These lines of dialogue are a spoken between the lead character, Simon Birch, and Ben Goodrich, who is played by Oliver Platt. This proclamation sums up the driving force behind Simon's actions. His quest to be a hero is Simon Birch's 'maguffin'. It is the thing that drives him forward through the film. Throughout the film he is constantly in search of a sign from god that will tell him when the time has come for him to be a hero.

This most recent adaptation of a John Irving novel, "A Prayer for Owen Meany", is filmmaker Mark Johnson's Simon Birch. What needs to be understood by the viewer is that the movie is an adaptation and not the book. Reviewers repeatedly said that the movie was not like the book and the reason for that is it is not the book. This seems to be something that critics lost sight of, the movie was judged against the book and not for its artistic merit.

Although the film "...premiered to cheers from the audience..."(17.), most critics seem to agree that there was no justice done to the Irving novel. Variety said that Simon Birch yet again showed that, "capturing Irving's mercurial tonal shifts in another medium is not so easy

Although the majority of reviewers stated their dislike for the movie, there were those who wrote reviews commenting on how much they enjoyed Simon Birch. These pleasing reviews mostly appeared in magazines like Cosmopolitan, People Weekly, and other magazines along the same line.

Faith is a theme that runs throughout this movie. Constantly the characters faith is tried and tested. They endure many emotional tests on their faith that they repeatedly pass. In the beginning of the movie an older Joe Wenteworth explains to the audience that he owes his faith to Simon Birch and this is explained throughout the course of the movie. It is evident within the exchanges between the boys, and those between Simon and everyone he interacts with, that he is wise beyond his years. The conversations are profound and this is owed to the fact that what he says has strong roots in his faith.

Critics seems to agree that the movie did no justice to the book and was nothing like it, they neglect to take into consideration that for those who have never read the novel the movie seems very well made and a good choice. A writer for the Christian Century writes that if this movie sends a new generation in search of "A Prayer for Owen Meany" then he is all for it. The opinion is pretty much unanimous, throughout the reviews, that the book was extremely well written, but not so much in favor of the movie.

In addition to Simon being a Christ-like figure the story is filled with examples of symbolism. Examples of this are the two deer that are seen by Joe after the untimely deaths of the two most important people in his life, his mother and Simon. Shortly after the death of his mother, Joe spots what looks to be a mother deer grazing in the woods. The way the scene is shot suggests that Joe realizes what the deer represents, his mother, and this enables him to begin to cope with the death of his mother.

Joe's mother, played by Ashley Judd, is suddenly killed as a result of being struck in the head with a baseball. Oddly enough hit the ball that delivered the fatal blow was hit by Simon. Though saddened by the tragedy Simon claims that he cannot help that he is an instrument of God.

Simon Birch, in the same fashion as Citizen Kane, used a deep focus style of shooting, in certain scenes. When Johnson employed the deep focus, the characters were dwarfed by their environment. Johnson's motives, however, were quite different from those of Orson Welles. The reasoning behind this type of shot was to suggest to the audience just how small we

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