Saint Ralph: The Miracle Movie Rebekah Hendershot

The weather was out to get Michael McGowan. With a tight 26-day filming schedule on his latest movie, Saint Ralph, the climate had turned against his climax. 14-year-old Ralph Walker had to run the Boston Marathon to wake his mother from her coma, and he had to do it in Cambridge over a short stretch of September 2003. However, he wasn’t going much of anywhere with the tail end of Hurricane Isabel dumping a monsoon on 339 extras and their vintage wardrobe. McGowan spent the afternoon in a coffee shop, moping.

“Even the extras felt bad for us,” he said.

A 1995 Detroit Marathon winner who had written the unlikely story himself, McGowan was running out of time and money in a hurry. Finally the decision was made to finish the scene, rain and all. In the finished film, Ralph plunges down the home stretch with fat raindrops falling from the sky to the sound of Gord Downie’s take on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

But the weather had another surprise in store.

After the marathon filming, McGowan went back and filmed scenes earlier in the movie, including one where Ralph is training with his priestly father figure, Father Hibbert, under the light of a full moon. (The essential insanity of trying to film such a thing is only underlined by the justification for the scene in the story—the author of Ralph’s running manual, an acknowledged lunatic, recommended running under a full moon to increase speed.) In the scene, Ralph finally succeeds in breaking the “runner’s wall,” or what he had thought was his maximum speed, and goes flying through the park. Actor Adam Butcher was running through the scene—literally—when the weather reared its head again.

“Suddenly he’s flying,” recalled producer Andrea Mann, “and again, out of the blue, we had this torrential downpour with high winds of 60 kilometers per hour. It was in that moment we realized this wonderful symmetry between this scene and the marathon shot.”

Saint Ralph, an apparent inspirational puff piece with a quirky sense of humor that translates into wicked absurdity, has been the beneficiary of a long series of happy accidents. From having good luck with a teenage actor (relative newcomer Adam Butcher) in a lead role to having a prior connection to another star (noted Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, who had done a public reading of one of the Canadian-born McGowan’s scripts years before) to being able to fake vintage running shoes by dyeing and modifying bowling shoes, the film seemed to lead an awkwardly charmed life, in keeping with its story about a boy in search of a miracle.

The miracle, in fact, was the basis of the story from the start. “It was kind of a ridiculous notion,” McGowan says, describing a 14-year-old training to win the Boston Marathon. For that reason, he chose to set the film in a Canadian Catholic school during the 1950s, in keeping with the history of the Catholic Church in McGowan’s native country.

“If he needs a miracle, what kind of world would he live in?,” McGowan wondered. His Catholic upbringing sprang easily to mind. The Catholic Church was extremely powerful in the '50s, he notes, giving Ralph’s antagonist, the stern Father Fitzpatrick, an added weapon and further lengthening the odds that Ralph would succeed in his rebellion and run the race.

“You’re 14 years old,” Fitzpatrick tells Ralph in an early scene, with an air of utter finality. “Greatness is not an option.”

The period is also in keeping with the history of the sport.

“A kid could come out of nowhere in the '50s,” he explains. “A kid’s going to challenge, what, the Kenyans now?”

The film McGowan produced is just as unorthodox as the elements he embraced to make it. The indomitable Ralph takes to training like a Catholic martyr, running in a heavy overcoat to increase his endurance (he causes himself to pass out instead), having a friend pull him along behind a bicycle as he runs so he can get his body used to speed (he ends up taking a pratfall into the mud) and following every silly instruction he can find in the madman’s instruction book. His periodic visions from God, urging him to win Boston, look remarkably like his dead father in a Santa Claus suit. His chief accomplices in defying Father Fitzpatrick include a rebellious priest (Campbell Scott) who teaches Nietzsche to ninth graders, a would-be nun (Tamara Hope) who suggests touching a recently dead body to commune with the Almighty and a lesbian nurse (Jennifer Tilly) who has a history with an Olympic bobsled team and a set of weights for Ralph to use. Title cards at the beginning of every month of Ralph’s training chart his progress by saints’ feasts, ranging from St. Jude (patron saint of lost causes) to St. Bruno (patron saint against possession) to St. Anthony the Abbot (patron saint of gravediggers). Father Fitzpatrick’s discovery that someone has been forging notes from home for Ralph, and his demand that Ralph reveal the forger, is cut off by the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of apologists. The roll call of screwball saints builds to a crescendo when Ralph’s house burns down and the month of April is cheerily greeted by the patron saint of fire prevention.

That oddball sensibility doesn’t seem to have reduced audience interest in the film, which premiered at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival and, at last check, had no negative remarks among comments posted on the Internet Movie Database. Filmgoers have put their own twist on the film’s charmed life by asking McGowan if the story is a true one.

“I’m always amazed,” McGowan laughs, “because, come on, the kid’s running through air and there’s Santa Claus in the thing.”

Even the Catholic community, which McGowan had thought might come out against a film in which the head of a Catholic boys’ school is the primary antagonist and a heroic priest suggests that Jesus was an anarchist, has been pleased with Saint Ralph. Canada’s Catholic Register praised the film for treating the now-gone monolithic church of the '50s “with no condescension and no phony reverence” and compares the movie to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film, Life is Beautiful.

A religious audience is on McGowan’s mind, though the film involves partial nudity, some fairly crude sexual humor and McGowan cut a subplot involving Tilly’s character with another nurse at the hospital. Religious buying power is still on many minds after the phenomenal box office success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in 2004, and McGowan doesn’t believe inspirational films need to be as pure as driven snow.

“I watched Billy Elliot the other day, and the amount of swearing in that movie is staggering,” he remarks. Notably, McGowan’s film involves relatively little profanity.

As for box office miracles, McGowan is guardedly hopeful. He keeps recent independent successes like The Blair Witch Project, Passion and My Big Fat Greek Wedding in mind.

“Who knows where the next one’s going to be?,” he asks.

As for Saint Ralph: “I think it has a chance.”

McGowan may have summed up that chance in a scene during a running montage in the film, which also made it into the trailer on the film’s Web site. After Ralph performs assorted strange exercises at the bidding of his book, he is seen running past two local workers visible in earlier scenes.

“Kid’s looking better,” one comments to the other.

His companion replies, “At least he’s not running backwards.”

Saint Ralph is now playing in limited release.

For more information on the film visit www.saintralphmovie.com.