The Overnighters REVIEW
The film, The Overnighters, is about the stresses placed upon a North Dakota community and a church within that community, when an oil boom comes to town. Imagine the population of your town doubling in the period of a year or two. Imagine that the migrants who move into town are an assortment of broken, struggling, single men with no prospects anywhere else and many of them come with criminal records that prohibit their getting jobs in the places from which they come.
“It’s easy to become a facade,” Pastor Reinke tells us at the beginning of the film, “maybe especially when you’re a pastor. But I know for me, the public persona, . . . and the private person, become something else. And the result is always pain.” Towards the end of the film, he comes back to this theme when he says,
“The private me distances itself from the public me. And I can believe the public me because sometimes it looks very good. But the private me has become something else.”
The public pastor becomes even more public when he decides to allow his work with the migrants to be filmed. Seeking to make the church available to homeless workers, Pastor Reinke must navigate the feelings of his parishioners, his family, the neighbors, the local paper, and the various men with their diverse needs themselves. He must also navigate his own emotions as he deals with the callousness of friends, the dishonesty of some of the men, the fears of the community, and the demands of his faith. Before the film is over, we also learn of even deeper realities that were serving as an underlying cause of this pastor’s empathy for the outsider. Perhaps he knew that he would soon be one. Perhaps his decision to open up his church so completely in spite of the risks doing to presented to his job as a minister there, were all a means to an end – to find a way to make a transition from life as a pastor altogether.
This is a movie that enters deeply into personal space. I confess, maybe too deeply for a Yankee like myself. But it is a reminder that each of our lives can be a riveting story.
Question for Comment: Do you think someone could make a documentary worth watching out of your life?
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