It's the 25th anniversary of Sister Act! Here's Chris Feil with the second installment of Soundtracking, our newest series at The Film Experience, focusing on music in the movies...
Nuns having fun while singing runs! Alma, check your battery, because it’s time to take it to church!
Sister Act is about as much of an easy comfort as 90s movies get, from Whoopi Goldberg’s peak comic powers to that vibrant choral soundtrack. The film is kind of a prototype jukebox musical, recontextualizing 60s girl group soul to a vaguely christian context. “Guy” becomes “God”, traditional hymns transition into contemporary gospel, music and lyrics twisted twenty years before Pitch Perfect and Glee popularized the mash-up.
Similarly, the film itself is somewhere in a middleground of bouyant pop sensibility and religious sentiment unburdened by messy reality. A cynic might say that Delores’s reshaping of spiritual music reflects how some religious types twist religion to support their own agenda, but Sister Act’s worldview is about cohabitation. Can you imagine a film today as uninterested with supporting either affiliation but asserting our abilities to beneficially exist together? And doing so through song, no less? (And making crazy money at the box office like how Sister Act spent an entire summer in the Top 10? I could go on and on...)
The joining of the two musical styles is crucial in displaying that passive relationship. The opening lounge medley that forecasts some of the hits to come is disjointed and dispassionate. There’s nothing of the ebullient connection we feel to the music later on, and the same goes for Whoopi’s Dolores. Her eagerness to ultimately get the damn show over with shows she’s come a long way from calling Beatles her own apostles as a young girl. It’s as if it takes Dolores working among God worshippers to rediscover that music is her deity, even if she herself isn’t a convert to theirs.
Not that the nuns don’t need her worldliness just as much. Isn’t the sound of Kathy Najimy’s bone-rattling upper register wailing just burned into your brain, if that one baritone nun doesn’t barge in early before her cue again? The nuns are far more eager to learn that Dolores, even with Reverend Mother’s strictness, and find their faith even more actualized due to Dolores’s new ideas.
They are more convincing because they are more convicted, a more unified group for the message.
Dolores’s education moves in steps from modernizing the sound with “Oh Maria”, to the lyrical tweak to “My God”, to full on unaltered soul classic “I Will Follow Him”. With this final number you can take as much spiritual meaning as you wish or not at all, but the chorus uplifts all the same. Their liberating expression of devoted faith is also Delores’s reemergence into her own passion - oh and hey she remains the star of the show she always wanted to be. Sister Mary Robert’s vocals do give her a run for her money (trivia nerds - Wendy Makkena had a voice double!).
Everybody wins (especially the audience’s ears) and no one is forced to sacrifice their identity. It’s an interesting message against the recent rise of faith films and mainstream cinema’s avoidance of religion all together. Though Sister Act is essentially areligious, the most inoffensive possible package no matter your spiritual affiliation, it does show both sides with something to gain from the other.
BONUS TRACK: Fellow VHS generation folks will remember that post-credits original track “If My Sister’s In Trouble” by Lady Soul also adds to that sense of unity. “Sister” obviously being a nod towards the Sister Mary [blank]s, but it’s pure 90s soul fabulousness. Sequin gowns, leather gloves, nun choreo - your modern day original songs could never. "I Will Follow Him" may be a untoppably joyful finale, but this makes for a perfect coda.
Previously on Soundtracking...
American Honey