Phil Cooke

I found myself remembering Phil's comments (in his interview with me for INFUZE Magazine) while watching Midnight Clear on DVD this weekend. The film from Dallas Jenkins, is based on a short film Dallas wrote and directed and an original story by his dad, Jerry Jenkins. I've never read the story, but I am sure that Jerry wrote a fine piece of work.

To be honest, I was mostly pleasantly surprised by the film. Even though Dallas tends to avoid most of the Christian film cliches, he still falls prey to one or two, like being derivative. The film felt at the beginning like a cross between Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia.

Standing out from the crowd was Stephen Baldwin, giving easily his best performance since becoming a Christian and, I would judge, on a par with his work on The Usual Suspects.

Other of the actors also did a fine job, including K Callan and Kirk B.R. Woller.

However, the glaring hole in the script is in the "most" Christian characters – the pastor and the youth pastor. To his credit, perennial TV guest star Richard Fancy surpassed the writing to breathe life into a one dimensional character that we see for only a few minutes. However, youth pastor Mitch (played by newcomer Mitchell Jarvis) is so thin and underdeveloped, you couldn't wipe your butt with him. We are given virtually no subtext, no reason for his existence – or his general ennui about the season and reaching out to the community at Christmastime. In fact, his strongest trait is as a plot device that allows our main characters to eventually triumph. Oh, there is one more scene where he has a chance to deliver, but gives us exposition rather than subtext and empathy.

I just don't understand how you a writer can take and develop the fully-layered characters of Lefty and Eva (who is given even more depth by K Callan's portrayal) and even the secondary, but still strong Kirk and Mary and then take the two pastors and phone it in? Heck, Victoria Jackson's meals on wheels lady is better developed for the 5 minutes she's on screen than Mitch gets as what should have been the strongest secondary character. The kids, who each have one line, are more detailed.

It's lazy is what it is, and the entire film suffers for it, despite delivering a moving Christmas story without having to resort to the pithy or emotionally-strained material that made Touched By An Angel more cheesy than authentic (no offense to Brad Bird or Stuart Margolin).

A few minutes with an editor, or someone who had the guts to stand up and tell Dallas or writer Wes Halula to do things right would have saved this film from being classified as second rate. But that's just what I think…