War Room review: shut up and pray he quits

Is your husband a self-centered jerk? Does he ignore your needs, pay no attention to your adorable daughter, scold you for giving financial help to your troubled sister? Does he have a wandering eye and come dangerously close to committing adultery? Is he embezzling from his job? Well, you should know that it’s all your fault. When you find his behavior upsetting and take him to task you are only protracting the struggle. What you need to do is surrender, go in the closet and pray.

These tactics, say Alex and Stephen Kendrick in their latest “faith-based” film War Room, will bring your husband back to you, and cast Satan from your home. If you follow a precise prayer regimen (which remains vague in the film but all spelled out in supplemental materials available for purchase on the Kendricks’ website) there is no reason to believe that your husband won’t transform back into the man you fell for. He’ll even join your daughter for the big rope-skipping competition perfectly timed for the end of the movie.

War Room, which follows up the Kendricks’ very successful Fireproof and Facing the Giants, is, unfortunately, nowhere near as entertaining as some other of the recent low budget evangelical Christian films. (Nothing tops The Identical, in which Elvis Presley’s long lost twin brother comes to redeem us all from sin.) The performers are professional and, while it’s set in dull interiors with flat TV lighting, it cuts together okay. The plot is an uninteresting melodrama with a tortoise’s pace, but this does allow the viewer plenty of time to scrutinize its odd logic. Elizabeth (Priscilla Shirer, a successful Christian minister in her first film role) is a hard-working real estate agent aware that her marriage is almost at its breaking point. Her no-nonsense new client Miss Clara (Karen Abercrombie) wants to talk less about selling her house and more about Elizabeth’s relationship with Jesus. When Elizabeth confesses that she is unhappy, and only attends church when it fits her schedule, Miss Clara explains how she found happiness.

Taking a cue from her late husband (who was a battle strategist during the Vietnam War) Miss Clara, who mostly speaks in hosanna soundbytes, discovered she needed a bunker in which to configure a plan of action. She turned her walk-in closet into a war room, and there she sat and prayed and prayed. She ignored the troubles outside, and only worried about within. This, apparently, does the trick.

After a lengthy period of consideration, Elizabeth follows suit. It builds to a triumphant monologue in which she shouts Satan out of her home as strings ring out on the film’s score. It was good timing, too, as her no-good husband Tony was just about to shack up with a work associate, but then can’t because he gets a stomach ache. Tony (T.C. Stallings, surprisingly muscular for a pharmaceutical sales rep) eventually is fired due to some queer invoicing. All Elizabeth needs to do is not get angry at him – basically accept that he is a thief – and like magic all of his bad traits quickly disappear. He begs forgiveness, prays and even gives stolen drugs back to his bosses (who don’t press charges, because he seems so sad.) There is a recurring gag that Elizabeth’s feet stink, and the movie ends with Tony washing them in a nice genderbent Mary Magdalene moment.

Shirer and Stallings do the best they can with the material, and while Miss Clara is about as subtle as Tyler Perry’s Madea, Karen Abercrombie’s furniture-chomping performance does sneak a laugh or two. It’s interesting to consider that all the main players in War Room are African-American, but there is not one reference to race in the film. I was hoping that in this entry of the expanding “faith-based” sub-genre, we’d get a glimpse of how black churches in America are frequently nerve center of political activism and community organizing. But that aspect is completely absent. Prayer in War Room is a solitary endeavor, though hardly ascetic, considering the officially branded Battle Plan Prayer Cards and Sticky Notes for sale. One can always keep praying that the next of these films will be a little better.