For people of faith who just want to see Bible stories on screen, Fox’s “The Faithful: Women of the Bible” will work. It’s essentially a series of three made-for-TV movies that tell different Old Testament stories from women’s perspectives.
The first film, “The Woman Who Bowed to No One,” which was the only one given to critics, dramatizes the journey of Sarah (Minnie Driver) and Hagar (Natacha Karam). In this version, Abraham (Jeffrey Donovan) is a side character, and Sarah is a force to be reckoned with.
These stories have endured for thousands of years, at least in part, because there’s real meat on them. What must it have felt like for Sarah, desperate to have a child, to recommend that her beloved husband sleep with another woman? And then for Sarah to raise that baby as her own? And for Hagar, who is certainly grateful to have escaped the Pharaoh and find herself with kinder masters in Sarah and Abraham—what did she feel trying to give the baby up but remain near it? What sort of life was that?
These questions echo some of our current conversations around surrogacy, but of course, they go in a different, more faith-specific direction.
And that direction is not inherently bad, but “The Faithful” doesn’t exactly pull it off. Part of the problem is that the show needs more table-setting. Yes, a large portion of its audience will know these stories. But we are also modern media consumers, and we expect shows (or a series of made-for-TV movies) to build the world we step into when we turn on our screens.
“The Faithful” mostly skips all that. So it’s not entirely clear if we’re in our own logical world or one of miracles. Obviously, that’s a problem of adapting this particular subject matter—it’s supposed to be true and holy. Magical realism, if you will. And some adaptations of that genre have worked recently, capturing the thrust of their source material by keeping the magic extraordinary and ordinary.
Productions like Netflix’s “Cien Años de Soledad” and HBO’s “Like Water for Chocolate” work because they are sumptuous. Watching them, it feels like you could step into Macondo or revolutionary Mexico. You can taste these places, smell them. And since they feel so rich, when a curse becomes real, or food literally transmits emotions, that too feels real.
Unfortunately, “The Faithful” doesn’t take that track. Its aesthetic is more of your local nativity play, the kind where kids perform with blankets over their heads, secured with braided ribbons (if they’re lucky).
Surely an IP as important as The Bible deserves a higher budget. Hagar’s wigs are distractingly bad. The costumes are only slightly better than my Vacation Bible School’s productions in the nineties. The voice-of-God effect… is a voiceover.
It just doesn’t match the grandeur of the project.
And there’s another problem. Sarah’s episode is called “The Woman Who Bowed to No One,” and it opens with a scene in which a young Sarah refuses to bow to the man her parents want her to marry. She rejects him and ends up with Abraham. Which is nice, but is basically every plucky, on-screen heroine of the last 35 years.
Later, it takes actual divine intervention to save Sarah from other men who would have her bow to them. But since we don’t meet anyone else, and the show refuses to do any world building, their reactions ot Sarah make no sense. Why is she so alluring to them? Is she different from other women? How?
This show doesn’t take the time to answer that question, and so Sarah feels ordinary to our 21 century sensibilities even as “The Faithful” insists she’s anything but. And that disconnect creates a barrier to the show’s humanizing aim, keeping us at a distance from these characters rather than allowing us to feel their struggles.
And there are other odd choices that undercut the film’s reason for being. For example, we see Hagar giving birth and the pains that go with it, but we don’t see Sarah’s. Narratively, that’s such a missed opportunity. Hagar’s pregnancy conforms to the natural order, so there’s nothing much interesting in her birthing sequence. Sarah, though, is way past the age when even modern women give birth. So what’s it like to get a baby out at that age? And thousands of years ago at that? For unknown reasons, “The Faithful” doesn’t go there, refusing to get into some of the messy questions a truly feminine retelling of the Bible would ask.
Which is to say, there’s not enough in “The Faithful” to entice viewers who aren’t hungry to see Bible stories on screen. And that’s a shame, because there’s a real idea here to do something more than make background noise for Easter egg hunts. Unfortunately, “The Faithful” seems to think it has a captive audience with its retelling of Sarah and Hagar’s tale, rather than finally giving these complicated women the respect they deserve.
