Like a good piece of music, this film begins and ends with the poignant leitmotif of a whimsical slow waltz (literally, in the film score), a town transformed by the "miracle" in subtle, internal ways, while the flash in the pan economic boom of a tourist influx provides the noisy, festive outer miracle.
An "illegal" Mexican boy has arrived in town on foot, looking for his lost father - and he leaves, at the end, with his father, on a bus returning to Mexico. In between, we are privy to a cross section of lives in the town, each life undergoing some sort of miraculous or redemptive change, all of it somehow related to the strange phenomenon of the bleeding Christ statue in the local church.
The external plot framework revolves around the discovery of the "real" cause of the bleeding, while concurrently there is a frantic faith contagion set off by media coverage of the "bleeding Christ".
Even as we see individuals pouring into town from everywhere experiencing faith healing a la Lourdes, the film almost loses it with a last minute major thematic flaw. Whether from the book author's choice, or from a modification by the movie adaptation, a last minute switch concerning the identification of the blood sample is thrust upon us, with the implication that the "bleeding Christ" indeed may be an authentic miracle.
Unnecessary, and perhaps a bone thrown to those in the reading/viewing audience who would need such a literal validation. Otherwise, maybe they might not "get" the story about the real miracles? In any event, this reviewer feels that the plot twist, coming almost like an afterthought, weakens the genuine effect of the "miracle worker" being the young Mexican boy or that the ways of "God" may be unfathomable, and not dependent upon literal things. To hammer the "miracle" message, there is one gratuitous "drive the point home" line spoken by Peter Fonda (the priest) BEFORE the last minute switch, when he says of the boy, "There's the real miracle"... only to contradict his own insight, and all the development of the movie, when the second blood test comes back, causing the priest to run out of the room shouting "It really IS a miracle". Which is it, or maybe it's both? Confusions abound at this point, along with a passing sense of anticlimax. But fortunately, the film is near its beautiful and poetic end with the sequenced scenes of changes wrought in individual lives. We can decide for ourselves about the real miracles of this miraculous little movie.
An "illegal" Mexican boy has arrived in town on foot, looking for his lost father - and he leaves, at the end, with his father, on a bus returning to Mexico. In between, we are privy to a cross section of lives in the town, each life undergoing some sort of miraculous or redemptive change, all of it somehow related to the strange phenomenon of the bleeding Christ statue in the local church.
The external plot framework revolves around the discovery of the "real" cause of the bleeding, while concurrently there is a frantic faith contagion set off by media coverage of the "bleeding Christ".
Even as we see individuals pouring into town from everywhere experiencing faith healing a la Lourdes, the film almost loses it with a last minute major thematic flaw. Whether from the book author's choice, or from a modification by the movie adaptation, a last minute switch concerning the identification of the blood sample is thrust upon us, with the implication that the "bleeding Christ" indeed may be an authentic miracle.
Unnecessary, and perhaps a bone thrown to those in the reading/viewing audience who would need such a literal validation. Otherwise, maybe they might not "get" the story about the real miracles? In any event, this reviewer feels that the plot twist, coming almost like an afterthought, weakens the genuine effect of the "miracle worker" being the young Mexican boy or that the ways of "God" may be unfathomable, and not dependent upon literal things. To hammer the "miracle" message, there is one gratuitous "drive the point home" line spoken by Peter Fonda (the priest) BEFORE the last minute switch, when he says of the boy, "There's the real miracle"... only to contradict his own insight, and all the development of the movie, when the second blood test comes back, causing the priest to run out of the room shouting "It really IS a miracle". Which is it, or maybe it's both? Confusions abound at this point, along with a passing sense of anticlimax. But fortunately, the film is near its beautiful and poetic end with the sequenced scenes of changes wrought in individual lives. We can decide for ourselves about the real miracles of this miraculous little movie.