Bruce Almighty

How can a Jim-Carrey-being-Jim-Carrey film make me cry?  How can one film be so irreverent and yet so overtly spiritual at the same time?  This morning I was watching Bruce Almighty again while doing a little stitching.  It's probably the fifth time I've seen the film, and I found myself, as always, being moved by Bruce's transformation, the treatment of fervent and honest prayer, and the question of "unanswered" prayer.  I'll issue a spoiler alert here, but since the film is 20 years old, if you haven't already seen it, you probably aren't going to.  

Just a not-so-little overview:  Bruce is a television news reporter whose career is going nowhere.  He's stuck doing human interest stories he sees as beneath him, but longs to be promoted to news anchor when a current anchor retires.  His dissatisfaction with his job spills over into his personal life, which he shares with his ever-faithful girlfriend, Grace, a kindergarten teacher, and their dog, Sam, who thinks the couple's armchair is his own personal fire hydrant.  Grace just wants a life with Bruce; Bruce sees that life as small.

Bruce views every bit of smallness in his life as a personal attack from God, and spends much time sarcastically thanking God for his trials:  traffic causing him to be late to work, the deceptively deep puddle he steps in, the lack of prestige in his work.  He has a good heart, defending a homeless person who is being mistreated by a street gang, but when he goes too far and insults them after they've already left the man alone, they turn on Bruce himself, which he again attributes to God punishing him for doing a good deed.  

After he loses his job (for losing his cool on the job), he starts getting paged repeatedly by an unknown number.  He finally responds, and a mysterious voice instructs him to meet at a certain location for a job opportunity.  Bruce enters an empty building, and sees a man mopping the floor.  The man asks him to help, but Bruce has better things to do, and heads for what he believes is a job interview on the seventh floor.  Once there, the man from the first floor is changing lightbulbs there, and reveals himself to be God.  He has heard Bruce's "prayers," and offers him the chance to be God.

Who wouldn't take that chance?  Bruce accepts, and begins to use his newfound powers to improve his own life--seducing Grace, getting Sam to finally use the toilet instead of the armchair, parting traffic (and his tomato soup--the "Red Sea"), vastly improving his "ride," retaliating against the gang that attacked him, and, of course, sabotaging the new anchor to get his job back.  When he finally realizes being God also means answering prayer, he is overwhelmed by the volume, and eventually just says "Yes" to them all.  Imagine the chaos as record numbers of people win the lottery, tsunamis occur from his fiddling with the moon, and hockey fans riot as the local team wins against all odds.  

Bruce discovers the real problem with a human having the power of God--self.  When he uses his powers only for his own good, his life starts to fall apart.  Grace leaves him, and he can't enjoy success in his anchor position as he keeps being interrupted by breaking news resulting from the problems he's caused in the city and the world.  He learns that he can't be truly satisfied in his life unless he is considering the needs of others.  While this makes him more like God, it also makes him more human.  He finally prays sincerely and honestly to God, not to get Grace back, but that Grace will be happy, even if it's not with him.  He relinquishes the anchor position to the man he had previously undermined, and humbly starts to do good with his powers.

The trailers for Bruce Almighty were pretty misleading:  we saw Jim Carrey exploding a fire hydrant and Steve Carell ululating in a news room, and we hear Snap!'s "The Power" underscoring Bruce's "miracles."  But the film is so much more than comedy, it's a commentary on prayer.  While Bruce's prayers in the beginning are irreverent, prayer is treated very sensitively--not as a cosmic Christmas wish list, but more of a Psalmic crying out of "How long?" or an intercessory pleading.  When Bruce answers millions of prayers with "Yes," we see how problematic that would be.  How can the answer be "yes" to two people who are praying for things that are in opposition to each other?  

Of course, there is more to prayer than a mainstream comedy film would present, but for secular media, it's a step in the right direction.  Bruce goes from merely talking to God, to actually listening to and working with God.  After all, at least in my experience, we, as humans, are God's answer to prayer.  When we're asking God to feed the hungry and bring about world peace, God's answer is asking us to do just that.  I heard Daniel Pink speak in a podcast recently.  He says, "If you have something that can benefit the world, it’s your moral obligation to put it out there." God gave us the skills, interests, and heart to be His answer to prayer in the world. We don't have to be God to do what we're asking of God. Instead of looking for God to give us a miracle, we are the miracle.