Signs

Signs is a wonderfully contrived vision of how the providence of God works to our good, even when we think things are working to the worse. A priest, played by Mel Gibson, has left his ministry because of the loss of his wife. We don't understand this at the beginning. We simply see him and his brother and his children and how they deal with the unknown. Crop circles appear, animals act weird, and finally it's revealed that an alien race has invaded our atmosphere. How do they react? Mel Gibson's brother asks for comfort. Mel gives him none. He gives him a choice - does he believe in chance or does he believe that there is a meaning behind it all, that things happen and someone is watching out for them through it all. Mel has given up that meaning because he has given up on God.

The person who doesn't believe is filled with fear, but the one who believes there's a meaning and someone watching out for them are filled with hope. Mel asks his brother what kind of person is he? Is it a sign, or do people just get lucky? "Is it possible that there are no coincidences?"

But the seriousness of the questions are interspersed continually with comedy that keeps you from recognizing that you are being sucked in. Sucked into what? Life and its vagaries, changes, unpredictabilities, disappointments. You are in the movie, living life, fearful, lacking in understanding as to why things happen, giving your best explanation which always seems to come up short. You don't know what connection the events going on in the movie and remembered by Mel have to each other. Your best attempts to solve your problems are silly, comedic, ineffectual. So, who's in charge, and is it for our good or for evil?

But the comedy is interspersed with true suspense, mystery, even terror. For instance, the time when Mel and his brother think they are chasing the same local pranksters but discover it's someone of enormous power. Then there's the time Mel tries to convince himself that it's just a human prank. He stands in the middle of a corn field, the bluish moonlight shedding a bright eerie glow on him and the field. Then, he encounters the unknown the unthinkable, and he reacts in terror - because he is not living in faith. And he turns to understanding as his solution. He tells his family it's time to turn the TV on. Before he wanted to protect his family from unwarranted fear. Now the reality is too close. Now he wants to know what's going on.

Then he encounters the man who killed his wife, by accident, but killed her nonetheless, and he speaks of the purpose of life, governed by a person. He has gone over it in his own mind over and over again, and he's come to the conclusion that it had to happen at just the exact right time. He could have fallen asleep behind the wheel at any point in his drive, and he would have simply driven into a ditch or tree and come out with a headache. But instead, he fell asleep just as he drove up to Mel's wife. "It's like it was meant to be." Even death has meaning, but the question in the movie is: What meaning? The man who killed Mel's wife, who thinks he's doomed for killing a reverend's wife, who has learned that God governs all things and that there's meaning in even the worst of events.

At the most crucial time of the invasion, Morgan, Mel's son, has an attack because of his medical condition. Then the truth comes out. Mel really believes, but he has not wanted to. In a demonstration of the grace of God poured out in spite of man's wickedness, Mel makes a perverse prayer. As he holds his son, who may die, he thinks of his wife, and says, "Don't do this to me again. Not again. . . . I hate you." Yet, his son doesn't die and they survive the night. It's one of the most touching moments of the movie, combining the love of a father for the son he thinks he'll lose (hints of Christ and the cross?) and the grief of a husband who has lost his wife in a freak accident.

In the final crisis, as usual, Mel's mind goes back to the night his wife died, and we learn what she said to him as she died. She has a message for each member of the family, but the messages for Mel and his brother are cryptic, and Mel has always attributed her words to the "random firings of the nerve endings of her brain" - nonsense in other words. But the movie returns us to the conversation with his brother when he's talking about those who "see" signs as meaning someone watching out for us and those who just believe in luck.

Mel's wife word for him was to "see," and that word sums up the faith problem Mel has throughout the movie. How will he see the events of his life? Will they have meaning? Will he learn from them? And, when the word has practical effect at the end, will he use it to effect and give his brother the message his wife had for him? The end of the movie is like eternity - when all the strange events of our life unfold and something meaningful and for our good is revealed. Even Mel's son's disease and his daughter's obsessive neurotic compulsion about water have a beneficial effect. Thus, the providence of God, the love of God, is displayed, even in the worst possible events we could imagine - death, disease, and the seeming end of the world.

The end of the movie is the simple but touching picture of a man restored in his faith, in his calling before God. Notice that after Mel has seen telling evidence of some odd creature - in the corn field where he saw the leg, he still tries to convince himself it's not true. When he went to Ray Reddy's house, he speaks to someone in the pantry as if it's some prankster. In fact, the first half of the movie, Mel's character appears to be atheistic, but we see what he really is toward the end, when he "prays" and says, "Not again, not again. I hate you. I hate you." He hates God because of what he has lost, what he has suffered. This is the truth of the atheist, not that he doesn't believe in God but that he doesn't want to, he hates God. This movie is not about aliens or signs; it's about a man whose suffering has caused him to turn against God, and it is about the fact that our suffering is not evidence that God is cruel. In fact, even our suffering turns to our good. This is the message of "Signs."