#2: You don't earn heaven. You co-create it.
Why Mormon romcoms don't make sense to non-members
This review is rife with spoilers! Don’t read any further unless you’ve seen the movie. Don’t know where to track it down? You can watch it for free here.
Anyone want to go to Liberty Park when this corona thing has blown over?
Alright, so I have bad news and good news about this week’s newsletter.
First, the bad news.
When I sat down to re-watch the greatest pieces of LDS entertainment ever created—The Singles Ward—I discovered that it’s pretty hard to track down. It’s available at Deseret Book, but it’s not available on Amazon Prime anymore, and it’s no longer illegally available on YouTube or DailyMotion. Hold tight on that one, I’m buying the DVD. The world needs to experience this film and I need to watch them experience it.
In the meantime, the good news is that I own Charly and therefore, can watch it anytime my heart desires, so I’ll be reviewing that movie instead. Guess there wasn’t a choice, after all!
The tricky thing about reviewing Charly
Charly is a funny movie to review. Like most LDS media, the reason it reads as corny to non-members is two-fold:
It’s clear the writers of this film have never had so much as a friendship with a non-member in their lives.
The Mormon worldview is so fundamentally different that it’s borderline unintelligible if you don’t come into this movie already buying into it.
There are plenty of valid criticisms of Charly, but at its heart, if you believe in the Church… it’s not only a beautiful movie, but an effective one.
The issue is, of course, that most of us aren’t Mormon so it either reads as hokey as heck, or firmly “not for us.”
Eternity is a long time, so choose your partner wisely.
The easiest way for me to describe Charly that it’s an amalgam of every successful romance flick up until 2002, with a special emphasis on Love Story, wrapped up in an LDS message.
New Yorker and non-member Charly meets uptight Peter Priesthood Sam Roberts during a confusing and elongated trip to Salt Lake City, falls in love with him, converts, and dies of cancer at the end.
As you can imagine, a lot of people felt like the third act was “a little much.”
Charly is based on an equally popular book by Jack Weyland, which I actually haven’t read, so I’m not sure how closely it stacks up or how significant it was in the community. I do know, however, the movie adaptation was a hit, and is a beloved part of the LDS canon.
Charly’s narrative structure
Charly is funny for another reason, one I’d like to explore more in the future. It’s told in three almost discrete episodes, that to me, make it seem like the writers just aren’t clear on how three act structures are supposed to function.
A criticism you hear of a lot about films out of Mollywood is that they’re boring— if you’re reading this as a non-member, you might think of Napoleon Dynamite. At best, they’re funny, at worst, they’re ham-fisted snooze fests.
I’ve always viewed it differently though. It’s not so much that these movies aren’t about anything, rather, their structures are unique. Possibly even more importantly, non-members don’t know what they’re about because they don’t have the right background to understand them.
Charly isn’t a boy-meets-girl movie. Charly isn’t even about the transformative power of the Church, and how faith in God reveals life’s meaning to you.
Charly is about the fact marriage and love are meant to last for an eternity. Not for the entirety of our earthy lives, eternity. And the writers are clear about that from the first scene.
In the celestial glory there are three heavens or degrees;
And in order to obtain the highest, a man must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage];
And if he does not, he cannot obtain it.
— Doctrine and Covenants 131:1–3
The movie starts with this sort of uncanny valley echo of Father of the Bride with the protagonist, Sam Roberts saying, “I always believed that love was fairly uncomplicated. You found the perfect woman, gorgeous but practical. You married, settle down with children, minivan, mortgage, lived quietly, predictably, happily ever after. That was my dream. Until she came into my life.”
(You might recall George Banks proclaiming something similar in Father of the Bride: “I used to think a wedding was a simple affair. Boy and girl meet, he buys a ring, she buys a dress…” Even the setting is similar.)
It’s so easy to watch this movie and think that Sam is making some sort of gesture towards how you can’t control who you fall in love with, how he overcame so much for this quirky New York chick.
That’s an important element of the movie, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not what it’s trying to communicate, and that’s precisely why the third act isn’t actually out of left field. It’s about him coming to accept that the physical part of life ends; the spiritual side is forever. That’s hard, but the beauty of God’s gift to us is that you can “let [the people you love] go and never lose them.”
Symbolism throughout Charly
Something I really respect about this movie is how consistently they use symbolism throughout. It’s worth keeping your eyes open for as you watch it: Charly’s loss of interest in painting fruit, her moment of faith happening in front of a painting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman…
It’s beautifully woven in. It makes me sad that this movie didn’t have a slightly better production value, because these are the kinds of touches that make you appreciate a movie during subsequent viewings.
What Charly gets right about non-members
Before we get into everything Charly got wrong, let’s talk about what it got right about non-members. There were two scenes in particular that jumped out to me as very real.
The first is a scene where Charly’s sitting with her grandmother, and her grandma compares her interest in the Church to her childhood flights of fancy of running to the circus. She tells a story about how when Charly finally got to the circus, she realized it wasn’t what she wanted at all. Her grandmother confesses that’s what she thought her interest in Mormons would be like. I think there’s something to that. For a lot of people, it’s hard not to treat as a curiosity. The characterization of this felt really real, and so did the way Charly communicated that it wasn’t just a phase.
The second scene is when Charly tells Sam she loves him for the first time. She says, “You introduced me to a new way of life, but it’s not going to mean much unless you’re a permanent part of it.” That’s universal.
It’s a strange feeling to want to be a better person for someone, make that change, and then realize they might not join you on the journey that follows.
What Charly gets wrong about non-members (and some funny observations)
So, compelling themes aside, Charly gets… an incredible amount comically wrong. This was my third or fourth time watching Charly, and I tried to make a list of everything that struck me as unusual, but gave up an hour and ten minutes in.
There was just too much.
Here’s a short list:
In the beginning of the movie, when Charly lands in SLC, she calls her current boyfriend/fiancé Mark. As she steps over a child, who for some reason is just lying down in the middle of a busy airport, her lover regales her with memorized statistics about why Utahns are boring. She reassures him he doesn’t need to be threatened. Really, he could have left it at “they don’t drink” and that would have been that.
Everyone in New Yorker (and college student?) Charly’s life seems to accept that she’s taking this mysterious, open-ended trip to Utah, where she’s not really in communication with any of her friends, least of all her fiancé. Framed this way, it’s pretty easy to see why Mormons can suspend their disbelief. I don’t care what year it is, this is really, really strange.
We’re supposed believe these two 35 year old actors are college students? I can maybe, maybe believe they’re in their mid-20s, but even that’s pushing it. Makes sense for Sam (still a big maybe!), assuming he went on a mission in the middle of college. But what’s Charly’s excuse? Also, being in school has little or no bearing on the rest of the film. Why even include that? Is it just a subtle advertisement for BYU’s “information systems” department?
There’s a lot about Charly’s behavior in the first 10, 15 minutes I think is worth nitpicking, but might not be worth going through unless you’re watching it unfold in realtime.
One thing that really stood out to me during these scenes that she describes the “typical” Mormon dream girl as a “stout” type A, when in reality… it’s just her with a slight attitude adjustment and a cardigan.Charly’s dad describes her boyfriends 🚨 since junior high 🚨 as being noncommittal, with her current beau cast as “Captain Non-Commitment.” Uh? Who’s committing in junior high? I don’t even think this is a Mormon thing, just bad writing.
She orders a merlot in Temple Square, yet her whole family lives in SLC and she’s from there. Seriously? Also, again, she’s supposed to be in college but she’s old enough to drink? 🧐
More of a global observation: this movie is dripping with repressed sexuality. During their second date, Sam makes some kind bad joke about humidity in Utah versus New York, that only serves as a vehicle to talk about how being hot and bothered is…well, a bother. Why is he going out with her again, then, if he resents her for turning him on?
Throughout this whole film, I kept asking “What happened to Mark, her fiancé?” She’s full on dating another dude, and we never see her break-up with her fiancé! What the heck!
At one point, Charly checks a copy of The Bible out from the library. I don’t know why, I just thought this was funny.
Later in the film, Charly describes New York intelligentsia—what’s been keeping her from faith this whole time—as: the Museum of Natural History, the Met, and the Hayden Planetarium. Another moment where I borderline said out loud, “Have the writers ever left Utah?”
At the beginning of Act 2, Sam gets more upset that Charly is “used merchandise” (i.e. slept with her fiancé) than the fact she converted to another religion and cheated on her fiancé with him. Wouldn’t adultery be a lot worse than the fact she’s had sex? This betrays another blindspot. I will say, the way that this plot point is resolved is compelling for non-members who may not want to join because they feel “tainted.”
After meeting the Mormon his fiancé cheated on him with, non-member Mark just takes Charly back. He also seems to accept her unconditionally, and is cool with the whole LDS thing. She dumps him anyway, even after he makes her a dinner of pizza and Merlot.
Speaking of that dinner, they mix up New York style pizza and Chicago style pizza which like… that’s quite the mistake, guys.
There’s so much more I could say about this movie, but we’re almost at 2,000 words. Maybe I’ll return to it again in an easier to convey format. Podcast maybe? YouTube video?
Until then, I hope you enjoyed this, friends.
Growing up in Salt Lake I assumed that this movie and The Singles Ward were, like, major Hollywood releases because people talked about them in the same breath as regular movies. Weird to realize now that they're these bizarre little cultural nuggets that are completely baffling to most of the world, my adult self included. I hope you keep going with this blog, there's so much weird and charming mormon media to talk about.
Don’t most college students turn 21 in either their junior or senior year? Not sure if the movie specified the year but not realistic for college students to drink.