Oh, God! (1977)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Comment: Uh, sometimes, uh, now and then, couldn’t we just talk?
Dusty: I’ll tell you what. You comment, I’ll reply. I love site engagement.

Rating: PG
Director: Carl Reiner
Writers: Larry Gelbart, Avery Corman
Stars: John Denver, George Burns, Teri Garr
Release Date: October 7, 1977 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

THE PLOT:

via wiki:

God appears as a kindly old man to Jerry Landers, an assistant supermarket manager. After a few failed attempts in trying to set up an “interview”, God tells Jerry that he has been selected to be His messenger to the modern world, much like a contemporary Moses. Timidly at first, Landers tells his wife, children and a religion editor of the Los Angeles Times of his encounters with God and soon becomes a national icon of comedic fodder.

Jerry soon appears on television with Dinah Shore and describes the look God takes when he encounters him. The next day, after Jerry is stranded from a car breakdown, God appears as a taxi driver to take Jerry home, where they are met by a bunch of chanting “religious nuts”. Before he disappears, God consoles Jerry that he has the “strength that comes from knowing”.

Skeptical at first, Landers finds his life turned upside down as a group of theologians attempt to discredit him by challenging him to answer a series of questions written in Aramaic while locked in a hotel room alone to prove God is contacting him directly. To Jerry’s relief after an agonizing wait, God, working as room service, delivers food to Jerry and answers the questions. After being sued for slander by a charismatic preacher that God directed Jerry to call a “phony”, Jerry decides to prove his story in a court of law.

Jerry argues that if God’s existence is a reasonable possibility, then He can materialize and sit in the witness chair if He so chooses. At first, God fails to appear and the judge threatens to charge Jerry with contempt for “what you apparently thought was a clever stunt”. Jerry argues that when everyone waited for a moment to see what would happen when he raised the mere possibility of God making a personal appearance in the courtroom, it proved that He at least deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Suddenly, without opening the doors, God appears and asks to be sworn in, concluding the procedure with “So help me, Me. If it pleases the court, and even if it doesn’t please the court, I’m God, your honor”.

God provides some miracles, first in the form of a few rather impressive card tricks for the judge. Then, to help the people believe, he leaves the stand, walks a few steps and, with everyone watching, literally disappears before their eyes. His disembodied voice then issues a parting shot: “It can work. If you find it hard to believe in Me, maybe it will help to know that I believe in you”. After a moment, the judge calls a recess and asks both parties to join him in chambers. Turns out that God’s voice does not appear on the court tape recording nor on the court stenographer’s tape. The judge has no choice but to dismiss the case.

Sometime later, after hearing the ringing of a public telephone, Jerry meets up with God once again. God states he’s going on a trip to spend some time with animals. Jerry expresses worry that they failed, but God compares him to Johnny Appleseed, saying he was given the best seeds and they will take root. Jerry then says he has lost his job and that everybody thinks he’s a nut, but God assures him that there are other supermarkets and that he’s in “good company”. God had said to Jerry earlier: “lose a job; save a world”. God gets ready to leave and says that he will not be coming back. Jerry then asks what to do if he needs to talk with him. God says to him “I’ll tell you what, you talk. I’ll listen”. He then disappears. Jerry smiles as God departs.

My Review

I was perusing my free movie app’s listings and came across this strange film from nearly fifty years ago. How could I turn away from something starring John Denver and George Burns? I couldn’t. It’s not that I expected the movie to be really good, or for the comedy to hold up. It wasn’t and it didn’t. I was primarily intrigued by it as a time capsule. Films that are preachy (overtly or subtly) tend to be a good window into the world about which they are speaking. What does this movie tell me about the world as it existed in 1977? It tells me that 1977’s America was religious, but mostly in name only, and that something about that status quo bothered people. The movie seemed to speak for a public who simultaneously wanted others to believe in God and who wanted people to not get too worked up over the God details.

After some investigation, I looked up how the movie was received when it debuted. It did well at the box office. The screenplay received an Oscar nomination, a Saturn Award for best writing, and a Writers Guild Award for Best Comedy Adapted From Another Medium. Apparently it resonated within the zeitgeist. The movie was directed by Carl Reiner, the father of also-famous director Rob Reiner and his siblings.

The comedy of the movie is largely built around gags and the idea of God behaving in unexpected ways, whether that be showing up to talk to John Denver’s Jerry while he’s in the shower, making it rain inside Jerry’s car, or admitting to making mistakes (like creating the sense of shame, or making the pits in avocados too large.) When you peel back the comedy, though, the movie is essentially a rambling secular, humanistic sermon about universalism and good morals with the veneer of religiosity to sell it to a religious public. The only time we see Burns’ God somewhat angry about bad behavior, specifically, is when he starts talking about pollution. Most of the rest of his message is an encouraging “you got this!” Burns’ God is essentially a wise-cracking deistic God, who created the world, and then stepped away from personal involvement after giving humanity free will… making only occasional exceptions.

“God” makes an exception to his role as a non-interventionist in this film to remind Jerry (a grocery store manager), and then through him the world, that he is alive and that people need to start acting better and to start protecting the environment more. He’s not a fan of religion, religious people, or holy books. God in the film states that Jesus, Muhammed, Moses, and Jerry are all his “sons.” To me, the movie felt very much like what an antagonistic atheist or agnostic person’s conception of what God might be.

“Well, if I have to say he’s real, let’s make him old, snarky, mistake-prone, a little irreverent, but ultimately he wants what I want – for people to not actually need God, for religious people to be dunked on, for people to be kind to each other, and I guess to not pollute.”

I cannot decide whether that message was more difficult to sell in the more culturally Christian 1970s or in the more sensitive-about-everything 2020s. The story pits Jerry against an obviously heretical Evangelical pastor who is getting rich with his ministry. Those types have always been easy to dislike – including by sincere Christians. As a result, the audience sort of adopts Jerry’s side (and the film’s version of God), because the opposition is more obviously bad. People seem to innately want to choose the lesser of two evils when finding a third option requires more work. Here the lesser of the two evils was the grocery store manager turned prophet and there wasn’t a third option readily available. You know, that sales technique would probably work today, too.

It helps too that the message from “God” is relatively inoffensive beyond its, well, blasphemy. Don’t pollute. Be kind to each other. Don’t kill each other. Don’t grift the public, in my name. You’ve got everything you need and you can do it. Those are things that most people can readily accept, assuming they aren’t already offended.

The heart of the film is the personal cost to Jerry of doing this job, with his family, at work, and with the public at large. Most of this movie is not a feel-good story for the guy who was called by God to send a message. A lot of the movie is spent with Jerry’s wife and/or his boss shouting at him to stop what he’s doing, in between the media and the religious world attacking him in the other scenes. Since he didn’t choose this path of his own volition, he is sympathetic. In one particularly rough scene, Jerry’s son – embarrassed to be seen with his infamous dad – refuses to get in a car with him to ride home from school. He chooses to walk home instead. Jerry continues to do as asked, though, and God sticks by his side, eventually providing him with vindication in a dramatic court room scene wherein God reveals himself to the assembled courtroom public.

Note: For Millennial-aged rewatchers, you will notice that Jerry’s boss “Mr. Summers” is played by a young William Daniels of Boy Meets World (“Mr. Feeny”) fame. That was a fun surprise.

Aside from finding it intellectually interesting, I didn’t really enjoy the movie very much. George Burns and John Denver both created characters who are easy to like, however, the story felt predictable, the comedy didn’t really work for me, and as I mentioned, a lot of the messaging was somewhat irritating, as a person of faith. There just wasn’t enough balance for my taste on that front. On the whole, whether you are religious or not, I don’t really recommend a rewatch here. If you want to see a movie wherein God appears and talks to someone at random, Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty probably tackled this topic a little better.