'Miracles' preaches to more than faith-based film flock

The rise of the so-called "faith-based film" - typically low-budget films that are almost uniformly evangelical - has occurred largely in a bubble of its own like a sheltering harbor for Christian believers at that heathen meeting place: the multiplex.

"Miracles From Heaven," a film whose title even Hallmark would blush at, is an attempt to expand the reach of the faith-based film a little beyond the flock. To do so, it has armed itself with two things: the star power of Jennifer Garner and a full barrage of sentimentality. The fate of a sick 10-year-old girl precariously hangs in the balance.

The film, directed by Patricia Riggen ("The 33"), is adapted from the memoir of Christy Beam, whose Texas family is jolted when one of their three daughters, Anna (played sweetly by Kylie Rogers), is found to suffer from a rare disorder that leaves her chronically unable to digest food.

"Based on real events," is how the film presents itself, and some of its best qualities are in depicting elements of life - the frightful anxiety of parenthood, the struggle to find meaning amid hardship - that don't often make it into the movies.

But the course of "Miracles From Heaven" is never in doubt. When Garner as Beam intones in the opening voiceover questions of where miracles come from, the film's title has already stated the answer.

For those girding for religious propaganda, that is here. And the Beams - a white, churchgoing Texas family with horses on their homespun ranch - offer little that deviates from the most stereotyped view of who's Christian. But to the film's credit, its more distinguishing characteristic is an earnestness to recognize the small and large gestures of kindness that alter lives.

Garner is, of course, a better performer than many of these films have had before, and her white-knuckle maternal worry propels the movie to something a touch better than the Lifetime movie you'd expect. A few years after "Dallas Buyers Club," Garner is back in hospital halls, this time as a pleading parent of a patient.

"Miracles are everywhere" is the movie's concluding ethos, something that might also be said of Terrence Malick's bursting-with-life films, the latest of which was his Los Angeles version of the prodigal son tale, "Knight of Cups." The connection, between radically different elevations of moviemaking, is maybe a little silly.

But it's a reminder that, just as "miracles" are all around, spirituality in the cinema is, too.