4pm, Regal 4

Director: Michael Tolkin
Writer: Michael Tolkin
Cinematographer: Bojan Bazeli
Cast: Mimi Rogers, Darwyn Carson, Patrick Bauchau, Marvin Elkins, David Duchovny, Will Patton
Running Time: 100 min

The Rapture explores the entire spectrum of faith, from soul-crushing emptiness to unqualified devotion. Writer-director Michael Tolkin –best known for his novel-turned-screenplay, The Player –takes viewers along for this wild existential ride, a dramatization of the appeal and beliefs of fundamentalist Protestant evangelicalism, blended with New Age elements. Critic Roger Ebert pronounced the movie “one of the most radical, infuriating, engrossing, challenging movies I’ve ever seen.”Â?

Mimi Rogers delivers an exceptional performance as Sharon, a disaffected telephone operator who holds impersonal phone conversations with strangers during the day, and cruises “swingers”Â? clubs with her boyfriend to have impersonal sex with strangers at night. When Sharon sleeps, she is haunted by images of a pearl suspended in blackness. She finds herself drawn to a group of Christian co-workers and discovers that they share the same dream. They convince her that God is calling to her and the dream is a harbinger of the Apocalypse. Suddenly, the empty void of her life is filled with a purpose and Sharon becomes born-again. Friends from the past are skeptical of her sudden transformation. When she informs Vic that the powerful love she has discovered would love him too, he laughingly assumes that she has taken up with “a rich homosexual.”Â?

Supported by her evangelical circle, Sharon builds a fruitful new life with a past lover, Randy (a youthful David Duchovny) and they have a child, Mary. Then tragedy sets her on a faster track toward God and Sharon takes Mary to the desert in expectation of the Rapture. Will Patton as Deputy Foster interjects a welcome dose of human kindness as mother and child wait to join their loved ones in Heaven. When God fails to keep their date, Mimi grows impatient with the plan. The abrupt change from a casual life filled with superficial pleasures to a harsh and uncompromising encounter with life after death is jarring both for Sharon and for the viewer. Nevertheless, Tolkin presses the spirit of inquiry forward, setting the scene for Sharon’s defiant confrontation with the Almighty on the shores of heaven at the End of Days.