Evan Almighty

Evan Almighty

Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Lauren Graham

It is an old joke. A few years back my grandfather was sleeping in his chair when his youngest great-granddaughter started staring at him. After awhile, he woke up and noticed the young child with the puzzled look. After awhile, he asked her, “What do you want?” The crumb cruncher asked, “Grandpa, did you know Noah?” The old man, with a few pin pricks in his pride, replied, “No, I did not know Noah!” The ankle biter shot back, “Then how did you survive the flood?”

Noah and his ark have an almost magical hold over our society. There are restaurants, hotels, material, purses, stuff toys, play sets, and a great comedy routine by Bill Cosby devoted to Noah and the Ark. Every few months a group of explorers claim to have found the boat on some remote mountain even though it would be near impossible for gopher wood to have lasted this long. It is the first story in the Bible that captures a child’s imagination. It has all the animals! What child does not sparkle at the thought of all those dogs, horses, zebras, giraffes, birds, and elephants? A lot of Christians make this story a litmus test of whether you are in or out. Either you believe the geological evidence, facts, or you believe a Mesopotamian myth that the Jews appropriated. I have always thought it was the wrong question. I think the question is, what does a 600-year-old man and a boat have to do with you and me?

After all, not many of us are going to have God tell us to build an ark. I cannot picture what it is like to be 600, and not feeling as spry as you were when you were a century earlier. You look at the young pup 400-year-olds, shake your fist at the stupidity of the 39 different younger generations and lament how when you were 267, you knew a thing or two about respect, not like these kids of today. You wish you were 300 years younger so you could chase your 500-year-old trophy wife around the kitchen, throw on your Jack LaLanne jumpsuit so you can hit the early bird specials, and then have the voice of the Big Guy telling you to build a boat. (Given that Noah is 6 centuries old, and my grandparents, who are in their 80s, and cannot hear worth a darn, this is a conversation I am sure Noah’s entire neighborhood heard with God going hoarse by the end of the conversation, with Noah only catching every third or fourth word.) Then you start to build. Day after day in the hot sun, putting the beams into place, pegs after peg, smearing the pitch. Of course Noah’s friends had to think he was just showing his age and were probably happy that he was wearing pants. Nuts. If you have not been to the Middle East, it is a pretty dry place. There were better things he could be doing. Relaxing in his chair, reading, sleeping in, watching Dick Clark, listening to your arteries harden, a thousand better things to do that go out day after day and building a big boat. It is a nice story, but what does this dude have to do with you and me?

Steve Carell (The 40 Year Old Virgin, “The Office,” Little Miss Sunshine, Get Smart) stars in the sequel to the 2003 Jim Carrey smash hit Bruce Almighty. When a film takes in over $242 million at the box office you know studio executives are going to want to do a second film. One little problem, Jim Carrey rarely does sequels. Except for Ace Ventura, which he did for a friend, the comedian has resisted huge sums of money to do further adventures of some America’s favorite characters. This does not mean that Hollywood has not tried to continue franchises without him. Anyone who has made the mistake of watching Son of Mask and Dumb & Dumberer can tell you the results. Those two films are more painful than watching a children’s show host suffering from Turrets Syndrome. Plus, Carrey’s box office muscle has shrunk over the last couple of years, going from the Charles Atlas of leading men to the kid getting sand kicked in his face when it comes to tickets purchased, and he has developed a growing reputation for being difficult to work with. So, what is a studio to do?

Turn to Steve Carell. The “Daily Show” correspondent has become a hot property. The former mail carrier spent most of the last decade on the margins of show business, doing small roles in television shows like “The Dana Carvey Show,” “The Tim Curry Show,” and “Watching Ellie.” Without leading man looks, he was thankful to join friend Jon Stewart who had just signed on to be the anchor on Comedy Central’s lowly-rated “Daily Show” in 1999. Where, along with his former understudy at Second City, Stephen Colbert, he delighted audiences and was happy to get a paycheck. Yet, it was Carell’s likeability that kept getting him minor roles, especially because he was friends with the Frat Pack (Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and brothers Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson) and their friends (David Koechner, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Justin Long, John C. Reilly, Jon Favreau, Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, and Todd Phillips). These connections got him minor roles in films like Bruce Almighty, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and Bewitched. Yet it was his friendship with Apatow that gave him his big break. Apatow had watched Carell on stage play a middle-aged, virginal character that the actor had invented for a short skit and thought this character would be perfect for a small sex comedy that they would write together. That film became the smash hit The 40 Year Old Virgin. At roughly the same time, he got the role of Michael Scott, the boss, in the American version of The Office. He had also agreed to play a suicidal, gay former professor in a minor film about a little girl on her way to a beauty contest in Little Miss Sunshine. No one at Sundance in 2006 would have predicted that it would be getting Oscar buzz a year later. Carell was hot, hot enough to be the leading man in a tent pole summer release.

For those of you who don’t remember, Carell was the rival anchor foil for Carrey’s character in the first movie. Evan has been elected to Congress, and moved from Buffalo to the suburbs of northern Virginia. He is living out the American materialistic dream when God (Morgan Freeman) comes a knocking. What does the Almighty want? He wants Even to build an ark because there is a flood coming. Like the first movie, it is a pleasant comedy, not outstanding, but nice, the kind of film with a good moral message that would have been made in the 1950s, except for the potty jokes, if they would have had the ability to do these kinds of special effects. It makes you smile. The most interesting thing about this film is that it will need to clear $250 million at the box office before it makes a profit.

When you get older, you start to realize that there are times that life is like a flood. When the problems of life come, and they always come, illness, financial problems, emotional trauma, they pour in around you and it feels like you are drowning. All you can do is stand there and watching the waters carry so much of what you built up away. When the floodwaters recede, you go in and see what can be saved, if anything can be saved, and sometimes all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put things together again. We all know that couple who seemed so in love, that seemed so perfect for each other. Then the storms of life come and they leave each in search of fairer weather. That is why we have to spend our time building arks to prepare for the floods of life, whether it is faith or in relationships. If you don’t do the hard work that it takes, put in the time and effort necessary, sacrifice, your relationship will drift away. Similarly, religion, & faith helps people build their boats that will carry them to safety when the waters come. That is what an old man and a boat has to do with you and me, whether his name is Evan, Naunet, Ziusudra, or Noah. I hope you are one of the lucky ones who have built your ark to carry you to safety. One of the greatest people I have ever met is named Olive Batman who, in many ways, has had a hard life. In her late 90s, she was one of the most positive people I had ever met. She had been through a lot of storms in her life. Deaths, financial problems, disappointments, the infirmities that come with age, and yet, every time I looked in her eyes I saw that ark of the spirit that will carry her to a land most of us will never see. A few pastors and holy rollers could take learn lessons from that little woman about knowing Noah and surviving floods.

Verdict: A Nice Film