The Jesus Music (Erwin and Erwin, 2021)
Both Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith are listed as Executive Producers of The Jesus Music. While not disqualifying, this fact may go a way to explaining why the film looks and feels more like an “aren’t we great?” chat among friends than a probing examination of a subject by an engaged or interested outsider.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I like Grant. I own a handful of her CDs and could probably produce her greatest hits album on cassette if I went rummaging through my attic. I like Jon and Andy Erwin for that matter, having given mildly positive reviews for each of their films from October Baby through Steve McQueen: American Icon. But I think their deal with Lionsgate and their deserved status as the best overtly “Christian” filmmakers has pushed them towards ever safer ground — reflecting the subculture back to the subculture rather than ever questioning or challenging it … or even presenting it to the outside world.
This tendency is manifested in an editing style that rarely lingers over an opening to a potentially interesting line of inquiry, seldom asks a follow-up question, and hardly ever takes time out from presenting to examine what has just been presented. I couldn’t help thinking at points about Barbara Kopple’s Running From Crazy. In festival presentations, Kopple said that she and subject Mariel Hemingway agreed the film would only be worth doing if the actress was ready to be 100% open and honest. Here, the interviewer asks a subject on camera if it is even okay to ask a question about why his band split up. It’s not that I think Hemingway is inherently more interesting or honest than anyone interviewed in The Jesus Music, just that Kopple’s film is more able and willing to utilize that honesty to paint a fuller, more realized portrait of complex human beings.
By contrast, The Jesus Music leans heavily on labels that carry a lot of emotive power but are presented vaguely as to their actual meaning. “Pioneers” and “rebels” are the two examples that come immediately to mind. But rebelling against what? Pioneering what? Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or an unimportant thing that some of the early practitioners experimented with drug use? (Were they rebelling against cultural taboos against drug use, and, if so, are they meant to be celebrated for that or in spite of it?) If the industry remains largely uninterested in addressing racial injustice in and out of the church, were early examples of integrated bands pioneers or simply outliers? (Part of what I’m getting at here is that “rebel” and “pioneer” are free-floating signifiers that are used to praise without really explaining why they are, or should be, praiseworthy.)
The documentary is at its best when it allows the artists room to reflect on the painful parts of the experience of celebrity — on the gap that churches induce (demand?) between authenticity and the masks of public personae. One senses that several of the subjects (including Grant) could go deeper into the dissonance felt between naive, youthful, enthusiasm and mature introspection. But to let them would risk bringing to the forefront what the film always wants to be pushing to the background: that success or failure in Christian music may have more to do with the cultural work the music is performing (and the church’s feelings about that work at any given time) than it does about spiritual integrity, personal maturity, or artistic talent.
Not that there is anything all that wrong with The Jesus Music. It is one of those movies that will please its target audience (Christians) by pandering to it and promoting some of its preferred metanarratives. It’s not nearly as aggrandizing as a Kendrick film or a Pureflix film, and the Erwins will most likely always get a warmer reception among non-Evangelical press and viewers than their peers for that reason alone. But neither is it daring or even remotely critical. Why bite the hand that’s feeding you?
