The Rapture

I've been trying to remember another recent debut film from a novice director that packs as much of a punch as Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, and I can't. Set in modern Los Angeles, young, single Sharon (Rogers) spends her days working as a nameless, faceless information operator, and passes her nights in an endless series of emotionally barren sexual encounters. She's the very picture of nineties angst and psychic despair, until one bleak night when she opts to turn her life around and accept God into her life. Faster than you can say “born again,” she kicks her lover out of bed, changes the sheets, and, of course, flosses madly. It is this turning point -- and the situations that result from it -- that Tolkin takes as a very sly means of exploring the muddled realm of Christianity (and on a grander scale, the concept, questions, and conceits of religion as a whole). In the aftermath of her conversion, she loses her friends, familiy, and ties to her past life and, in turn, gains a purpose in life. There is, at long last, Something to Believe In. Eventually, her new-found faith takes Sharon and her young daughter into the California desert to await the Rapture of the film's title: the sacred moment when the righteous are spirited away into Heaven while the nonbelievers get a ringside seat at Armageddon. And then things really get interesting. Religion has never been much of a selling point for movies, and so it comes as quite a surprise that Tolkin would choose this obviously risky topic on which to hang his debut. Tolkin's Rapture manages to skirt the pitfalls of both the Hollywood-saturated Ten Commandments as well as the blatant, effects-laden shocks of The Seventh Sign, and instead burrows uncompromisingly into that most bizarre of territories, Religious Faith. Tolkin's film dredges up just about every question in the book, and then proceeds to toss out (im)possible answers left and right. If all this sounds a bit on the weighty side, well, it is. The Rapture is a genuinely troubling film, not so much for all the theological heft bandied about on the screen, but more so for the disturbing questions that follow you out of the theater and into the light. What if? What if all directorial debuts were as original and exhilarating as this one? Wouldn't that be… Heaven?