Faith of Our Fathers

Running time: 100 mins

The central character of Hamilton Sterling's Faith of Our Fathers is an optimistic chimneysweep N- there ends any similarity to Mary Poppins. Charles starts out in L.A. full of hope, believing he can succeed in turning an honest buck through honest effort. He encounters a failed priest, the ironically named Nicholas Nickleby, who radiates a tireless cynicism that would shock a politician. In most films, old Nick would be a glowing guardian angel, magically appearing and guiding the neophyte away from evil. Sterling instead assigns Charles a fallen angel of the streets. His mission: to help Charles survive the poisoning, by degrees, of his purity of spirit. The film is an orgy of allegory and allusion, awash with social indictment. Struggling-to-know-right-and-wrong is shot in hard black and white; sold-out-and-thriving-on-it is shot in comfortable color. Religion is the people's opiate, protecting the powerful: ''You tempt people to despair,'' says the businessman. ''That's good for business.'' Except for Charles, these are metaphors, not people. And by the end, Charles, too, is a mere metaphor for one whose early actions have genuinely good intentions, but whose later ones serve a rotten inner agenda. The troubling moral is not just that they are indistinguishable on the surface, but that the latter seems to benefit others the most. --Neil Hooper