No Vacancy (Saylors, 2022)

The underlying message of almost all “Christian” films is that we are better than them.

I use the “we” consciously since one mark of a Christian film is that it is directed at a Christian audience. There are films that are by Christians or about Christians that may not have an air of triumphant superiority about them, but the ones most in need of introspection are the ones that seem to have the least of it.

For most but not all of its runtime, No Vacancy remains so low-key and so narrowly focused on its plainspoken do-gooders that it avoids the self-congratulatory sheen that envelopes most Christian entertainment. But it can’t stay satisfied with just showing Christians doing good — that good must be acknowledged and applauded by all those who might have cause to doubt that Christians, like Mary Poppins, are practically perfect in every way.

The biggest offending scene here is one in which a Florida businessman gifts an African American parishioner a truck to help him start a lawn-care business. When Cecil (T.C. Stallings) says this is the nicest thing anyone “black or white” has ever done for him, would most of us say the appropriate response is:

a) You’re welcome.

b) If you want to be successful in life, you have to stop seeing color. I grew up [white] in Alabama, surrounded by racism, but my surroundings didn’t determine what I was going to become….

If you picked “b,” you are the exact target demographic for this film. What makes it representative of so many Christian movies these days is its insistence that the African American character not only accept that this (admittedly generous) act of charity balances the cosmic ledger between races but that he give up “seeing” race as a factor in his life or that of any other person. Because the white character has not been visibly shaped by the racism that surrouned him, any claims that that racism impacted anyone anywhere are suspect. Any suggestions that such racism might be linked to institutional religion are reverse-racism and just factually wrong.

A bit later, when a reporter (Sean Young) prays for her story to be picked up by the newspaper so that people will see the good that the church she is writing about is doing, she says “I see something different here.” Turns out the only reason she has been so vehemently anti-Christian is because she hasn’t met the right Christians. This is straight out of the Left Behind playbook — all evidence of mistakes or bad faith on the part of institutional or Christian churches is elided or evaded by essentially blaming the victim for misplacing the blame of a small few onto Christians in general instead of realizing that the bad name church people have is a negative stereotype that only the willfully blind would think of applying to the majority.

This is a shame because there is a legitimate comparison between ways of living out one’s faith to be made here. One would assume that at least some of the citizens who speak out against First Baptist’s plan to buy a hotel and turn it into a homeless shelter are (or identify as) Christian. The implication is that more Christians are like the generous First Baptisters than the indifferent or hostile Floridians. There is even a stab at ecumenicalism by showing how Roman Catholics contribute to the Baptist project. If the film believed its own premise, it could simply publicize what happened and expect the natural goodness of Christians to emulate First Baptist or contribute to their project(s).

But is that entertainment? Why must it be a movie? And the fact that it is a movie reveals the internal contradiction that the film has a hard time glossing over. Either the work of First Baptist is exceptional (in which case most Christians are NOT like this) or it is ordinary (in which case it is oddly self-congratulatory towards its audience).

What’s missing from No Vacancy is any semblance of a whiff of a hint of anything that might make the target audience feel uncomfortable. As David Mamet once famously opined, art challenges us, while entertainment comforts us by telling us we were right, all along, about everything. This is definitely Christian entertainment in a nutshell.

As such, anyone who wants to go to the Fathom Events on screening on May 9 and dish out $15 for a shot of self-esteem and satisfaction shouldn’t really be deterred from doing so. It’s probably a more benign way of feeling good about oneself than the target audience is likely to get on media channels directed at them which too often subordinate such stories in favor of trumpeting the evils of government, or liberalism, or otherism.

Like most Christian entertainment films, one senses that No Vacancy doesn’t quite recognize the most interesting aspects of its own story. A postscript reminds us that this started with a congregation voting to donate its money for a shelter rather than another building project. What was that vote like? Who came up with the idea? Did people stop giving to the church? Leave? We get one scene between an idealistic pastor (Dean Cain) and a representative of a finance committee. Was this pushed through by an enthusiastic pastor? I’d much rather have been a fly on the wall of some of those congregational meetings in which, one assumes, different interpretaitons of the Bible and its commands were examined and used than one at the generic county meeting where those outside the church are given all the objections. Or was the church remarkably unified in this decision, and if so, were they always that way or only after the recession?

None of this makes No Vacancy a bad film — and I feel like I’ve written that sentence many times over the years about a lot of Christian entertainment — at least not in a formal sense. The acting and film craft is fine as far as it goes. It’s just a bland, evasive one. Being good is better than being evil. Being healthy is better than being hooked on crack. Loving your neighbors is better than turning a blind eye to them. I don’t disagree with any of those sentiments. One feels like (at least I do) that it is an unrecognizable portrait of American Christianity not because it out-and-out-lies but because it generalizes to the point of abstraction, allowing us to use high profile acts of charity as a symbol of all of us regardless of how representative of all of us that symbol actually is.

No Vacancy will play nationwide at select theaters via Fathom Events.

P.S. Why do faith films so consistently fumble when it comes to race? I think, for example, of the use of “Sweet Home Alabama” in Woodlawn or the driving while black scene in Selfie Dad. When otherwise benign films have standout misfires whenever they address race, that makes me wonder what it is about that subject that makes American Christians singularly abysmal at addressing it. Whatever the reason, I’m getting tired of being embarrassed at my race’s and religion’s treatment of this issue.