‘Ordinary Angels’ Review: Hilary Swank Plucks Heartstrings Expertly in Inspirational Drama

We’re informed in the opening seconds of Ordinary Angels that “This is a true story,” and it’s a good thing. Otherwise, it would be all too easy to scoff at this inspirational drama, which pulls your heartstrings with the expertise of Jascha Heifetz. Cynics will probably do so anyway, and there’s no doubt creative liberties have been applied. Nonetheless, this film starring Hilary Swank as a Kentucky hairdresser who rallies her community on behalf of a widower and his seriously ill three-year-old daughter proves irresistible with its powerful feel-good story.  

Set in Louisville in the early ‘90s, the film begins by introducing us to its troubled heroine, Sharon (Swank, sporting big hair and a Julia-Roberts-as-Erin-Brockovich accent), who wears short skirts and loudly buys everyone at her local tavern a beer before jumping on the bar and dancing raucously to “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” Yes, it’s clear that Sharon has a drinking problem, and that her drunken ebullience covers up considerable inner turmoil. Her good friend and co-hairstylist Rose (Tamala Jones) becomes so alarmed by Sharon’s behavior that she drops her off at an AA meeting, where Sharon refuses to admit she’s an alcoholic.

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But her troubles don’t compare to those of Ed Schmitt (Alan Ritchson, Reacher), a blue-collar roofer who has just lost his wife to a rare disease that also threatens to kill his youngest daughter Michelle (Emily Mitchell) unless she receives a liver transplant for which she’s far down on the list. Now raising her and her older sister Ashley (Skywalker Hughes) with only the help of his mother Barbara (Nancy Travis, as appealing as ever), Ed, who doesn’t have health insurance, struggles to pay medical bills that include $6,000 for Michelle’s recent emergency room visit.

Reading about the family story, Sharon impulsively shows up at the funeral, still hung over, awkwardly introduces herself to Ed and the children and offers to help. He responds with a stiff, “Thank you, ma’am,” and assumes that’s the end of it. But Sharon soon organizes a “Hair-O-Thon” fundraiser and shows up at Ed’s door to give him the $3,200 she’s raised. Much to Ed’s discomfort, Barbara invites the brash Sharon to come in and join them, privately telling her son, “When the lord sends a woman to your door with an envelope full of cash, you invite her for dinner.”

That’s only the beginning of Sharon’s efforts, as she soon becomes completely intertwined with Ed and the children and makes it her personal mission to solve his many financial problems. Along the way, she delivers the sort of lines that actresses love saying, and Swank tears into them with gusto. “I’m good at plenty of things,” she tells Ed. “Taking no for an answer isn’t one of them.” At another point, after she joins him at a business meeting and recklessly promises a potential client that he can take on more work than Ed feels he can handle, she advises him, “Life’s about saying yes, and then figuring it out.”

While a little of this sort of thing can go a long way, Swank makes it work with a canny performance that conveys her character’s inner turbulence, much of it derived from her troubled relationship with her estranged grown son. Ritchson’s turn complements hers nicely, the actor letting his massive frame do the work for him as the taciturn, emotionally undemonstrative Ed who loves his children dearly and will do anything for them. As the story develops, the screenplay by Kelly Fremon Craig (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret?) and actress Meg Tilly rushes through such epochal developments as Sharon managing to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills erased during a single conversation. But by then her forcefulness has been so well established that we just go with it.

But it’s the rousing finale, involving a desperate attempt to get Michelle to a hospital hundreds of miles away for a liver transplant during a horrendous blizzard, that will have audiences cheering. A sequence involving the entire community banding together to clear a makeshift helicopter landing spot at the snow-covered parking space of (where else?) a local church would be impossible to believe, save for the real-life news footage chronicling the event during the end credits.

Ordinary Angels, skillfully directed by Jon Gunn, arrives courtesy of Kingdom Story Company, also responsible for such faith-based hits as I Can Only Imagine and Jesus Revolution. Its religiosity is readily apparent (“Son, don’t lose your faith over this,” Barbara advises her son during a difficult moment) but handled with relative subtlety. The film, for all its predictable elements, proves inspirational in the best sense of the word.