The ending moved me to (almost) tears tonight, and any movie that can accomplish that (it’s a short list) is worth watching in my opinion. I thought the symbolic grace that passed to each of the characters lives in front of the nativity was beautiful. That said, it made me very uncomfortable to see Holly squishing up close to Elder Ferrell (doesn’t he remind anyone else of Will Ferrell?) and nestling her head on his shoulder and to not have the mission president or his mom (hello?!) intervene. (I swear it looked like they were already officially boyfriend/girlfriend. “Call me, mkay?” Gag.) I think even “untrained” non-Mormon viewers would feel uncomfortable with the inconsistency.

Here’s my final scene: The mission president and other Elders are waiting by the van. As Elder Ferrell and his mom come down the apartment steps and out the door, they hear the music from the nativity and gravitate naturally to take a look. (And remove the “Lutheran” sign — I felt like that was going out of the way to prove some unnecessary ecumenical point. “Do Lutherans know more about grace than Mormons?” It was distracting to me.) The others by the van notice this and naturally wander over, too, to see what they see. (Having everyone meet at the van, and then only Elder Ferrell walking over, and then Holly, and then everyone else, it was WAY too forced.)

The main characters pass the baby from one person to the next (keeping the powerful symbol of God’s grace touching their lives) — Holly is still watching from her balcony in tears. After they’ve all held the baby, the mission president taps the elders on their shoulder to signal “it’s time to go” and they slowly break off, but Elder Ferrell hangs on to the baby a bit longer, now weeping and kneeling down. Seeing this, Holly then rushes downstairs and as she arrives and kneels next to him. He hands the baby off to her, looks sorrowfully one last time at her, and then escorts his mom back to the van. Holly lays the baby back in the manger, slowly takes a few steps toward the van as it drives off, tugs at the cross around her neck, and walks back up to her apartment as we fade to black.

You still get everyone in the last scene, you still have the final interaction between Elder Ferrell and Holly (but it’s more believable and more faithful to the reality of what happened and to those gosh-darn rules), and you still have the symbol of the grace of God working in everyone’s lives.

Adam, just get me a Handycam, a Mac, and Final Cut Pro, and I’ll shoot the whole thing for you! :)

Jon

It isn’t a question of playing some post-modern trick on the audience. Dutcher has his faults but he’s not that bad–if his message were that we assume sin where it isn’t, we’d see it somewhere in the movie, it would be confirmed somewhere at the end, and the film wouldn’t be titled States of Grace. I think the real reasons why we aren’t sledgehammered with the fornication are delicacy for the audience’s sensibility, the difficulty of making the mutual seduction plausible if shown on-screen, and the fact that making the sin more real to the audience exposes how absurd the ending is.

Anyway, I think your approach weakens the atonement rather than strengthens it. When we brush off sin as irrelevant, we diminish the atonement.

The point is not that he is performing some masterful directorial sleight of hand and that there was no fornication; the point is that we don’t actually know what happened–he never tells us–that it doesn’t really matter, and that our presumption of fornication is based in large part on the young woman’s past and our quiet judgment of her and not on the actual evidence presented. The evidence given in the narrative itself could just as easily point to a past transgression that he should have cleared up before serving, or to a non sexual sin that she simply convinced him he should confess and accept the consequences for. Dutcher’s point is not (I think) that lackluster performance of mundane duties leads to fornication or other serious sins but that when we obsess over identifying and labeling the sinful act itself we miss out on the depth of Christ’s healing power.

When the (alleged) adulteress was brought before the Savior, the evidentiary case against her was tenuous at best. Jesus did not even deal with the question of whether or not she had actually committed the sin in question because his power to heal (and to shame those who sought to use her alleged sinfulness as a pretext for punishing her publicly in the most self-righteous, self-congratulatory manner imaginable) extended infinitely beyond the limitations presumed by a fixation on the nature, extent, and details of her supposed crime.

That said, I definitely agree that the directing in the final act was saccharine and rather ham-fisted–an entire group of adults spontaneously caught up in the collective effervescence of worshiping Ricky Bobby’s baby Jesus.