey of Mack (Sam Worthington), whose youngest child is abducted and murdered while he is watching over her and her two siblings on a camping trip.

Many faith-based films settle for a Jesus-loves-me climax without digging far into theological matters. This one at least asks the difficult questions. It’s at its best when Mack is grilling Papa on matters like why she allows children to be murdered.

She never really does. Not to be sacrilegious, but as a film character, Papa doesn’t have a lot of depth; for much of the movie it’s as if Mack has stumbled into a very nice bed-and-breakfast and God is the universe’s most benevolent innkeeper.

And so as the film passes the two-hour mark, it begins to feel as if it’s treading water. People of faith already know that there are no cut-and-dried answers to the kinds of questions Mack is asking. The intended audience here, though, will at least come away with plenty of fodder for postviewing discussion groups.

Read full review at New York times

With The Shack, a numbingly earnest Easter-season offering, Octavia Spencer joins the ranks of performers who have played God. Hers is a Supreme Being with none of the winking, kvetching or bossiness we’ve seen in versions rendered by Morgan Freeman, George Burns, Ralph Richardson and Alanis Morissette, to name a few. The warm, maternal “Papa” portrayed by Spencer is all loving magnanimity — the movie is, like the publishing-phenomenon novel on which it’s based, essentially a theodicy, or defense of God’s goodness.

And given that William Paul Young’s book has sold many millions of copies, Lionsgate can expect an eager flock in theaters; fans will want to see how the story of a grief-crippled man’s weekend-long encounter with the Almighty translates to the big screen. For those who come to the material not as devotees, that translation unfolds with a Bible-study-meets-Esalen awkwardness. It’s hard to imagine the feature generating the same word-of-mouth that turned a self-published story into an international best-seller.

Hazeldine, whose only previous feature is the 2009 psychological thriller Exam, bungles crucial transitions, especially in the early sequences that shift between past and present to set up the story of Mackenzie Phillips (Sam Worthington)

There’s a scented-candle, lifestyle aspect to the lessons that ensue. Determined to heal Mack and resolve his doubts about God’s love, the Trinity, in their flowy Eileen Fisher–ish neutrals and comfy Pottery Barn cottage, are infinitely kind and patient, and mostly insufferable for it. As Sophia, or wisdom personified, Alice Braga dispenses a slightly tougher form of love, but one that’s no less maddening in its sermon-y monotone.

Hazeldine and his design team clearly wanted to cast these supernatural encounters in a super-relatable light, an approach that’s echoed in the screenplay. Credited to three screenwriters (John Fusco, Andrew Lanham and Destin Cretton), the adaptation interweaves the homespun clichés of Willie’s narration around the main event: a series of colloquies that tackle timeless questions about the nature of evil, the power of forgiveness and humankind’s place in the universe.

The view of a personal God as a gender-fluid shape-shifter (Graham Greene appears as a male version of Papa) will be inspiring to some, anathema to others. The same goes for the multicultural Trinity. In its stereotype-trafficking way, The Shack challenges narrow conceptions of what a Christian (and perhaps, by extension, an American) looks or sounds like. It's not the film's ideas that are its problem, but the heavy-handed literalness with which they’re explored.

There’s a little-boy openness to Worthington’s features that suits the role of Mack, a man understandably struggling with a lifetime’s worth of loss and guilt, but there’s only so much he can do with material so lacking in subtlety. Spencer, who can say more with a glance than most, radiates the requisite affection, however contrived the setup. She delivers a piercing moment of compassion in a flashback to Mack’s troubled childhood, and a priceless quip in one of the film’s rare instances of humor.

Visually, Mack’s sacred encounters are pretty but never soul-stirring, even with ace cinematographer Declan Quinn on hand. (Among Quinn’s many credits are a couple of Jonathan Demme's documentaries on Neil Young, which might explain why the musician gets an ain’t-I-hip shout-out from Papa.) Hazeldine leaves the potential dramatic power of the natural setting — shooting took place primarily in Vancouver — mostly unfulfilled.

The movie’s only truly affecting encounter is a brief, direct and visually unadorned exchange between Mack and his older daughter, Kate (Megan Charpentier), who has been at least as wracked by pain and self-reproach over Missy’s death as Mack. Otherwise, from Missy’s precociously discerning questions about God to the constant coaxing of Aaron Zigman’s score to a strained depiction of "closure" between Mack and his abusive father (Derek Hamilton), what should be deeply touching is merely forced. McGraw’s voiceover may assure us that “you’ll have to decide for yourself.” But room for contemplation is nowhere to be found in The Shack.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

'The Shack' Cinematically Confronts The Problem Of Suffering  

Marketing for The Shack has been odd, to say the least. Maybe those who know the book as a surprise Christian bestseller might have been presumed to already be a guaranteed audience, with the trailer's goal being not putting the masses off by mentioning Jesus too much. It's tracking to do a fairly impressive $12 million opening weekend on a reported $20 million budget, so maybe bad marketing doesn't matter

We should hope for the best, because The Shack, despite some minor missteps, is what faith-based films aspire to be: a feature with good actors, a structured screenplay, music that's sentimental but not terrible, a focus on the most positive and universal elements of the Gospel and an original hook that keeps it from being more than just a predictable narrative of a gone-wrong protagonist who finds obvious redemption. More orthodox adherents may take issue with some of its theology, but even there, the story offers an out -- the fact that much of it may be a dream or a vision allows for the fact that the divine message had to filter through a human's subconscious, and may have done so in a way that allows him to handle it in the best way possible.

The most significant flaw is the very weird choice of having the story be narrated by the protagonist's neighbor, Willie (Tim McGraw), who isn't present for most of what happens. This may be a holdover device from the book, or a way to add another layer of plausible deniability to things by having it all be a third-hand account. It is, however, pointless; the narration adds no illumination to what we can plainly see, and McGraw... Well, let's just say he's no James Earl Jones.

when Bruce Almighty came out, there were evangelical critics who objected to Morgan Freeman as a humanoid God the Father, arguing that God in human form is and only ever will be Jesus Christ. If that's a sticking point, remember that this is all Mac's vision, and sometimes in dreams even people we know can appear in two or more different bodies. The Holy Spirit as an Asian woman rather than a dove is a big imagery shift relative to what classical artwork depicts, but her portrayal as God's most touchy-feely side, for want of a better term, is creative. Frankly, if you were okay with Aslan being Jesus as a lion in The Chronicles of Narnia, this shouldn't be too great an issue.

While the arguments made are religious, their points about guilt and forgiveness are valid regardless of whether or not you think Jesus might someday show up to walk on water with you. The focus is on the Golden Rule of loving one another rather than a laundry list of Thou Shalt Nots; if you prefer your religious movies to give you the pep talk that you're good and secular liberals are evil, this isn't the one to attend. Rather, it assumes our own worst enemies can be ourselves, when we rush to judgment and condemnation despite sometimes being wrong. This God is more like Yoda on Dagobah than Franklin Graham in an anti-Islam sermon, and comes complete with mystical cave of the Dark Side.

Just as fundamentalists can use the "all a dream" escape hatch to explain away departures from dogma, so too can atheists and agnostics argue that this is merely the story of a man wrestling with his better self, which he calls "God," or rather, "Papa." Regardless of which path you come at it by, it's a cleverly told lesson of love and forgiveness, and the most appealing movie sermon I've seen in years.  

 Read full review at Forbes

Movie rating ★✬☆☆  

Religious drama doesn’t live up to its own lofty ideals

The novel “The Shack” was a surprising literary phenomenon. After author William Paul Young self-published the book in 2007, it went on to sell more than 20 million copies, to a predominantly Christian audience. (“The Shack” overtly deals with evangelical ideas of God.) The film adaptation captures the meat of Young’s text, focusing on the didactic aspects of its premise. As a film, “The Shack” works best as a thought experiment, because its promise of big answers to big questions is so appealing. But whether taken as an emotional experience or an intellectual exercise, “The Shack” falters under its own inconsistency.

In translating the book from page to screen, “The Shack” faces challenges. Cinema is a more objective medium than literature. Where a reader might conjure up a personal idea of the action, film presents a less ambiguous version. Director Stuart Hazeldine and his cast must convincingly render scenes that take place between an Everyman and the physical embodiment of the supernatural. On one level, Spencer represents the trope of the Magical Negro: Her character exists primarily to help the white protagonist (and, indeed, everyone Mack encounters is a person of color). At one point, God switches from an African American woman to a Native American man. This is a lazy form of racism, yet the film pushes past it, on a somber journey toward spiritual awakening.

One of the big questions it tackles is “Why do bad things happen to good people?” But there’s no satisfying answer. Hazeldine and his screenwriters take a stab at explanations that lie somewhere between platitudes and riddles, with Mack’s spiritual growth presented as a metric of our own satisfaction. Worthingon’s transition, however, is unconvincing, and not just because his American accent keeps slipping back to his native Australian: Mack remains a bland cipher, accepting God’s love only because that’s what the screenplay requires of him.

 “The Shack” never explores what makes Mack deserving of God’s audience, a frustrating oversight, given that so many others have suffered far worse than he has. His interrogations are feckless, and his dialogue explores little beyond his own hurt feelings. Mack explains that he’s only of average intelligence, a rationalization that almost insults our own capacity for curiosity or skepticism.

 Parts of “The Shack” are, admittedly, appealing: Mack observes that he’s most comfortable around Jesus, for example, and their subsequent dialogue adds a human dimension to the drama. Still, the film’s conclusion — that crying and hugging it out are all we need to heal — gives short shrift to how difficult real grief can be.

 Jesus tells Mack that he wants friends, not worshipers. That’s a pretty audacious statement. Yet by the end of “The Shack,” Mack is shown to be restored because he’s singing the contemporary worship song “Awesome God.” A film this bold should not compromise its own ideas.

Read full review at Washington Post