Yes, Tom Shadyac’s Evan Almighty (2007), about the titular news anchor turned freshman congressman (Steve Carell) who asks God to help him change the world and in return is assigned to build an ark in the middle of a drought, is all low comedy and unfunny clichés. Yes, you can see every single plot twist from the moment Congressman Long’s (John Goodman) bill’s title is revealed to include the word “land” (written by Steve Oedekerk). (We should have a discussion about Goodman being typecast as the heel due to his body shape.) Yes, the CGI is intrusively obvious. But most of these faults are due to the film’s commitment to the philosophical bit. Also, they named the Noah-character’s wife “Joan” (Lauren Graham) because her husband is building an ark. Gotta love that.
In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard meditates on what it must have been like for Abraham when God ordered him to sacrifice his beloved only son, Isaac, himself a gift from God. How could he explain himself to his non-God-hearing family? How could he be sure that he wasn’t in fact going crazy? The protagonist of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping thinks the same thing about Noah:
Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand.
This quote neatly sublimates the realist into the spiritual, but it doesn’t answer the question.
In Evan Almighty, we walk in knowing it’s the real deal. We also know that everyone will believe Evan in the end. The whole story lies in how their minds are changed: the naysayers by the sight of the floodwaters no doubt, but what about his wife and three children (Johnny Simmons, Graham Phillips, and Jimmy Bennett), who are supposed to be helping him build the big boat?
From this perspective, it’s entertaining to see God (Morgan Freeman) fucking with him: Even after Evan agrees to build the ark, God keeps making him look more and more biblical (costume design by Judy Ruskin Howell; hair department led by Adruitha Lee). Evan thinks God is just having some fun at his expense, but plotwise it forces Evan to go all in, yelling about the impending flood as he’s dragged out of a congressional hearing and later imploring Long to repent of his corruption. Carell plays that split second between reluctance and resignation incredibly well, viscerally conveying the sentiment of “in for a penny, in for a pound.”
The film’s thematic hyperfocus shuts down most other avenues of humor. Too much extraneous wit could distract from the central absurdity of the plot, so most of the other jokes are scatological or slapstick. Evan’s office staff (Wanda Sykes and John Michael Higgins) are the only exceptions, because their sarcasm marks them as utterly modern, having nothing to do with this biblical reenactment.
Again, yes, the film gets Joan on board (sorry not sorry) with a literal deus ex machina, but for a brief moment (i.e., the film’s first half), the question is raised. And then the cringe dancing in the end credits erases any accumulated goodwill.
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