This is Martin Bonner

BySheikh Javed Mansuri
This is Martin Bonner

“I feel like it should mean nothing or everything,” Travis says of the Christianity that he sees professed by others and lived by Martin, “and I can’t get to either place.” 

This is Martin Bonner is the rare recent film where Christian characters talk like Christians I know. Martin has been hurt by the church. He feels, probably with some cause, that Christians turned their back on him when he got divorced. That the film shows Martin dealing with the consequences of the divorce rather than explaining its causes is also rare. It seeks and finds that elusive middle ground in between the facile notion that all Christians are saints and the equally facile dismissal that no Christian service can be sincerely motivated. 

Martin is part of a church program designed to help parolees reintegrate into society. Travis’s experience shows such programs to be welcome but woefully insufficient. It isn’t said aloud, but what we are made to feel more keenly with each passing scene is that Marin (and those like him) has no program to help him transition from one part of his life to another. Isn’t that what church is supposed to be? 

— Kenneth R. Morefield (2020)

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2020 Top 100 — #99

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