Available on DVD: “Higher Ground”

Dagmara Dominczyk and Vera Farmiga in Higher Ground

Vera Farmiga’s debut as a film director tells the story of a woman’s spiritual life from her teen years through the early dawn of middle age, a journey in which she becomes a believer and associates with believers but keeps listening for the voice of God and hearing nothing. Higher Ground shines a light on an important aspect of the human experience, one not often explored onscreen, and contains a number of notable performances — not the least of which is Farmiga in the central role. It was a hit at Sundance and deserves to have been for the aforementioned reasons.

The movie has also been praised for its balanced presentation of the religious life, and Farmiga herself has done a number of interviews talking about how she had no desire to skew the film in either a pro- or anti-religion way. Yet the point of view of the film is skewed, just by virtue of the story, which is adapted from This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost, Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir of her path into and ultimately out of evangelical Christianity.

The problem here is subtle, and therefore must be stated bluntly. The problem is not the point of view. An equally good movie could be made endorsing organized religion as rejecting it (and if anything it’s a relief that Farmiga treats the religious life with a respect uncommon in recent Hollywood film). The problem is that the story, as constituted, is of necessity against organized religion, but Farmiga, as director, pretends that it’s ambiguous. So you get a movie slightly at cross-purposes with itself.

Farmiga wants to convey the church’s sense of loving community, but everyone Corinne (Farmiga) meets acts like a smiling zombie, simmering with suppressed or unacknowledged hostility. The only one vital, life-embracing exception comes in the form of Corinne’s best friend (Dagmara Dominczyk), and even that character’s arc doesn’t reinforce the value of faith. When Corinne, wrestling with doubt, speaks up at a meeting, the creepy pastor (Bill Irwin) tries to cut her off, and a woman later warns her against preaching, which is the domain of men.

Against this background, Corinne’s spiritual questioning can’t help but seem either a manifestation of her honesty (the others are faking it) or her intelligence (the others are deluded). Farmiga may be trying to paint a neutral portrait, but the script is anything but neutral, and she probably would have been better off embracing more of the film’s contents rather than shying away from it. When Corinne tells her husband (Joshua Leonard) that he is boring, it’s difficult to imagine too many people disagreeing.

Still, perhaps the tension between director and screenplay isn’t completely bad, in that it makes Higher Ground harder to peg and invites closer scrutiny. It’s a movie of subtle shifts and unspoken transactions and rewards attention.

One thing you’re guaranteed to notice is that the young woman who plays Corinne as a teenager looks uncannily like Farmiga, down to her facial expressions and reactions. Chalk it up to nature, not CGI. Teenage Corinne is played by Taissa Farmiga, Vera’s younger sister.