Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this film includes two scenes showing parents' deaths, and ongoing discussions about how to cope with such loss and the resulting anger and sadness. The film includes mildly sexual images (a husband and wife appear in bed together) and early on, an R&B dance performance featuring gyrating bodies. Focused on family tensions, the film includes various scenes showing discord between father and son, husband and wife, a couple trying to get back together, and former best friends. In an early scene, characters briefly smoke, dance suggestively, and drink in a red-lit nightclub. Later, in despair, a character drinks alone in his home, then while he is driving.
Families can talk about the long-standing hostility between father and son: assuming it's 15 years between their meetings, the son sustains and acts out his anger at his father in ways the film frames as self-destructive (his turn from the church to pop stardom, excessive sex and drinking). How do the son and father reconcile? How does their relationship mirror others in the film, between other family members (husbands and wives, in particular)? How does the movie present the church -- as a source of salvation, a site of corruption and self-interest, or a neutral ground where individuals are responsible for their own actions?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
THE GOSPEL is inspiring and energetic when it's focused on music. Assembled by Kirk Franklin, the numbers are lively and sometimes -- as in the case of Yolanda Adams' brief performance -- quite brilliant. For the most part, however, the movie is awkwardly structured and soapily slow-moving.
David (Boris Kodjoe) is a flashy R&B singer, enjoying his rising fame along with his fast-talking, cigar-puffing, Hummer-driving manager Wesley (the always excellent Omar Gooding). Their careers are put on hold though, when David receives word that his father is ill. Some 15 years earlier, the Bishop Fred Taylor (Clifton Powell) disappointed his son by paying too much attention to his work and not enough to David and his dying mother. Now the prodigal son returns, to make up with his father and help save his ministry.
Once back home in Atlanta, David struggles with his moral and spiritual decisions. For one thing, he meets a devout choir member, single mother Rain (Tamyra Gray), whose initial resistance to his seductions inspires him to pursue her. She has an adorable five-year-old, Maya (Keshia Knight Pulliam), who sees through David right off. "How old are you?" he asks, leaning down to be sweet. "How old are you?!" she asks back, and yes, he does behave childishly through much of the film.
His confused priorities are revealed in his tense relationship with his former childhood friend and classmate, now Reverend Charles Frank (Idris Elba), who means to take over the church from Fred and feels competitive with David. Frank's ambition to expand the church, following the spectacular-show/mega-church model, has led him to think rather highly of himself as well. This means that he's pushing aside Fred's longtime accountant and trusted friend, Minister Hunter (Donnie McClurkin). In this enterprise, Frank is both egged on and challenged by his wife (and David's cousin) Charlene (Nona Gaye, mostly reduced to reaction shots). While they refer mysteriously to their "problem," Lifetime-movie-style, the reason for their estrangement is both repressed and obvious, in the form of clichés.
The film is hampered by a clunky structure (some scenes seem cut together randomly, others just click time while waiting for the next choir number) that detracts from its basic theme, the simultaneous conflict and sameness between pop music stardom and church celebrity and commercialism, and the emphasis on profits that drives both. When a young, aspiring rapper "comes down" the aisle to be welcomed into the church because he's been invited by his idol, David, it seems trite rather than convincing. Only Wesley seems able to reconcile and maintain himself in equal parts: producing gospel tracks, he can still afford his yellow Hummer.
Families who like this movie might also want to see Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Woman Thou Art Loosed, both concerned with black church communities. Or, you might enjoy Saved!, which makes fun of born-again white church tactics, including crass, commercial appeals to young people.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSome sexual language and imagery (in an R&B concert, in a married couple's bedroom); no sex per se. |
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ViolenceTwo scenes showing parents' deaths. |
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LanguageVery mild. |
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Message |
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Social BehaviorSome greed, some family tensions, competition and arguments between childhood friends. |
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CommercialismThematic, in the sense that characters consider how to expand and essentially, "sell" the church. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoSome drinking and smoking, clearly framed as self-destructive behavior. |
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