GODSTUFF: “Soul Surfer” strikes balance between faith and fiction

The beautiful teenage girl floats across the surface of a crystal-blue ocean like a dream, her sun-bleached blonde tresses flowing behind her, unpolluted joy painted across her face.

On the white-sand beach in the distance, her brother, a bronze-god of a young man, calls to her to come ashore. She’s running late, lost in the reverie of surfing her native Hawaii’s epic waves.

As the new film “Soul Surfer” opens, the angelic surfer, Bethany Hamilton (AnnaSophia Robb), rushes ashore, grabs a white sundress and hustles up the beach a large white tent where a crowd is gathered.

“What’s that?” my son asked in the darkened theater.

“It’s a wedding,” I answered without giving it much thought, reaching into the large bucket of popcorn between us.

But I was wrong. The opening scene of “Soul Surfer” doesn’t depict a wedding. Instead, it’s a regular Sunday-morning Calvary Chapel church service. Bethany, her hair a wet tangle around her shoulders, joins her family for worship.

Churchgoing is a rare event in cinema. Usually, if a scene is set in a house of worship, it’s because the plot calls for a wedding or funeral, First Communion or Christening. More commonly, a church scene is used to show some kind of inherent pathology in the characters’ psyche or impending evil. (See: “The Apostle” or “The Exorcist.”)

Even more commonly, religious life is depicted as a last resort in times of trauma — a Hail Mary prayer, a deathbed confession, an (often futile) search for answers to impossible questions about loss, tragedy and pain.

“Soul Surfer,” based on the real-life story of Hamilton, a world-class surfer who in 2003, at age 14, lost her arm in a shark attack near her home in Kauai, has plenty of trauma and the ensuing grappling with loss.  But the religious life of the Hamilton family is portrayed as a normal part of their everyday lives.

That is part of what makes the “Soul Surfer” story ring so wonderfully authentic.

After Hamilton loses her arm, and keeps her composure with supernatural grace, she awakens in the hospital with her father Tom (Dennis Quaid) quietly reading the Bible at her bedside. When Bethany asks him if she’ll ever surf again, her dad says he knows she will. She can do all things … “through him who gives me strength,” she interrupts, finishing the quote from Philippians for him. She knows it by heart, deep in her bones.

Still, “Soul Surfer” is not without moments of defeat. When Hamilton enters her first post-accident surfing contest, she fails and gives up.  She even gives her surfboards away.

(In real life, Hamilton says that never happened. Instead, Bethany says, she never gave up and relied on her faith in Jesus Christ to carry her through. Perhaps filmmakers believed the truth was simply too far-fetched for their audience to accept.)

In the film, a despondent Hamilton turns to her youth group leader, Sarah Hill (country music star Carrie Underwood) at the seaside church pavilion and asks that most difficult question: Why would God let this happen?

“I don’t know,” Underwood’s character answers. This is usually where people, in films and in real life, try to give well-intentioned answers that nonetheless fall short of providing any real solace.

The youth group leader consoles her young disciple, saying that she’s certain something good will come of the girl’s unfathomable loss and quoting from the biblical book of Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

When Hamilton asks her father a similar question in the film — now what is she going to do? — her father answers, “Whatever comes next.”

What actually came next — at least according to the film — before her triumphant return to competitive surfing, was a trip to tsunami-stricken Thailand where Hamilton volunteered with the international relief group World Vision. Out of her own pain, she reached out to help others, even teaching a young orphaned boy how to surf.

By transcending her own grief, digging deep in the well of her soul to find the strength to help others, the film shows Bethany finding the courage to conquer her own fears, doubts and frustrations.

“Soul Surfer” succeeds where many other Christian-themed films fail. It strikes a satisfying balance between powerful storytelling and overreaching message-giving.

The Hamilton clan’s faith comes across as authentic and, in another uncommon feat, appealing. While some have criticized the film for not being explicitly “Christian” enough, its just-shy-of-understated approach to portraying real religious life on film allows “Soul Surfer” to speak the language of faith without beating the audience over the head with a Bible.

Bethany Hamilton’s real-life story is beyond inspirational. (Today, at 21, Hamilton is one of the top women surfers in the world.)

On film, her story doesn’t lose any of its power — or faith.

The real-life Hamilton did all of the one-armed surfing scenes in the film herself. In its final scene, after an astounding performance in a surf contest, reporters ask whether, if she had to do it all over again, she would choose again to go surfing the day the shark took her arm.

Her faithful answer is breathtaking: “I’ve had the chance to embrace more people with one arm than I ever could with two.” It’s an answer the real-life Bethany Hamilton has offered many times.

Sometimes the truth is harder to believe than fiction.

A version of this post originally appeared via Religion News Service.