Restoration Of Faith, With Some Heavenly Help
"Preacher's Wife" Is Angelic

Date: December 13, 1996
By Carrie Rickey, Movie Critic

From The Philadelphia Inquirer
Submitted by: Larry A.


Lately there have been so many holiday horror movies about the panic of finding the right toy (Jingle All the Way) or delivering the loot on time (The Santa Clause), one might conclude that for Hollywood, the holidays are strictly consumerist.

For that reason alone, The Preacher's Wife - a delightful fantasy in which an angel helps restore a reverend's shaken faith - is a singular seasonal entertainment.

But spiritual correctness is hardly the only quality to recommend this warm and genuinely funny rethink of the 1947 classic, The Bishop's Wife.

The original starred Cary Grant as the guy who helps an Episcopal bishop reprioritize. This one stars heavenly Denzel Washington as the guardian spirit who, in answering the prayers of a harried Baptist pastor (Courtney B. Vance), can't help but be smitten by the preacher's fetching, gospel-singing wife (Whitney Houston).

In The Bodyguard and Waiting to Exhale, Houston had two acting notes: panicked and petulant. Here, as the neglected wife of the man trying to hold a crumbling church and community together, Houston sinks her soul into the songs so thrillingly that you don't notice her acting limitations.

Houston is hardly the chief attraction in a film that stars the incomparably suave Washington, who seems to have wafted down from Cloud Nine. He wears his charm so lightly that the mirthful spirit of his character, Dudley, hovers over the film even when he is not onscreen. He warms the movie.

The revelation, though, is Vance, the baritone-voiced stage actor featured in movies like Dangerous Minds and The Last Supper, usually cast for his authoritarian tone. The way he plays the Rev. Biggs' reverse-conversion experience, from doubter to believer, is to begin small-voiced and tentative, crescendoing as his faith is restored.

Director Penny Marshall elicits a host of other memorable performances, most appealingly Jenifer Lewis as Houston's nosy mother and Loretta Devine as the preacher's secretary. It's refreshing to see a movie in which the stars don't dominate every scene and not every funny line is punched up to the max, with pauses for laughter. Marshall knows the value of a good throwaway joke, and screenwriters Nat Mauldin and Allan Scott provide many.

There are two downsides to this deeply satisfying film. One is the character of its antagonist, a real-estate tycoon played by Gregory Hines, whose conversion from greedy to good is never fully explained. The second is the glib narration by young actor Justin Pierre Edmund, who plays the preacher's son and whose performance betrays Marshall's roots in sitcom.

Otherwise sweet without being sugary, serious without being a downer, The Preacher's Wife is something more than a feel-good affair. It makes you feel renewed.

THE PREACHER'S WIFE* * * 1/2