Hollywood serves up a soft one for Christmas<

Date: December 13, 1996
By Noel Taylor

From The Ottawa Citizen
Submitted by: Larry A.


The Preacher's Wife MM 1/2

It's that time of year again ... when Hollywood makes up to the maudlin in the moviegoer with sugar-coated casting, gift-wrapped mush and earth-bound angels.

Specifically, in The Preacher's Wife, that's an angel called Dudley, who looks like Denzel. An angel without wings, with a grey fedora and a smile full of teeth. And a priest to be called on, the Rev. Henry Biggs (Courtney B. Vance) who's having problems keeping his church from a greedy developer (Gregory Hines), and his flock in line.

All over again

If it all sounds familiar, that's Sam Goldwyn for you, remaking what was already sparkling like a Christmas tree ornament (The Bishop's Wife, in 1947) just because it's that time of year.

In 50 years things haven't changed much, as long as you overlook the switch in color from a white angel (Cary Grant) to a black one (Denzel Washington), from a white cleric (David Niven) to a black one (Vance), and from Loretta Young's dutiful wife to the gospel-belting Whitney Houston.

In Yonkers 1996, an angel called Dudley who drops in from the sky fits in comfortably enough. Only Washington's no Cary Grant and Houston, she's no Loretta but she sings up a storm, acts (just enough) and looks divine. As for Vance, he's got an air of ordinariness that somehow survives all the box office business around him.

Sticks to the plan

Director Penny Marshall (Big, A League of Their Own) has the elan to do it right, or at least differently, but someone keeps reminding her that when it comes to Christmas, there's no room for revisionism.

The Preacher's Wife has all the seasonal trimmings, and some red-hot gospel singing besides. Nothing about it is intended to surprise, or to disconcert -- only to stoke the Christmas spirit and leave you warm all over.

There are dollops of sentiment and a pinch of lust, heapings of decency and a miracle or two. As well as a gooey voice-over by the preacher's son (six-year-old Justin Pierre Edmund), a child you'd be ostracized for not taking to.

Dudley makes an amiable angel with his own rulebook for special events like rescuing a marriage against his own un-angelic inclination, saving a street kid from the law and sticking it to smooth operators like Hines, who wants to replace St. Matthew's with a shrine to property development.

Dudley gets his way, as though we should be amazed, and exits beaming with a last longing look at the preacher's wife. Angels, it's apparent, are only human after all. It's a thought that goes against the seasonal grain, absolutely the only thing about Marshall's film that does.

Take the kids. If they're innocent enough, they'll love it. And take a spare bag to carry all that angel dust home.

Whitney Houston does what she does best -- sing. She also looks wonderful and acts just well enough to get by in The Preacher's Wife.