Touched by an angel

Date: December 13, 1996
By John Griffin

From The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
Submitted by: Larry A.


Cuteness is a key factor in our holiday films this season.

Kids rule. Family is good. And miracles are just around the corner.

The Preacher's Wife is long on all above counts. A remake of the 1947 feel-good Christmas fantasy The Bishop's Wife, Penny Marshall's heartwarming new version updates characters and locations while keeping all the important homespun values firmly in place.

Denzel Washington, Whitney Houston and Courtney B. Vance shine brightly in the inspirational story of an angel sent to help a family in need in New York City.

Washington is that angel - and as dapper an angel figure as ever Cary Grant cut in the original, while Houston neatly underplays the gospel-singing wife to Vance's overworked and spiritually distraught pastor in a poor black N.Y.C. community.

The kid's role, and role of narrative voice-over, is filled admirably and with a minimum of the "C" factor by little Justin Pierre Edmund. Jenifer Lewis provides the bite as Houston's live-in mother, Gregory Hines is a rapacious, upwardly mobile real-estate developer, and Lionel Ritchie continues his return from pop-culture limbo with a solid turn as a musician, friend and band leader.

There is very little not to like about redemption, especially when it's set at a time of year when salvation seems almost possible, and in a place with more beautiful children and fine music than heaven should normally allow.

Vance is minister of a church that is the glue that holds a rapidly fragmenting neighborhood together. Discouraged by his daily toil, distracted from his lovely wife by worry and short on cash for things like a new central-heating system, Vance's good man is one short step from crisis and crack-up.

He calls to his God for help, and help arrives in the form of a sweet-natured, gray-suited stranger named Dudley.

Genre films and spiritual anxiety being what they are, the preacher does not recognize succor when it's standing right in front of him. But things subtly start to go right for everyone.

Dudley connects with the boy from the jump, and executes such telling but minor changes as fixing a toy ambulance, and giving it a siren it never had before.

He reaches out to the caring but frustrated wife, reminding her of the qualities she once saw in her husband, and the value of the nuclear unit.

For her therapy, Houston gets to exercise her formidable pipes early and often, leading a remarkable gospel choir, guiding kids through nativity play rehearsals, and cutting the rug in a cosy jazz club with the angel and Richie. There will be album sales.

Throughout, Marshall manages to lay on the niceness like a fresh fall of fluffy snow.

Remarkably, there is comparatively little slush in a story that really should read like a how-to manual for glucose intolerance.

For that, ultimately, we can thank Washington's sugar-reduced sentience, our natural vulnerability to hope in the second week of December and the scouring power of the Lord's music as sung with faith and passion by earth-bound angels. Hallelujah!