When you’re single and dating, any individual date can have a variety of outcomes.
Sometimes you’ll go out with someone who’s interesting and exciting, and you can’t wait to see them again.
And sometimes you’ll go out with someone whose personality or habits clash with your own, and you’re just relieved when the date is over.
And sometimes you’ll go out with someone who’s remarkably…unremarkable. Someone who is pleasant and inoffensive, such that you can stand being in their presence without pulling out your hair, but don’t have anything particularly interesting, moving, or unique about them to make you remember them in any context after the date is over. You don’t despise them, certainly, but have a hard time finding anything to like either.
Movie watching is the same way, and like that third category of date, Baptists At Our Barbecue is pleasant, but nothing more. It’s hard to actively hate it, but doesn’t really offer anything interesting or unique to make you fall in love with it either. Or, frankly even remember much about it a half-hour after the ‘date’ is over.
Baptists At Our Barbecue is set in a small town which consists of 262 Baptists and 262 Mormons. The main character is Tartan, a 29-year-old single Mormon who takes a job in this small town, disrupting the fragile religious balance. (Since there are clearly not 262 people attending the LDS sacrament meeting, though, we know that there are many inactives — probably in both churches. The effect of inactives on the ‘balance’ of the town is never discussed.)
Tartan seems like a nice guy, although kind of bland. You can imagine his not being married at age 29 is because girls found him falling solidly into dating category #3 above — comparable, perhaps, to a song you hear on the radio that you don’t hate enough to switch stations, but isn’t good enough to make you buy the CD either. While living in this small town, Tartan meets 25 year old — and newly-unattached — Charity (someone who, by contrast, would probably have you running to the music store, breathlessly asking the clerk if the CD is still in stock.)
You might not recognize initially that Charity is played by Heather Beers of Charly, with her ultra-straight hair and more laid-back personality. Don’t worry, if you’ve seen Charly any time in the last five years, you’ll figure it out soon enough, because Baptists gives you LOTS of close-ups of her.
(And why not? (1) It’s Heather Beers, and (2) no one else in the movie is particularly photogenic…)
Baptists works best, in fact, when Tartan and Charity are simply talking to each other. Tartan shows a little more personality and energy, and Charity carries herself with wry dialogue and bemused smiles so that their scenes together have a little flair. Had the movie been entirely about their relationship, it might have had a better chance of success.
Alas, the movie’s other elements are only sporadically successful. Baptists aims to be a quirky comedy with a small town filled with quirky people. Unfortunately, ‘quirky’ is a hard tone to pull off — without just the right touch those ‘quirky’ characters become shallow and annoying caricatures without any realism. As it happens, none of the “unique” characters in Longfellow are particularly successful, and the movie jumps from one to another so quickly, it’s hard to provide a fulfilling character arc for any of them.
The other plot points and ‘messages’ of the movie turn out to be pretty muddled as well. We’re taught that we should tolerate others different than ourselves, but how the townspeople actually learned that lesson (and so quickly!) is a little vague. The plot thread of who stole half of the LDS trailer — set up to be the primary catalyst for story progression — is dropped without warning, and gets barely a mention at the end. Likewise, a plot thread about a ‘bad’ character trying to redeem himself feels like a few vital scenes were missing.
In the end, we’re happy for Tartan and Charity getting together, but nothing other than the basic romance works in this movie. Like those unremarkable dates, “Baptists At Our Barbecue” is not a spectacular nor offensive failure, but there’s really not much to recommend it as anything other than a cheap rental when there’s nothing better on the shelf to grab.
Final Grade: C
Analysis and Other Comments (possible spoilers):
(1) The scene where a house is deliberately set on fire, almost killing one of the main characters was probably a little too serious for the tone of this movie. I’m sure this could have been rewritten to something less dramatic that could have served the same plot purpose.
(2) The underlying message of the movie is getting along with people different than you. In this movie, it’s Baptists and Mormons, although it could have been Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Muslims, blacks and whites, East Coast and West Coast rappers, etc… At no time does any actual church doctrine come into play in the movie, so the two groups could have been Democrats and Republicans for all it really mattered.
I’m not sure the definitions of the two groups mattered internally either. Once “Us” and “Them” have been defined, no one stops to think about why it was We don’t get along with Them (specific doctrinal differences or what) and just remember that They are different from Us…and that’s Bad. (In the movie, no one discusses any specific reason why the Baptists and Mormons don’t get along…other than — duh! — ‘We’ are Mormons and ‘They’ are Baptists, and vice versa.)
There are a number of ways where this lesson of tolerance and inclusion could have been achieved, and this movie happened to choose one of the least effective methods. A strange ‘miraculous’ sound in the mountains? Seriously? If that was supposed to be a subtle comment about how uneducated people treat ‘miracles’ and how easily they can change prejudices, it was too subtle for me.
Other, better methods of achieving religious unity amid the conflicts in the movie might have included:
- A Romeo-and-Juliet-style inter-faith romance between a young Baptist and a young Mormon, forcing their families to come to terms with one another’s differences. (Problematic, because of the LDS policy of marrying within the faith. The movie seems to hint at one such romance at the end, though.)
- A natural disaster, where the two sides have to band together to help the community survive. (Maybe the fire could have served this purpose in a different context.)
- Some other form of combined service project where the two sides have to work together to accomplish a common goal.
I would have picked any of these methods to provide a more fulfilling and meaningful reconciliation between the Baptists and the Mormons than what was actually presented.
(3) Baptists At Our Barbecue is very LDS-centric, but not LDS-biased. The Baptist/Mormon divide from the LDS side was not just ‘They Hate Us’, but also ‘We Hate Them Back’. The Mormons in Longfellow were depicted as being just as prejudiced against the other side as the Baptists were — perhaps more. The movie could have made a major misstep by making the Saints too much like…um, ‘saints’. By showing that the Mormons really genuinely didn’t want to associate with the Baptists in any way, is one way the movie managed to hit a spot of realism.
(4) From a plotting perspective, Rich was so obviously the prime suspect in the stealing of the LDS chapel, that (of course) I figured it couldn’t be him. The real obvious prime suspect in stealing the chapel would have been Sister Wyngate, who had shown her opposition to virtually everything the other Mormons had been doing since the beginning. Plus, having a Mormon be the culprit would have fit in nicely with the unifying theme of the story, since in the end it would have been shown that it wasn’t a Baptist responsible as all the Mormons originally thought. However, the entire stealing-the-chapel subplot ends up going nowhere, with a meaningless conclusion (“Yeah, I stole it…and I forgot where I left it”) (?)
(5) Similarly, Rich doesn’ t appear to suffer any consequences for burning down a house and almost killing someone, and stealing the trailer (add in assault, too…) We hear about him starting a new profession, but nothing about the legal consequences of his actions. Tartan seems to get off easy for his (admittedly smaller) mistake of lying to Charity.
(6) While the reverse is obvious, I’m not sure I buy why Heather Beers’ character would actually fall in love with Tartan. And I didn’t really buy why her character would choose the guy she did in Charly either (Heather’s only other movie of which I’m aware). Both guys are kind of bland and unremarkable. Of course, if the script says they get together in the end then there’s not much you can do, but maybe we should start a petition to get Heather a better ‘boyfriend’ in her next movie.
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