Much like its characters, Jon Gunn’s Ordinary Angels overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds. Written by actress Meg Tilly (Agnes of God) and filmmaker Kelly Fremon Craig (Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret), the movie evolves, in real time, from a mechanical, saccharine drama by a faith-based studio to a rousing tale of altruism and neighborly good will whose disparate pieces are glued together by a supremely dialed-in cast led by Reacher’s Alan Ritchson.
The premise borrows from a true human-interest story from 1994, when a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky town came together to help a widowed father save his ailing daughter during a debilitating snowstorm. Plenty of details are altered while others are wholly fictionalized, but Ordinary Angels preserves the core of these real events: the relationship between the Schmitts—grieving roofing contractor Ed (Ritchson) and his adorable young daughters, Michelle (Emily Mitchell) and Ashley (Skywalker Hughes)—and Sharon Stevens (Hilary Swank), the persistent stranger who, in the movie, forces her boisterous-but-loving personality upon them.
An intimate, hospital-set prologue sees Ed celebrating Michelle’s birth with his wife, Theresa (Amy Acker), before a hard cut to a different hospital room, five years later, leaves him a widower. Matching this jarring edit is the one that jumps from night to day as Sharon, then a stranger to Ed’s family, gets drunk, blacks out, and wakes up the next morning. Like Ed, she’s lost time. Ordinary Angels is rarely this impactful or precise again (at least until its climactic scenes), but the editing flourish does the trick: Without a word exchanged, Ed and Sharon feel similarly adrift, bound by a common need to be firmly rooted.
