The life of Rachel Scott, a victim of the
shooters at Columbine High School, is twisted into a big-screen pep talk for stressed
Christian teens.
An ungenerous way to describe I'm Not embarrassed,
a completely earnest TV-grade movie about Columbine High School victim Rachel
Scott, is that it has turned one of the most horrific events in American
history into a mere plot device, using it to add prefabricated gravitas to an
otherwise ordinary story of a teen's struggle to live according to her
Christian beliefs.
Many won't see it that way: Scott's
life and tragic death (and the journal she left behind) were the springboard
for an anti-violence nonprofit that has given school presentations to tens of
millions of students, and presumably many of those have embraced the
comparisons made between Scott and Anne Frank. Many Christians yearning for
faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film, and that crowd may well
ensure a profit for the production. But more picky viewers will admit that even
taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it's
awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic
backdrop. (Moviegoers who want a more affecting film about campus shootings
this month should look instead to Keith Maitland's Tower.)
Played by Masey McLain, Rachel wavers
between assertive chipperness about the crash she can have on others and a dark
fear that she'll never quite fit in. At the start, she sits with friends
lamenting "I just want a real boyfriend." Boys just don't think of
her that way, it seems, which is odd, because she's the prettiest one in her
popular-girl pack, as well as the most friendly.
Trying to make herself boy-worthy,
Rachel sneaks out of the house, goes to parties, smokes and drinks. (Unlike so
many contemporary movies that go out of their way to keep tobacco goods
offscreen, Ashamed has more conspicuous teen smoking than
a Grease production underwritten by Philip
Morris.) She gets caught at one point, and is sent to spend the summer with devout
relatives in Louisiana; there, she has the first of multiple revivals of faith.
When she returns, Rachel tries to be
more involved with a church youth group, where she winds up noticing a homeless
young man (Ben Davies's Nathan), and fundamentally stalks him until he accepts
her help. He becomes her surrogate big brother, embracing church in a big way.
He should probably become her boyfriend as well, but Rachel's hung up on a
theater bro named Alex. The film devotes a lot of energy to her budding maybe/maybe-not
romance with Alex, who is giving her acting lessons with an eye to putting her
in his upcoming school play.
If Rachel was, in fact, the kind of
idealist the movie depicts, she probably would not object to her ensuing trials
— brief spasms of loneliness; concerns that "having a walk with God
is hard" in an unreligious world — being dramatized for the sake of
others in her shoes. But as the movie cuts from time to time to its versions of
the two teens who tried to kill hundreds of their classmates on April 20, 1999,
the rest of us may have qualms, about both the shallowness of its depiction of
mass shooters and about the use of this event to turn Rachel into a Christian
martyr. A 2000 book about her used that word in its title, and the movie runs
with the idea, implying that Scott's murder was an act of religious persecution
— which would come as news to the victims of this indiscriminate act of
hatred, who simply happened to be at the wrong school on the wrong day.
Production companies: Visible
Pictures, All Entertainment
Distributor: Pure Flix
Entertainment
Cast: Masey McLain, Ben Davies,
Cameron McKendry, Terri Minton, Victoria Staley, Taylor Kalupa, Emma Elle
Roberts, Sadie Robertson, David Errigo Jr., Cory Chapman, Mark Daugherty
Director: Brian Baugh
Screenwriters: Bodie Thoene,
Philipa A. Booyens, Robin Hanley, Kari Redmond
Producers: Brad Allen, Nise
Davies, Chuck Howard, Martin Michael
Executive producer: Benny
Proffitt
Director of photography: John
Matysiak
Production designer: Christian
Snell
Costume designer: Vanessa
Gonzalez
Editor: Chris Witt
Composer: Tim Williams
Casting director: Nise Davies
No comments:
Post a Comment