"The film Places in the Heart, for which Sally Field won the 1985 Academy Award as the best actress of the year, ends with a Baptist communion service in a small town in Texas during the Great Depression. As the cup and wafers are passed through the congregation and the camera examines the faces of each of the communicants, we become aware that all of the characters in the story are present, the good and the bad, the venal and the heroic, the living and the dead, the killer and the victim.
"As I watched this ending, I found myself thinking, They aren't really going to try this; if they do, they're not going to get away with it. But of course, they did try it and they did get away with it — a moving and vivid portrait of the religious doctrine that Catholics call "the communion of the saints." Whether that was the term the film-makers would have applied to the final scene of Places in the Heart I do not know; nonetheless the idea or, perhaps more fundamentally, the image that we are all brought together in one by Jesus and, indeed, by the reception of the Eucharist which 're-presents' Jesus is the same as the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints.
"After the lights went up, the film ended, and everyone else left the theater in Chicago's Water Tower Place, I sat for a few moments staring at the blank screen reviving an old conviction: the film is the sacramental art par excellence; either as a fine or lively art nothing is quite so vivid as film for revealing the presence of God. Film in the hands of a skilled sacrament-maker is uniquely able to make 'epiphanies' happen."