This stridently Christian film takes a news story from 2011 and turns it into a hectoring preach, with one very curious invention. A 10-year-old girl in small-town Texas named Anna Beam (played here by Kylie Rogers) is suffering from an agonisingly painful and apparently incurable bowel disease. Her devoutly Christian parents Christy and Kevin (Jennifer Garner and Martin Henderson) take comfort in prayer and their local church; desperately, Christy takes Anna to a famous Boston paediatrician who does what can. All seems lost. But then … well, there’s a miracle, which the family unhesitatingly attribute to divine grace. Fine. But wait. There are two miracles here. Because in this film, little Anna shares a hospital ward with the daughter of a Boston journalist named Ben Wexler. Now, Wexler appears to be a decent enough guy, but not a Christian, in fact he actually takes Christy to one side to say he objects to the family giving his daughter a cross pendant. But Wexler is dramatically converted in the end by Anna’s miracle. I guess there’s more joy in heaven over one big-city media sophisticate who repenteth. The problem is that “Wexler” is entirely made up. He didn’t exist in real life: the sort of liberal-metropolitan type whose unbelief is there to be vanquished. What a strange film.
