NEWS FEATURE:“Dogma”offers controversial, comedic look at Christianity

c. 1999 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Is Christianity often comical? Can doubt coexist with devotion? And can profound questions about life, the cosmos and Catholic theology be commingled with sex jokes, profanity, violence and potty humor? These are just some of the questions raised by”Dogma,”a sly and silly offering from award-winning Generation-X filmmaker Kevin […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Is Christianity often comical? Can doubt coexist with devotion? And can profound questions about life, the cosmos and Catholic theology be commingled with sex jokes, profanity, violence and potty humor?

These are just some of the questions raised by”Dogma,”a sly and silly offering from award-winning Generation-X filmmaker Kevin Smith that opens Friday (Nov. 12).


The film, which combines the puerile, pubescent humor of”South Park,”the end-times anxiety of”The Omega Code”and the sexual obsessions of”There’s Something About Mary,”focuses on two fallen angels who risk the fate of the cosmos when they try to exploit a loophole in church law in order to return to heaven.

The movie has generated more pre-release opposition from Catholic and Protestant groups than any film since”The Last Temptation of Christ,”which opened in 1988. In both cases, religious leaders read early copies of the scripts, declared the movies blasphemous assaults on religious faith, and attempted to halt their release, unintentionally creating plentiful publicity for films that might have otherwise have had little broad-based appeal.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association and the Southern Baptist Convention have condemned”Dogma,”which was originally produced by Miramax, a division of Disney, a corporation already bedeviled by a long-running boycott effort by these and other religious groups.

Disney dropped the film, leaving”Dogma”high and dry until Lion’s Gate, an independent distributor of art films (“Gods and Monsters”), agreed to distribute it. After its world premiere at last May’s Cannes International Film Festival, movie critics praised its wit, bravado and edgy originality. Variety, the movie industry trade publication, called the film”a very vulgar pro-faith comedy.” Smith, 29, was raised on Catholicism and comic books. A film school dropout and former video store clerk, he underwent a personal crisis of faith in his early 20s.”Sooner or later, no matter how devout you are, even if you’re the pope, you have to step back and say, `What’s the difference between this book, the Bible, and Greek mythology?'”Smith told The New York Times this summer.

He used credit cards to make his 1994 debut,”Clerks,”which has been hailed by pop-culture observers as a”slacker opus.”That set the stage for his further explorations of baby buster ennui in 1995’s”Mallrats”and 1997’s”Chasing Amy.””Dogma”is Smith’s most ambitious film yet, and it delves most deeply into Smith’s strong but often ambivalent feelings about religion. Although he has repeatedly affirmed his belief in God and in Jesus Christ, Smith is much less certain about the church. Like Bethany, a central character in”Dogma,”he goes to church but isn’t always sure why, and is often bored.”It’s called the Celebration of the Mass,”he vented during an interview with the ZUG comedy Web site,”but it’s no party. No one’s having a good time.” In”Dogma,”Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck) are two fallen angels with bad attitudes who were banished to the wasteland of Wisconsin and want to go back home to heaven.

Their machinations threaten the sovereignty of God and the very existence of the cosmos while leading them to cross paths with a host of colorful characters, including flawed celestial beings, demons from the pits of hell, and fallible human beings who are struggling to make sense of the cosmic drama unfolding around them.

God dispatches the glitzy angel Metatron (Alan Rickman) to recruit Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) to join the battle. A distant relative of Jesus who works in a Pittsburgh abortion clinic, Bethany is a mixture of faith and doubt but she agrees to join the battle against evil.


Along the way, Bethany encounters two unlikely prophets (filmmaker Smith and Jason Mewes appearing in their fourth Smith movie as Silent Bob and Jay); a muse who works in a strip bar to make ends meet (Salma Hayek); comedian Chris Rock as Rufus, a previously unknown 13th disciple of Jesus who was allegedly edited out of the Bible because he was black; and God herself (played in a cameo role by singer Alanis Morissette, who also contributes a song to the soundtrack).

Other colorful characters include Cardinal Glick (George Carlin), whose program to reinvigorate the church, called”Catholicism _ WOW!”, replaces the depressing image of the crucifix with a statue called”Buddy Christ”featuring a smiling Jesus with upraised thumbs, and Golgothan, a smelly poop demon who literally oozes up from a toilet.

Smith describes”Dogma”as a comedic love letter to the church and the sacred mysteries of life, reminding viewers at the outset of the film that”God has a sense of humor.”But William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, for one, isn’t laughing. He has condemned the film as anti-Christian hate mail.

Now that the film is finding its way into theaters nationwide, moviegoers can make their own judgments. Some will undoubtedly find Smith’s dizzying mix of orthodoxy and absurdity offensive, but others might find it strangely moving.

AMB END RABEY

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