Oh, God!

Director: Carl Reiner
Starring: John Denver, George Burns
Running Time: 97 min.
Rated PG for adult humor
3 out of 5 stars

Movies about God are necessarily products of their time. The 1950’s brought us Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments, which assumed all its viewers were Christian, or at least of an Abrahamic religion, but didn’t really care what the movie had to say as long as it entertained; the early 2000’s brought us Tom Shadyac’s Bruce Almighty, which featured God as a prominent character, but thanks to political correctness and bottom-line concerns, couldn’t actually say anything about him. Carl Reiner’s Oh, God! is just as much a child of the 70’s: God is sick of religion and war (in that order) and just wants us all to get along.

The film starts with a first-rate premise and some brilliant casting that never fully deliver as you might expect them to: folk singer John Denver plays Jerry Landers, a downtrodden assistant manager at a local grocery store (Woody Allen was originally considered for the role—and it shows) who is contacted by God himself (portrayed by vaudeville veteran George Burns—although he adds the caveat that he could have appeared in any form he wished) to deliver a message. The message is simple: “It can work.” That is, if we stop fighting and killing each other and learn to get along, everything can be okay.

If the message seems a little too bland to sustain a full-length motion picture, it is—although it does make for some apt satire of those who blindly seek God’s will when it should be obvious. Key scenes from the film involve an unnamed university’s panel of divinity professors who spend all their time sitting among stodgy books and arguing “how-many-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin”-type questions (which serves as a compelling foil to the brain-dead group of hare krishnas who congregate on Jerry’s lawn after he announces God’s appearance). The film’s de facto villain is, appropriately, a charismatic preacher who has become rich by convincing his unfortunate followers that they must “give to the Lord.”

Unfortunately, this is where the film fails as well: while satire of the Prosperity Gospel sham is both welcome and deserved (and arguably needed even more now than it was 30 years ago), the Rev. Willie Williams (as our charismatic friend bills himself) is not even introduced until the last third of the film. This is unfortunate, as his villain would have provided Jerry and God with some much-needed opposition. For majority of the picture, we’re left to watch Jerry contact various news outlets (God, for some reason, is reluctant to prove his existence—or even to contact more than one person at a time), share God’s message, and get laughed at. The reactions of the press and the populous are generally uninteresting, and while there is some chemistry between Denver and Burns, the scenes are short-lived and not always laugh-out-loud funny.

The film, as one might expect, is frustrating for the same reasons that most movies where God is an active character are: in order to make God work as a character, he must be rendered less than all-powerful (otherwise the requisite conflict is a dubious proposition). Burns is a God who worries that creating avocados was a mistake, and who is unable to prove his own existence in a court of law. This admittedly makes for some funny scenes, but ultimately bogs the film down in wishy-washy, faith-based sentimentality. One wonders if the producers were simply worried about offending anyone—until we hear God explicitly discount all of the world’s major religions.

Oh, God! is a film that works on the level of performances—Burns is hilarious as always, and it’s a wonder that Denver never acted again—but fails to do much more than entertain at the most basic level. If you’re the sort of person that goes to church every Christmas and Easter because “it’s good for you,” you might be stirred by the spiritual messages here. Otherwise, expect a few funny moments and nothing more.