Showbits

I'm a big fan of Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations With God books — not solely due to their content, which to a better trained eye may be unremarkable, but because these books initiated me into the realm of philosophical texts. If everyone is fortunate enough to have an eye-opening experience that teaches them there are more things in Heaven and Earth than they'd dreamt of, this was mine.

So imagine my disappointment when, ten years later, the film adaptation, released last month on DVD after a limited 2006 theatrical release, turned out to be a big yawn.

First, some background: the book is written as a dialogue between the author and a voice he claims is God's. If you get far enough into the book, you realize that it doesn't matter what god, if any, Mr. Walsch is channelling; the message, not the messenger, is what matters. And that's a message I can get behind.

But, as I suspected from CWG's trailer, the film is not about the book so much as it is about its author (played here by Henry Czerny, who we're supposed to remember from the 1996 Mission Impossible film). When a car accident breaks Neale's neck, he's left unemployable and homeless. He's still homeless an hour of film later — an hour that's conveyed little of any import. There are occasional "flash-forwards" to Neale giving presentations about his book, but these morsels of philosophy don't balance the film's interminable pace.

Finally, a voice wakes him up in the middle of the night, and he starts taking dictation. But the movie spends more time recording how he bargained a $1 million book sale into $1.5M than it does relating the contents of that book. The title character has been pushed right out of this rags-to-riches story.

It's disappointing that more of what made the book a bestseller wasn't preserved in this adaptation. Mr. Walsch had previously written and starred in the film Indigo, which actually demonstrates some concepts from his books. And Indigo and Conversations With God were produced by Stephen Simon, who also produced the movie adaptations of Richard Matheson's books Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come, two of my favorite philosophical/romantic books and films. He's also co-founder of the CWG film's publishing company, The Spiritual Cinema Circle, a DVD-of-the-month club that has always intrigued me in concept, save for my lack of agency in the selections. Given that track record, I'm surprised he doesn't have another hit on his hands.

If the movie is supposed to be a promotional device for the book, it doesn't stand a prayer. And that's a shame, as the film doesn't do the book justice.

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