God's Army

On Thursday last we watched God's Army in my Mormons and film class. The only other Richard Dutcher film I've seen is States of Grace. As much as I liked States of Grace, I liked God's Army even more. I was so impressed. My experience watching God's Army was similar to my experience watching New York Doll for the first time. I think I've mentioned in past posts that New York Doll was what got me interested in Mormon letters to begin with. Watching Arthur Kane's story unfold on screen in all of its beautiful complexity, shaped and crafted by deft hands, but not filtered or molded into something it wasn't made me realize how important Mormon stories are--how they need to be told and told well. I had a nearly identical experience watching God's Army.

I like that in the Fifth Wave of Mormon cinema, several filmmakers working independently from the Church and other institutions have captured the Mormon experience more authentically. For example, in God's Army we have Elder Banks, an African American missionary who during one scene is treated patronizingly by African American investigators because they think he's been duped by the Church. I remember witnessing something similar when I went on splits with sister missionaries during a Stake missionary day activity back home in Sacramento. The sister missionary I was assigned to go tracting with was African American. At one of the homes we visited, we chatted with a couple who were also African American. They weren't interested, but it was pleasant enough, and I didn't think much about it until my sister missionary companion, eyebrows knit together, told me the couple had been laughing at her--that they were thinking essentially the same thing that the investigator couple in God's Army had thought about Elder Banks. Along with this issue, Richard Dutcher brings up several others: a young missionary having doubts because of the anti-Mormon material he's been reading, the protagonist questioning his faith because his step-father who brought him and his mother the Gospel had been jailed for molesting children, a sister missionary gaining a testimony of the Gospel only to lose an important relationship in the process, missionaries becoming frustrated because there's only so much they can do to help their investigators. These are the kinds of things that Mormons experience, and it was refreshing to see it portrayed on film--to see missionaries get angry and frustrated in once scene but humbly give blessings of healing and comfort in another scene. These may seem incongruous, but these scenes certainly reflect my own experience quite well--those paradoxes of Mormonism that Terryl Givens has discussed in articles and in his recent book, People of Paradox.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for God's Army was somewhat quenched by the fact that there will never be another one because Richard Dutcher is no longer interested in working in Mormon cinema. To me this is tragic in a very personal way because when art touches me the most, it's when it speaks something that I've always felt very deeply but haven't found the words or medium to express myself. When the Mormon community lost Richard Dutcher, we lost a voice that was successfully speaking the Mormon experience. Like being struck dumb just after we'd learned to speak. I only hope that future Mormon filmmakers will take up where Dutcher left off.