Bobby: seul contre tous

Sigourney Weaver hits a home-run performance as a right-wing bible carrying nut who can't accept the fact that her younger son is gay.

She resorts to just about everything possible to get him to amend his ways. She sends him to therapy, constantly belittles him and uses the bible frequently to justify her disdain for his lifestyle.

A confused and bewildered young man, Bobby eventually commits suicide. The real tragedy here is to get his mother thinking that the condemnation of gays is really not the way to go.

The film is a very good one as it especially comes to grips with the church's condemnation of the gay life style and the use of the bible to distort this way of living.

It would be so wonderful if the people that this piece is about actually watched it and understood what kind of hell they're putting their kids in for no particularly good reason.

It should be required viewing in every Baptist church on the planet. And there are a few other evangelical organizations with strange ideas about human beings who might learn something.

I will be surprised if Sigourney Weaver doesn't get at least an Emmy nomination, particularly given the speech she gives to the city council, both well written and well delivered.

Ryan Kelly also delivers a believable performance as Bobby, regardless of some of the cutting required to get the film into a two hour programming window.

The movie went off five minutes ago and I'm still sobbing. This movie should be required viewing for every parent. Beyond the powerful subject matter, Prayers for Bobby is ultimately about loving and accepting your children for whoever they are. It's about nurturing their self-esteem, raising them to treat others with respect and praying that they go through life with love in their hearts. Bottom-line, it made me realize that I will always love my son unconditionally. He's four now. And if I'm blessed enough that we are both around when he's 14, 24 or 44, I will stand by and love him for whoever he is as he comes into his own and forever.

I cried my eyes out, so maybe I shouldn't raise any objections, but... many things in this beautifully made movie were more simplistic than they needed to be.

The priest called Mary's attention to commands in the Bible she obviously wasn't taking literally in her life: we should stone disobedient children to death, we shouldn't eat shellfish. She then looks up these passages and tells the priest she has read them, and continues to raise questions about his reasoning. But earlier in the movie the family amuses itself with Bible quizzes -- I say a phrase, you tell me the book and chapter it's from. How could a woman who clearly knew the Bible better than she knew her own son not already have read Deuteronomy and Leviticus backwards, forwards, and inside out? For a self-convinced Christian like Mary, the contradictions between the passages in the Bible she liked and the ones she didn't like would have been explained away long before the events of this story.

Also, as another poster has said, the story didn't really lead us to understand why the boy did what he did. There's a hint that his boyfriend was seeing other guys, he got a really nasty birthday present from his mother, he was very lonely at the hospital where he worked, but -- the dots weren't really connected. It felt like a couple of scenes had been cut, with the effect that at the climactic moment I found myself asking "Wha'?" instead of feeling the horrible inevitability of it.

Why am I criticizing a movie that gave me the best cry I've had in months? Because movies on Lifetime, even the best ones, always pull back from the edge. There is always at least to some degree an ironed-out, homogenized, Canadian-locationized blandness to the storytelling (even though this one wasn't shot in Canada.) What if they let a movie actually be itself? What if they aimed for Sundance quality nuance, naturalism, emotion, unexpectedness in storytelling? The writing and direction on this movie were first-rate, for what it was (and Sigourney Weaver and Ryan Kelley ripped my heart out)-- but I feel that both writer and director could have gone all the way with it and made it a MOVIE.

I wonder why they didn't.

The truth can be heartbreaking. Mary Griffith realized this when her son Bobby jumped off of a freeway into oncoming traffic. I just finished watching this movie and I must say... this movie is beyond touching. The acting was fantastic and it's message was very inspiring. Prayers for Bobby shows the struggles that gay youth and their families can go through, whether that means failing or triumph. This movie not only touches on the issues of homosexuality but also on pushing religion to far on someone, suicide and coming to terms with who you are. Life isn't always made up of rainbows and butterflies and this movie expresses that without holding anything back.