Robin Williams plays a perverted minister in License to Wed movieWhen I first saw the ads and trailers for the new movie License to Wed, it appeared to me that there was an anti-Christian agenda behind it, with Robin Williams playing a minister, Reverend Frank, who puts a young couple through a series of "tests" to ensure that they are indeed ready to be married.

It seemed to me that Williams’s character was intended to be shown as a hypocrite with perverse, voyeuristic impulses and a strong strain of sexual jealousy.

Williams has long made evident his hatred of Christianity and Christians, so it seemed obvious to me that this was not going to be a nuanced portrait of the religious implications of marriage, much less a positive portrayal of the importance and sanctity of marriage.

As a result, I put it on my list of movies to avoid watching in the theater even for scientific purposes, and perhaps catch it on cable TV down the road.

It appears that my initial impression was correct.

As the Christian Science Monitor critic reports, the film does indeed have the nasty subtext I saw in the previews:

Aided by a creepy pint-sized kid (Josh Flitter) whom he is mentoring in the Ministers For Tomorrow program, Rev. Frank puts Sadie and Ben through a series of rigorous test apparently designed to test their love.. . . .

On the surface, Frank is simply preparing the couple for the worst, but in fact he seems intent on breaking up the engagement. His bedchamber espionage is, at best, smarmy— the little kid joins in on the eavesdropping—and so is his barely suppressed ogling of Sadie. Director Ken Kwapis and his screenwriters don’t seem to be aware of what they are perpetrating here. They want us to embrace Frank as a lovable eccentric who wants only the best for Ben and Sadie. He’s a cutup with a collar—a do-gooder.

But Williams makes this impossible, the critic notes: 

As for Frank, his would-be good-heartedness is belied by Williams’s performance, which is full of tics and sneers. Williams is too sharp a comic not to know what’s going on here but the script requires him to be lovable. So he ends up trying to have it both ways: He’s a huggy bear with sleazeball vibes.

Clearly this plays into prevailing cultural stereotypes that most Christians are moral hypocrites. Let’s hope that few people are taken in by this wolf in sheep’s clothing.