"WAR ROOM" Urges Wives, Women to Hunker Down

War Room is the latest Christian movie to target the husband-wife dynamic. Paralleling marriage with a secret inner chamber for military strategizing stretches the artistic license a bit, but the Kendrick brothers manage to tone down the war analogies enough to create an emotionally layered movie with credible characters and a spiritual gender bend with women at the core.

The plot revolves around the increasingly bitter relationship between a busy upper middle class couple, Elizabeth and Tony Jordan. Elizabeth is a real estate agent and her husband is a successful pharmaceutical salesman. They have reached that point of stalemate where every encounter is a bitter argument and divorce is imminent. Actor T.C. Stallings plays the dissatisfied husband to Priscilla Shirer’s miserable wife. Some will be familiar with Shirer’s insightful "Jonah: Navigating A Life Interrupted" Bible teaching series a few years back.

Due to Tony’s busy work schedule, he has grown distant from his wife and 10 year old daughter and often takes out his impatience on them.  Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s latest client, Miss Clara, interferes in her life insisting that she turn to prayer for help with her husband.

Actress Karen Abercrombie, playing the elderly Miss Clara, steals every scene. She could have easily portrayed the character as a stereotypical kindly, but meddling older woman. Instead she created an authentic emotional personality of a feisty senior citizen who has lived a long time and has an interesting story to share. Her scenes garnered laughter and applause from the audience each and every time she appeared on the screen.

Miss Clara urges Elizabeth to fight for her marriage through prayer and by supporting her cheating husband. No feminist tome this is. It’s an obvious and frankly, encouraging look at what might be if perhaps more women (i.e. wives) took this route. The fact that the woman is put in the position of having to yield first will not sit well with all Christian women, some of whom are still fighting for positions of equal power in some denominations.

Elizabeth is alone in most of the scenes, so I think it is fair to say that the filmmakers’ view the burden of responsibility for a happy home as the main job of the wife.  There are quite a few scenes with her constantly making dinner and being almost solely responsible for her daughter.

Reluctantly, Elizabeth re-establishes her personal prayer life and determines to treat her husband with respect and love in spite of his philandering ways. She finds herself growing spiritually ad personally stronger and regaining her own sense of self.

While the means by which Elizabeth achieves this is slightly hyperbolic (it is a movie after all), it will make many women in difficult relationships bite their lips as unhappy memories surface. This type of film is designed to corner the viewer into facing themselves and ultimately facing God about their personal foibles that they often blame on God.

Meanwhile Elizabeth’s husband teeters on the brink of full-fledged adultery and is eventually exposed as a very dishonest salesman. As his sins finally catch up to him, he is fired and has to turn back to the wife that he despised. After discovering his wife’s “war room” covered in written prayers for him (like a personal Wailing Wall) he realizes the error of his ways and in a tearful breakdown, begs Jesus for forgiveness.

Some critics have lambasted the film for its overt sermonizing, but it was to be expected. “War of the Roses” freely used hyperbole in the escalating violent verbal battles and ultimately murderous finale between a divorcing couple over their large house. I think some critics may still not get that audiences are demanding a more personal lens on the lives they actually live and not the “Hollywood-ized” version and no one is demanding louder than Christian audiences. I didn’t take this movie as a conversion piece – I accepted it more as a forgiveness and reconciliation piece. Hoping against hope. Moving forward instead of wallowing in regret.

There are quite a few outstanding emotional and spiritual scenes. The actors really put their hearts into these pivotal scenes. At first I thought the movie would be a slow paced, sugary suburban “happily ever after” Bible belt bedtime story. But I came away feeling that the movie did show a more authentic anger between a husband and wife than some other Christian movies have been comfortable showing. Key performances are contributed by Michael, Jr., who delivers a hilarious and grounding presence as Tony’s best friend and child actress Alena Pitts, who plays the cute Double Dutch jumping daughter of Tony and Elizabeth.

The film is not without its faults. The story could have been a little tighter and there were too many gratuitous “convenience” moments like a mugging and text message about cheating husband that added melodrama without adding depth or character development. I also noticed some technical errors like camera shake. I can’t be certain if the technique was purposely used to try and convey a sense of drama but I could have done without it.

Ultimately, War Room fulfills a multipurpose function. Undoubtedly it will be used as a relationship building tool in Marriage Ministry classes across the country, demographically, it will serve as a departure from Christian films that have focused almost exclusively on the rightful place of the white Christian male, and spiritually it offers a much more up to the minute view of the current state of the Christian home – the real life war room.