SCREEN

The narrative jumps around in time, showing paid-advertisement-style lectures by Walsch as a millionaire writer, as well as his bout of homelessness some five years earlier. The uninspired vignettes of life on the street last about half the movie, until Walsch gets a job at a radio station and, eventually, a place to live. Walsch’s rather one-sided titular dialogues take place at this point, begging the question: What was the point of us watching all that homeless stuff? It seems like an entirely separate movie.

The remainder of the film charts Walsch’s meteoric rise to riches from peddling Hallmark-card platitudes with the aid of a holy ghost writer (in fact, the Holy Ghost). Before long, his scrawl has filled enough legal pads to make more than one book. I guess God’s thinkin’ franchise!

The movie’s most bewildering and reprehensible sequence has Walsch lecturing at a book signing. He’s interrupted by a grieving mother, who insists God is vengeful because her adopted son was killed by a drunken driver before she could fulfill her promise to introduce him to his real mother. Walsch spontaneously receives some divine intel on the matter and tells the woman that the boy’s real mother had died years earlier, and the son died so he could meet his real mom. So, essentially, he’s saying that her promise is what killed the boy. Inexplicably, she finds this comforting.

The film ends shortly thereafter, with the millionaire Walsch spotting the homeless version of himself standing in some dingy back alley. He joins him, and they walk side by side down the road for no particular reason. Perhaps this is meant as a metaphor for the preceding 100 minutes: two completely separate stories, both going nowhere.