Warm & Fun, It's A Wonderful 'Wife'
Denzel's An Angel, Whitney's Winning: 'Preacher' Revs Up The Christmas Cheer

Date: December 13, 1996
By Jami Bernard

From The New York Daily News
Submitted by: Larry A.


THE PREACHER'S WIFE. Denzel Washington, Whitney Houston, Courtney B. Vance, Gregory Hines. Directed by Penny Marshall. At area theaters. Running time: 124 mins. Rated PG. 3 STARS

MANY BELIEVE DENZEL Washington was sent to Earth to answer the prayers of women everywhere.

In the rousing, good-hearted holiday comedy "The Preacher's Wife," he is sent here for a higher purpose.

Washington plays the angel Dudley, whose mission is to help a small-town preacher tend his flock. The job isn't so bad, considering that Dudley gets to hang around with the preacher's neglected wife, played by Whitney Houston. When you rub an angel's wings together, do you get sparks?

The movie is a remake of the 1947 Oscar-winning film "The Bishop's Wife," which starred Cary Grant as the angel and David Niven and Loretta Young as the couple in need. Samuel Goldwyn produced the original. Samuel Goldwyn Jr. has produced the update.

The Rev. Henry Biggs (Courtney B. Vance) is beleaguered by a broken boiler, a forlorn collection plate and the encroachments of a slick realestate mogul (Gregory Hines) who wants to build a gaudy new church as a shrine to big business. Biggs prays for help, and he gets it in the form of Dudley do-right, a dapper messenger from on high.

Dudley plops to Earth, making a snow angel in the Biggs' front yard. On his first visit back to the nabe, he can't wait to have a slice of pizza and taste some other Earthly delights.

One of those delights is the preacher's wife, Julia. She sings gorgeously in the church choir, she's a wonderful mommy to precociously adorable Justin Pierre Edmund and she's not getting enough attention from her preoccupied husband.

Dudley and Julia partake of a little holiday cheer, and soon those angel wings are starting to singe.

Unfortunately for romance fans, this is about as chaste as a movie can get, aimed squarely at the "It's A Wonderful Life" crowd. Very little can tempt Dudley to take off his halo.

Houston comes alive whenever she's singing. Her speaking voice is the whisper of someone resting up for opening night, but that doesn't stop some snappy interchanges with Jenifer Lewis as her mom.

Vance plays such a stick-in-the-mud preacher, you keep hoping he'll be assigned to another parish.

Washington, on the other hand, proves adept at light comedy after a career in the dignified Gregory Peck mold. This breezy angel is like a kid in a candy store, amazed by screen savers while refreshing his inner compass with the sobering rule book he has brought along.

The too-rarely-seen Hines fits the movie like a comfortable slipper. He plays an entrepreneur who tempts mere mortals with filthy lucre.Singer Lionel Richie makes an odd screen debut as a jazz-club owner.

Penny Marshall would seem an unlikely director for this gospel-heavy, "Sister Act"-like movie. But her hit-making instincts often veer toward material where childlike innocence prevails as in "Big" and "Awakenings."

She is especially good at directing newcomer Edmund, coaxing from the tot the kind of natural performance you get when you know a child's habits the particular way he bounces into bed, for example.

"The Preacher's Wife" is a true crowd-pleaser, a heartwarmer with a gospel beat.