Marvelous ‘Millions’ a film about faith, real miracles

Why do some people believe in God — in a world beyond the one we can see — while others don’t?

Are some folks simply missing that “God gene” in their hardwiring, or does life experience mutate it into disbelief?

“Millions,” a gorgeous, tender, and clever new film by Danny Boyle, the British director of often violently visceral films such as “Trainspotting” and “28 Days Later,” raises these questions with equal parts humor, magical realism and armchair theology.

The film, set in modern-day industrial northern England (somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester), follows the story of two young brothers, Damian and Anthony Cunningham, whose mother has died and father has moved them to a new, better house in a new, better neighborhood.

Damian, about 8, is the believer.

Anthony, about 11, is the skeptic.

The little guy, Damian, played by an absolutely angelic 9-year-old Alex Etel (in his acting debut) is obsessed with Roman Catholic saints. His dog-eared copy of The Six O’Clock Saints, a history of Christian martyrs, is never far from his doe-eyed, freckled person.

One day while Damian’s sitting by the railroad tracks in a fort made of cardboard refrigerator boxes, having a conversation with St. Claire of Assisi (the patron saint of television, among other things), a huge bag of money literally falls from the sky and into his lap.

A gift from God, Damian assumes. He’s supposed to use the money to help poor people. It’s as clear to him as the blue sky, or the 13th century saint he was just talking to before the black Nike bag of money crushed his fort.

“So you can see it, too?!” Damian asks Anthony when he shows him the stash of money for the first time, explaining that sometimes, you know, he sees things that other people, well, can’t.

Anthony the skeptic, played by newcomer Lewis McGibbon, isn’t sure where the money’s come from but he’s certain it didn’t fall from heaven. And he’s got big plans for the quarter million pounds sterling that involve jet skis, real estate, and camera-cell phones, but not Oxfam or Feed the Children.

Anthony, only a few years older than Damian, has seen too much to believe, and considers his younger brother a “nutter” for his simple, and vivid, faith.

I don’t want to give too much of the story away because it’s so different and wonderful (run out and see it this weekend, and bring the kids) that I don’t want to spoil it, but suffice to say the true provenance of the money is revealed (and it’s not so heavenly), a battle of faith vs. will unfolds over what to do with it, and a small parade of saints — Nicholas, Francis of Assisi, Joseph the Carpenter, and Peter among them — appears to shepherd little Damian through his struggle to do the right thing.

Boyle, who was raised Catholic by a devoutly religious Irish mother but who has since abandoned any organized religion, says he was more like Damian than Anthony when he was a boy.

“I was more like the younger boy in a way because I was sort of imaginative,” Boyle told me on a recent visit to Chicago. “I remember having conversations like that when I was a kid. . . . No sensible rational barriers that you put up, that people are putting up for you by saying, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ His brother is like that, already a bit careful and a bit canny.

“Everybody changes. . . . There is something clearly between the ages of 8 and 10 where you take those first steps into adult life and there’s no going back then. Once you have got a taste for what they perceive we value, they never go back.”

Raising big questions about the nature of faith (are you born with it and how do you lose it?) was entirely unintentional, Boyle said.

“The lesson of the film, if there is a lesson — and there’s not meant to be a lesson — one of the things [Damian’s] mom goes on about to him in the last scene, and it’s something that my mom went on about to me all the time, is about faith in other people, having that belief in other people, that good can come out of it,” he explained.

“And it’s more important than iconography and all those kinds of things. It’s a gesture toward other people.”

The scene from “Millions” I’ve been mulling deals with that kind of faith.

Boyle and the screenwriter, Frank Cottrell Boyce, a practicing Catholic (“He has seven children, whereby he proves it,” Boyle quipped), retell Jesus’ miracle of the loaves and fishes.

They have St. Peter, a gruff, key-jangling bloke from Newcastle with what Boyle describes as a “proper, working-class, industrial accent,” tell it to Damian as a bedtime story.

The miracle was not some magical multiplication of sardines and pita bread, St. Peter explains. The real miracle was that people in the crowd who had stashed food away for themselves decided to share it with one another. They were prompted to do so by a young boy who gave Jesus a sack of a few fish and a few pieces of bread.

The miracle was the change of people’s selfish hearts.

They were the miracle.

St. Peter asks Damian if he understands what the story means. “Not really,” he says, pulling the covers up to his chin.

But he does. In his guilelessness he just doesn’t realize his faith has compelled him to do exactly what the cranky saint is talking about, and that he, too, is the miracle.

“I think you should share your fortune and what you have, any gifts you have. So, those are my beliefs,” Boyle confessed.

Danny gets it just like Damian does. Perhaps in spite of himself, as if it were imprinted somewhere on his DNA.

His “Millions” is the kind of film that makes you feel more alive leaving the theater than when you arrived.

Full of life.

Full of faith.