Brazen Angels
DOGMA
Earth hangs in the balance as two sullen souls comically stir things up.
With Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Linda Fiorentino, George Carlin
Written and directed by Kevin Smith
LET'S FACE IT: Whether you believe in God or not, society is stuck with Him (or Her), at least for our lifetime. Unless the world really ends on New Year's Day, none of us will live to see a time where organized religion disappears and something ju st as eternally reassuring comes along to replace it.
I'm sorry, did I say God? I meant movies, television and all the pop-cult trappings that fuel our fantasies of achieving our own extended fifteen minutes. For nowadays it's hard to tell what people worship - a book that preaches about the Almighty, or a s creenplay that threatens to make you famous.
At the heart of Dogma, a very funny, very dark fable about modern faith, you'll find a suggestion for cleaning up the mess we've made of our relationship with our creator. But the writer/director here is Kevin Smith, the fellow who (in the charmi ng Chasing Amy) seemed to believe that lesbians only need the love of a handsome man to go straight. Try as he might in Dogma, he can't get beyond a liberal, middle-brow, Touched by an Angel, twice-a-year holiday Protestant phil osophy about God. Or as one character says, "It doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe something."
That's not a disappointment, for who could possibly hope to sort out the quagmire of all the gods and all the religions of the world? In Dogma - which, by the way, Smith filmed in and around Pittsburgh - we're told that it's better to have ideas than beliefs because it's easier to change ideas, whereas beliefs tend to cast our feet dangerously in cement. So Smith, who writes dialogue as brisk as a screwball comedy, does something that few mainstream movies have the balls to do: He throws out lots of interesting ideas, all wrapped around a blistering parody of our insipid culture and empty faith.
The story of Dogma is no more complicated than Paradise Lost, but I'll try to simplify it here.
Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck) are two disgruntled angels of death who got exiled by their employer (I won't ruin it by telling you who plays God) to Wisconsin, a place so bleak that they'd rather be dead than eternal. Then they discover a l oophole in Catholic Church dogma that allows them to pass under a holy arch in a New Jersey church and thus get back into Heaven. There's one catch: If they do it, the universe disappears - along with every human being who inhabits it.
Well, God can't let that happen. So He (or She) sends His (or Her) mouthpiece, the disheveled angel Metatron (Alan Rickman), to recruit Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a Planned Parenthood employee and slowly lapsing Catholic who will reluctantly serve as His (or Her) unlikely messenger. Metatron tells Bethany to look for help from two prophets, one who never shuts up, one who never says a word. But he neglects to tell her to look out for Azrael (Jason Lee), a horny devil who'd love to see Loki and Bartleby s ucceed, thus doing what he hasn't been able to do himself for millennia.
With a little help from Rufus (Chris Rock), the unknown 13th apostle who wants some recognition, and Serendipity (Salma Hayek), a muse who's responsible for creating 19 of the 20 top-grossing movies (she blames Home Alone on Satan), Bethany sets out for New Jersey, where a hip cardinal (George Carlin) has redesigned the image of the bloody crucified Jesus ("Christ didn't come to earth to give us the willies") as part of a campaign he calls "Catholicism WOW."
Get the picture? With his barrage of first-hour jokes, and his conflagration of second-hour slaughter, Smith's pop-cult theology postulates that organized religion has strayed too far from inviting a true relationship with God. These disparate tones mix w ell enough if you just relax and go with it, and the performance are ceaselessly ingratiating and laid back. (Carlin has razzed Catholicism for 30 years, so his presence here is sweet nostalgia.) And while Smith still doesn't quite know how to use his cam era effectively, his movie's visual lack of dash never undermines its rhetorical grace.
Smith opens Dogma with a homage to Clockwork Orange and speckles the rest of his script with digs at the banality of Hollywood. He especially seems to enjoy dissing John Hughes. He also creates the grandest roles yet for Jason Mewes and himself as the shaggy, sex-starved, ubiquitous stoner/slackers Jay (who talks too much) and Silent Bob (who finally talks - although not much).
Church faithfuls, of course, denounced Dogma long before any of them saw it. Now that the movie is out, they can revile it with good reason: Smith assails pretty much all the rules and kowtowing that Catholicism has preached for centuries, and he rattles off myriad Christian mythologies to show how complicated God and faith have become in the hands of theology and literature.
So it's almost divinely ironic that Dogma comes to us only days after Catholic and Lutheran church leaders signed a document declaring how to get into Heaven: It's not through good deeds, they finally agree, but rather through your direct relatio nship with God - just like Martin Luther said it was in 1517, when he found a different use for a hammer and some nails. This new ecumenism between warring faiths may be the supreme punch line to Smith's entertaining comic fantasy, which turns out to be m ore prophetic than he could possibly have imagined when he wrote it.