Chabert Watch: What If God Were The Sun? (2007)

Watched:  02/07/2026

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stephen Tolkin

We're still working our way through the Chabert-a-Tron 3000, and this checks another box.  I think I've only found one more movie was released on disc, so after that... who knows?

A pre-Hallmark Chabert had such a weird career.  Maybe all actors have an odd, bumpy start, but this movie was made in the thick of the period where Chabert was doing a lot of roles in scrappy indie movies you've never heard of, but then she was getting good work in smaller movies like Reach For Me which feel like they're at least trying to do something a bit more meaningful.  

I'm not really familiar with the Lifetime Network oeuvre, but this movie is much more in line with Reach For Me than it is, say, Be My Baby or The Pleasure Drivers.  And, it's another one of Chabert's movies where she works with one of the greats.  This time, her co-star is Gena Rowlands.

The six degrees of separation with Chabert is bananas.

Chabert plays an ER nurse who is currently not speaking with her father after finding out he had an affair which led to the dissolution of his marriage her mother, who then ran off to California to find herself. She's supposed to be getting married to her attorney boyfriend, played by actor Sam Trammell, who I guess is someone people know from True Blood and other things.   

She's working on a patient when she realizes her father, a cop, is in the next bed over and he's being declared dead, five bullets in his chest.  

Following this, she goes into a spiral, convinced if she'd been working on her dad instead of the other patient she would have saved him.  She stalls/ breaks off her engagement, and generally starts breaking down (she wasn't okay before her father's death).  After some bad behavior in the ER she's assigned first to the End-of-Life area of the hospital where she meets a wise-cracking Gena Rowlands who is suffering from lung cancer.  

Rowlands is dealing with her diagnosis as a joke, which is driving her daughter nuts.  

Anyway - it's a winding movie that is about Chabert learning about the actual circumstances of her parents' divorce, helps Rowlands transition to her final days in a way that will keep her dignity and sense of wonder - and heal Rowlands' relationship with her daughter.  Oh, and there are ghosts!  Yeah, full on ghosts are in this movie.  

Also, it has the worst portrayal of a realtor I've ever seen on film which anyone who has ever sold a house should have called out on set.

One gets the feeling this movie could have had less going on.  It's a lot.  And the movie wants to be oddly gritty in places that don't help it at all.  

To take advice from Coco Chanel, I would recommend this movie take off one or two items before they roll out this story.  I don't even know which item to take out, which is part of the problem, because thematically it's trying to say something about gathering rosebuds, and forgiving our parents for being who they are.  But there's so much between her father's affair, his work with a youth center, and their unresolved tensions.  There's Chabert's seeming inability to commit when it comes to actually getting married despite the fact a date is set that clearly needs more unpacking but is just there in the story's background.  There's Rowlands fighting with her daughter (Sarah Rafferty, who I think is also a thing).

The movie also wants to tackle *why we have faith and is it useful?* - thus the title.  But, you know, just a diversion on the way to movie's finale.  

And occasionally the movie wants to be gritty out of nowhere, from Chabert yelling at some dude for going to take a leak as near as I can tell, and the camera finding some soft-faced girl in the chorus of a church choir and saying "oh, she used to be a teen hooker who was addicted to smack".  

I'm making it sound like this was a bad movie, but it wasn't.  It's ambitious - maybe overly so.  I've heard that first time writers try to put all of their ideas into their first work, and it feels like maybe that's true here.  But I think the movie is *trying*.  Chabert is great here, holding her own with Gena Rowlands and buyable as she is going through a thing.  Lack of faith, lack of ability to see the future and the big picture, etc...  And maybe learning a bit from her patient about what's important to someone as they face their last days.  

Frankly, I think Lacey Chabert does us proud here.  She's playing a lot of things here, a young actor playing a young woman in crisis.  Her character is a mess, and she carries it off with aplomb.  And hangs just fine with Rowlands.  

Curiously, this movie is based on the debut novel by now-forgotten medium John Edward, and it looks like the book was severely re-written for the movie, barely holding parts in place.  But it does explain why the movie can be a bit woowoo at times with its ponderings of faith and, of course, ghosts.