Dear Elmer Gantry, meet me at the revival meeting. Do not sit in the preacher’s seat and do not sit in the front row where everyone can see you. Try to be as invisible as you can, and try not to say anything. Try instead to listen. Listen to your neighbors, listen to the preacher IF the preacher seems as willing to listen as they are to preach, and listen, if you’re being honest, to what God may be speaking to your heart. In all the revival meetings you have helped to lead, you have never stopped talking long enough to listen. So please come, and please do listen.
I watched your movie the other night, the one in which you start out by conning nuns to help get your bar tab paid and then wake up with a hangover next to a lady you had just met in the bar. You do not begin well there, my friend. Everywhere you go, it seems, you use Bible talk and the meaninglessly flowery phrase “Love is the morning and evening star” to sell people on whatever it is you are selling on a given day. Elmer, I would not be buying any of those things. Given how obviously hard you are pushing to sell all of these (including an image of your own virtuosity), I am very surprised anyone in this film is buying them either. Then again, the real world is full of people who buy stuff sold with pushes of the hardest kinds.
In your movie, you then go on to wander into one of Sister Sharon Falconer’s revivals that has just come to town. Sister Sharon is preaching about Jesus, but at the same time putting herself in the center of a cult of personality that is enamored by her every move and word. You are amazed by the attention she is getting. You realize you would love that kind of attention, too. So, you worm your way into her traveling band. You convince Sister Sharon you can rev people up with your story of being a businessman whose life was changed when you found a Gideon Bible in a hotel room drawer. Your life appeared to be changed in part because you then actually started making sales. Good one, Elmer. That story will draw crowds.
Crowds kept coming to hear you, of course, and even put up with theatrics like you bringing a monkey to the pulpit to talk about the silliness of evolution and allowing crowd members to bark like dogs. They are whipped up into a fervor as you talk about hell, which gets them ready for the softer tones of Sister Sharon beckoning them to repentance as a road to heaven.
As for me, I have been to a few revival-type meetings in my life. I remember weeping at one shortly after my Grandpa died. I even sensed God’s power and His goodness at a few of them. Yet my dear Elmer, I would not be able to see or experience God in your revivals because it is hard to embrace God at the other end of a sales pitch or a fever pitch.
In some sense, Mr. Gantry, the film understands that your revival shenanigans are pure folly because they arise out of your self-exalting and ever-contriving heart. This becomes clear in one satisfying passage in the final act of the film when you are finally humbled enough to have the salesman’s wide grin wiped off your face. If only your film would have ended at this point, as this is when the crimes of your past have busted their clouds over your head so you taste their bitter rain. We begin to see the chance for sweet hope for you as the taste of these showers drive you figuratively to your knees.
It is unfortunate that your film then tacks on a few events seemingly designed to bring you off your knees and transform you into a hero. I dearly hope that, if I found you in the real world, you would not be putting on the hero’s crown but rather humbly examining yourself and your life. Much better indeed that you would be looking back on your deception of yourself and of the world and beginning the revival of listening. Listen to your life. Listen to your neighbors. Listen to God. No more talking, Mr. Gantry. Just listen. — Brian Duignan (Screenattention).
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