Let 'Freedom' Ring True
How Jim Caviezel's newest film illustrates both artistic leaps and faltering steps
In an article on how filming rape scenes can be psychologically damaging for actors, Katelyn Beaty notes, “What we do with our bodies profoundly shapes us, even when our bodies are just going through the motions.” Acting out scenes of sexual exploitation, she says, involves “a hidden human cost.”
This human cost becomes even more heinous when child actors are involved. A tragic example of this is the film Cuties (2020). Director Maïmouna Doucouré, who rightly labels “the objectification of a woman’s body” as a “kind of oppression,” crafted her film as a “fight against young children’s hypersexualization.”
But for all of her good intentions, Doucouré ended up perpetuating what she sought to condemn, a reality acknowledged by many secular sources. For example, Psychology Today confirmed that the film shows “young girls not only sexualized (e.g., in crop tops and short shorts) but also sexually objectified.” And women’s advocate Melinda Tankard Reist notes that “there is an ethical principle at stake: do we treat human beings as means or ends? . . . While we appreciate the intention of the director in confronting us with the reality of life for an 11-year-old, these are real children. Yes, the young actors matter.”
To slightly alter what I have written elsewhere about Cuties, in Doucouré’s attempt to galvanize others to fight against child objectification, she incentivized them to defend hypersexualized artistic expression; and in attempting to liberate impressionable girls from sexualizing themselves, she ended up speaking with the visual language of the sexual oppressor.
All of this leads to Sound of Freedom, which I reviewed for The Collision shortly after its opening weekend. There’s more I’ve been wanting to say, and The Gospel Coalition has been gracious enough to publish my further thoughts in an article entitled “Is ‘Sound of Freedom’ the Next ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’?”
In this piece, I take a closer look at the film’s financial and artistic success, the objectification of actors in general, the challenges in depicting sexual exploitation through a visual medium like film, and Freedom’s problematic end-credits marketing tactics.
You can view the entire article by clicking here.
Are you aware this is produced by Mormons and the real main character is Mormon? Should we be endorsing anything that profits those involved in a cult and doctrine of demons?