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Movie Review
"The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc"
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By Michael Sragow
[11/11/99]

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-- Little Richard

To echo the above words of the Rev. Richard Penniman, if "Dogma" can move an old agnostic like me, it can move anybody. Condemned sight unseen by the Catholic League, nervously dropped by Miramax's parent company, Disney, Kevin Smith's comic-religious fantasy turns out to be the sweetest hot-potato movie imaginable. Alternately sophomoric and serious, "Dogma" is a movie where earnest questions of faith share time with dick and fart jokes, detailed explanation of Catholic doctrine with a sudden exegesis on the oeuvre of John Hughes, where angels and prophets walk the earth alongside gigantic poop monsters.

The sacred and the blasphemous, the otherworldly and the prosaic are inseparable in "Dogma," a picture whose most subversive move may be Kevin Smith's simple and consistent refusal to separate religion from the world that most of us live in. The Almighty's personal messenger tasting (but not swallowing) tequila at the tacky Mexican restaurant down the street? Sure. Angels traveling by Amtrak and Greyhound? Yup. One of Christ's apostles adjourning to a fast-food joint for "a two-piece and a biscuit?" Why not? A good Catholic girl working in an abortion clinic? Absolutely.

Dogma Written and directed by Kevin Smith Starring Linda Fiorentino, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek, George Carlin and Alanis Morissette

The consistent message that has come from the Catholic protests against "Dogma" (just as it did from the Catholic protests against Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" or Jean-Luc Godard's "Hail Mary") is that it's a sin to question Holy Mother Church. "Dogma" is a comic-book vision of how the church screws itself by wielding such an iron hand. "Dogma" presents a wicked and witty inversion in which Catholic dogma's insistence on God's infallibility creates a scenario that paves the way for the destruction of all creation. And it's only an outcast, someone who has dared the verboten and actually questioned the church, who can save the whole shebang.

Smith's heroine, Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), isn't so much a lapsed Catholic as an exhausted one. She still goes to mass, but it's long since ceased to mean anything to her. She still prays, but she's long since stopped believing that God is listening. Just the sort of person that God, with what seems like a typically perverse divine sense of humor, elects to save the world. Two angels who have been expelled from Heaven and condemned to spend eternity in Wisconsin -- Loki (Matt Damon), God's former Angel of Death, and his buddy Bartleby (Ben Affleck) -- have discovered a loophole in Catholic doctrine which would allow them to enter the kingdom of heaven, thus proving God wrong and -- whoops! -- negating all existence.

What follows is a topsy-turvy road movie with Bethany heading for Red Bank, N.J., (the angels' ascension will take place at a cathedral there), to fulfill her destiny, picking up various companions along the way. This collection of mortals and divinities are played by an all-star cast who drop nonchalantly into this shambling theological vaudeville to play their rhetorical part. There's Alan Rickman as the Metatron, the fashion-conscious messenger who acts as God's voice, so grand by itself that it destroys mere mortals who hear it. Rickman's presence seems to be a joke on the way Hollywood has always Anglicized God. His exasperated, finicky manner is a joke on the portrayal of the infinite patience of the godly; the Metatron can't believe the slowness of the mortals he has to deal with. There's Chris Rock as Rufus, the 13th apostle, left out of the Bible because it was written by white guys; Salma Hayek as Serendipity, a heavenly muse who takes credit for the 20 top-grossing movies of all time except "Home Alone." ("Somebody sold their soul to Satan to get the grosses up on that piece of shit.")

As a Jersey cardinal who wants to give 'em that new-time religion with his movement "Catholicism Wow!," George Carlin might be playing off the memory of every tough-nosed old-school priest he ever tangled with (and perhaps the memory of an early '60s run-in with Boston's late Cardinal Richard Cushing during his time as a DJ in that city). And there's Smith's recurring duo, the stoner Abbott and Costello, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith, with just two words of dialogue and a beguiling arsenal of facial expressions that gets more laughs than many actors could wring out of a script full of one-liners) as the "prophets" sent to show Bethany the way. They meet her in the parking lot of the abortion clinic where she works because they figured it'd be a good place to pick up loose women. As the characters argue and debate, eat, get drunk and argue some more, "Dogma" blends the bleariness of a road trip with the bleariness of an all-night bull session.

Next page | The perfect capper: Alanis as God