The Book of Ruth starts off very nicely with a beautiful score and some brilliant countryside scenery intended to evoke ancient Palestine.  So far so good.

One of the textbooks I used in teaching drama at Puget Sound Christian College decried what the author referred to as “nightgown nightmares”—holiday church pageants in which eager amateurs don bathrobes (and anything else that looks like vaguely archaic) and “put on a show.”  Almost anyone who’s spent much time in a church has seen more than a recommended lifetime allowance of such theatre.

But if comfort food is to your taste, then you’ve come to right place with The Book of Ruth, in which distributor PureFlix presents CCM legend Carman as Boaz, the distant Hebrew kinsman of Moabite widow Ruth.  If you’re at all familiar with the biblical story, you don’t need a plot summary; and if you aren’t, well, I don’t even know why you’d read this review; and in any event, the film itself lays it all out within the first scene as an elderly gentleman tells his grandson, “I’m going to tell you a story about…” 

In addition to the usual stuff, this retelling is about green- and blue-eyed Mary Kay reps who stalk the Holy Land in spotless garb and manicured nails while decrying “a people who slay the innocents”—that is, the multi-deitied but godless Moabites.  When the women-folk’s men die, the women mourn at oddly-undisturbed grave sites and, though destitute, practice the age-old grief therapy of visiting the market to “go buy some nice” robes and such.

For the most part, the film gets the storyline pretty much right—though I doubt that, when Boaz finally announced his betrothal to Ruth, the townspeople literally cried “Yay!” Any guesses who those two characters in the opening scene turn out to be?

This is fairly painless and pretty-looking stuff, and depending on your frame of mind, you might even get a guffaw or two out of the experience, as I did.

Just don’t expect too much from this biblical biopic—just as you don’t expect too much out of a box of Little Debbies, enjoy it as you might.

The Book of Ruth is unrated, but is strictly G material.  Personally, though, I’d find more substantial stuff to put in front of my kids, just as I’d rarely feed them Little Debbies—unless I couldn’t afford anything better.

Courtesy of a national publicist, Greg screened a promotional DVD of The Book of Ruth.