What do we do with the opportunities God brings us?  More specifically, what do those opportunities look like?  There are those that say that unfortunate events can turned to a benefit.  In such instances, it is a little difficult to see God’s hand.  Yet, when things are good, we often praise God for the fortunate circumstances.  However, our Creator is the Lord of the bad and the good.  Faith is about handling either of those extremes and offering them up to the Lord.  In Brewster’s Millions (1985), you have an extreme case of person being blessed, even if the title character, Montgomery “Monty” Brewster (Richard Pryor), never sees it in the context of Faith.  As often happens, the film has nothing to do with Christianity, but it does present an interesting case study in what to do with what God brings you.

What minor league baseball pitcher Monty is bringing before anyone is talking about Brewster’s Millions is the last of his ability on the mound.  Miraculously, though, he manages to win the game and his best friend and catcher, Spike Nolan (John Candy), decides to take Monty out to celebrate.  Unfortunately, the women they are talking to are engaged to players on the opposing team and a fight commences.  They are the only ones arrested and are about to go to jail until J. B. Donaldo (Joe Grifasi) steps forward offering to pay their bail and any other fines.  Monty is excited because he believes J. B. is a major league scout wanting to promote the pitcher.  Instead, Monty and Spike are taken to the office of George Granville (David White) and Norris Baxter (Jerome Dempsey) to hear an unheard-of proposition.  A previously unknown great uncle, Rupert Horn (Hume Cronyn), who had made an outrageous fortune out West, has found Monty to be his sole heir.  However, Rupert did not intend to simply have his money handed over to a stranger.  He has conditions.  The stipulations are kind of complicated, but it can be parsed into two different paths.  First, he can inherit $300 million, but to do so, he has to take thirty days to spend $30 million.  This might appear to be the obvious choice.  However, the main rule is that Monty cannot purchase anything that could be considered an asset.  By the end of the month-long period, he must have a zero sum on his balance sheet.  Rupert is trying to teach a lesson, couching it in terms of how his father had locked him in a closet with a box of cigars when he had been caught smoking as a boy.  The hope is that Monty will get so sick of blowing money that he will be conservative with his financial habits.  The alternative is to take $1 million, tax free, and walk away, the inheritance to be donated to charity by the law firm Granville & Baxter.  Instead of taking the easy money, Monty opts for the thirty-day spree.  As such, the executor of the will, Edward Roundfield (Pat Hingle), brings in Angela Drake (Lonette McKee), a paralegal, to keep track of the receipts for every penny.  As Monty is about to embark on a journey of extravagance, he is given one last guideline: he cannot tell anyone about what he is doing.  I mention this because before he leaves the building, he is causing a stir with paying people to do various jobs, including giving several thousand to J. B. to be his photographer.  It gets worse after leaving the bank where a vault contains the $30 million he is going to have to burn through in a little over four weeks.  He hands out a few more jobs to security personnel, takes an entire crowd of people out to lunch, and then buys out the top two floors of a swanky hotel.  Angela and Spike are pleading with Monty to be more judicious with his riches, but he continues at a frenzied pace.  Because Monty is sweet on Angela, he is disappointed when she informs him that she is engaged to Warren Cox (Stephen Collins), a junior lawyer at Granville & Baxter.  Monty brings Warren to the suite to hand out more money, but the lawyer begins noticing the elegance of the furnishings.  Warren adds that his ex-wife, Marilyn (Tovah Feldshuh), is an interior decorator, so he has an eye for such things.  Hearing this gives Monty the idea of paying Marilyn to redecorate all the rooms.  The things on which he has spent thus far are trivial, though, compared to his desire to pitch once more.  To accomplish this, he gets his former coach, Charlie Pegler (Jerry Orbach), to agree to have his team play the New York Yankees.  In short, things are going well for Monty, which is underscored when he sends Granville & Baxter a postcard with a stamp worth $50,000.  The partners in the firm are not pleased because they want to take the $300 million for themselves instead of donating it.  Thus, they get Warren to look for opportunities to foil Monty.  Then again, Monty starts making his own mistakes.  Some the investments he thought would be sure to fail turn out to be lucrative, including making $10 million on a company looking to install motors on ice bergs.  This is when he gets his next idea as to where to put his money: politics.  He injects millions into a bogus political campaign not to get himself elected but, hopefully, to ensure that nobody wins.  By this point, most of the people around him, including Angela and Spike, think Monty has become greedy.  They are thus surprised when, on the last night and thinking he is officially broke, he turns down the money they had collected for him.  Instead, he awakens the next morning, returns the fancy clothes he had been wearing, and meets with Granville & Baxter.  He thinks he is in line for a substantial windfall, but Warren comes forward with a refund of $20,000 for returned furniture.  Angela had been unaware of this transaction and had no accounted for it.  She finds Warren with the receipt, snatches it from him, and presents it Edward.  It still leaves Monty with cash, which he uses to hire Angela for legal counsel at the last second.  Edward then declares Monty the winner and the movie ends.

Is Monty the winner in Brewster’s Millions?  I suppose the title does give away what the movie wants you to think.  Do not forget that $300 million in 1985 would be worth almost $1 billion today.  I had to Google it.  Though the conditions Rupert puts on obtaining this fortune are ridiculous, as a Catholic I can see what he was trying to instill on Monty.  When you have privilege, even if you were not born with it, the riches can make a person take their status for granted.  What Monty must do, in the craziest manner possible, is to earn his blessings.  That is what is amazing about God.  He gives us His abundant love, and there is nothing we can do to earn it.  Think about that the next time you are feeling down, or something incredible has just happened to you.  If you are sad, remember that God is close to you.  If you are happy, know that you would not be so had, at the very least, God not created you.  Admittedly, it is hard to get a sense of such things in the film.  What is sneakily good about what Monty does, even if everyone is telling him that he is being irresponsible, is how he uses the money to make people’s lives better.  What he pays the people he hires is life changing.  One can extend this idea to the baseball game.  He benefitted from getting to pitch, but his teammates did, too.  Some of those other players might never get the chance again to be on the same field as the New York Yankees.  The Church does not say it is a sin to be rich.  I have known more than a few well-off Catholics.  However, it is what you do with those extra dollars that is what matters.  Luckily, God does not ask us to give the entirety of bank accounts to Him.  That would not be realistic.  Yet, He does want us to consider the needs of others, and that is something Monty does, even if he goes about it in a stranger way.

What I find stranger is that charity was not more of a part of Monty’s spending in Brewster’s Millions.  It was one of Rupert’s stipulations that he could not give it all away to such an organization.  Still, he could do some.  Either way, it is a fair movie with nothing too objectionable in it.