It's hard to find movies with a redemptive message. It's even harder to find movies that are well-made and tell real-life stories. Some of the best ever, like The Shawshank Redemption (1994), feature an amazing cast, great cinematography, and a captivating story (with a few low blows aimed at Christians), but they're fiction, not fact.
Brave the Dark, a new release from Angel Studios, is coming to theaters in late January. It tells the story of Stan Deen (1937-2016), a popular English teacher and drama director at Garden Spot High School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. One day, Deen sees a troubled young man, Nate, shaking a vending machine. When Nate arrives for class, Deen gives him a candy bar, thinking he was hungry.
Director: Damian HarrisWriters: Lynn Robertson Hay, Dale G. Bradley, Damian HarrisStars: Jared Harris, Sasha Bhasin, Will Price
It turns out that Nate hasn't eaten in days. He's homeless, living in his car, and has been in and out of foster homes since leaving his grandparents' custody years earlier. We later learn that the grandparents were poor caregivers, which contributed to Nate's trauma as a child in ways I can't reveal without giving away the plot.
Deen takes Nate under his wing at great personal cost. Nate falls in with the wrong crowd at school and soon finds himself in trouble with the law - ending up behind bars, unable to make bail and even refusing the usual phone call offered by the police. Worried, Deen eventually shows up at the jail to ask. They make contact with the grandparents and Nate briefly returns to live with them before moving in with Deen so he can finish high school. Deen's colleagues ridicule him at school for this risky decision.
Throughout the film, we are given snippets of what happened to Nate's mother and father until everything is revealed at the end. That's clearly intentional, and the filmmakers execute it to brilliant effect. The entire film revolves around Deen's attempts to reform Nate by helping him confront the demons of his past.
Deen is a tireless optimist who always sees the good in others. He's the kind of teacher the students adore. He also knows everyone in his small town because he's lived there so long and most of the residents were students in the past.
If Stan Deen is naive at first, that's soon corrected when he learns how difficult it is to help Nate. Sometimes Nate doesn't even want to help himself. He's a troubled teenager who's never experienced unconditional love and acceptance (aside from his mother), and he distrusts the adults around him; in his experience, they just want something in return. But Deen loves Nate simply because he chooses to, and that shakes up and reshapes Nate's entire orientation in life in ways that reminded me of the priest in Les Misérables who gives Jean Valjean his expensive silverware and candlesticks.
But Brave the Dark is not a preachy movie. We see Deen praying in the hospital as Nate fights for his life. The phrase “pearls before swine” is used as Deen angrily confronts Nate. But the real-life Stan Deen, according to his obituary, was a dedicated Christian, even serving at times as a youth minister at various churches. From what we are shown, it appears he never married. His fellow teachers and students, especially those in theater, became his family. (Dean involves Nate in the school theater production when he learns of his passion for photography.)
Brave the Dark is rated PG-13 for language and some brief scenes of teenagers kissing and partying. It’s a fair rating, and I wouldn’t recommend the movie for younger children. There is a violent moment toward the end that is not for the faint of heart. It's not gratuitous, though, and is actually an important part of the story's resolution as we come to better understand the dark forces Nate is battling.
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