Fourteen minutes into the new film Collision, my fingers started to itch for the fast-forward button. I desperately scanned the movie’s press materials: “How long can this go on?” I wondered. (Answer: 90 minutes.) The documentary, which opens this week, shows the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens and an Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson arguing in one drab venue after another over whether Christianity is “good for the world.” So uncinematic is this picture—two middle-aged white men talking—that my attention insistently wandered toward anything humanizing and finally dwelled, for too long perhaps, on a fleck of something on Hitchens’s eyelash. All the while Hitchens and Wilson went on and on and on and on, always well mannered, never conceding a thing.
About The Author
Lisa Miller
Lisa Miller is a domestic correspondent for the New York Times. She is a former contributing editor to New York magazine, the former religion columnist for the Washington Post, and former senior editor of Newsweek magazine. She is the author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife" and a co-author of "Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC."