God and old Nick square off in Hollywood’s latest batch of millennial thrillers, reports Brian Pendreigh
Some guy visits a face-painting stall, opts for red and black and declares himself a servant of the dark side. Things go bump in the night in Maryland woods. Dead people walk the Earth and do not even know they are dead. With just a few weeks till the end of the millennium, cinema is in the grip of Satan and the forces of evil.
Of course the religious right have been saying that for years. Unhappy with Hollywood’s output, they went off and made their own movie, a “Christian thriller” called The Omega Code, which scraped into the United States box-office top 10 last month. But ironically, to produce a hit the Trinity Broadcasting Network had to inject enough violence to merit a PG-13 certificate … and they gave the lead role in the film to the Devil. Faust, anyone?
But all is not lost. An unlikely superhero has arrived at the American box office in the nick of time. She does not say much and she wears a funny little ballet skirt over boxer shorts. We are left in no doubt about this superhero’s underwear of choice because of her propensity for handstands. Well, they always did say God moved in mysterious ways.
Forget the traditional image of an old man with a long white beard. In Kevin Smith’s Dogma, God is played by rock star Alanis Morissette. It covered its $8,5- million production costs in its opening three days at the American box-office – grossing more than The Omega Code took in its first three weeks – despite calls for a boycott by the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights and pickets outside cinemas.
“We don’t see the film as controversial, just a very funny comedy,” says Tom Ortenberg, co-president of distributors Lions Gate Films. But if Ortenberg sees no controversy, it must be the most remarkable case of selective blindness since Nelson blamed his missing eye for his failure to see a signal at the battle of Copenhagen. Dogma has caused more religious controversy than any film since The Last Temptation of Christ a decade ago.
Lions Gate acquired Dogma only after Miramax were forced to offload it. Kevin Smith’s hip low-budget comedies had helped maintain Miramax’s image as the leading independent production company after their acquisition by Disney. But Disney came under concerted pressure from American Christian groups and refused to allow Miramax to release the film.
Christian pressure groups were incensed by a 13th disciple, the jive-talking Rufus (Chris Rock), who claimed he was written out of the Bible because he was a black activist, and by Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a relative of Christ who works in an abortion clinic. And then there were the Almighty handstands.
Meanwhile, Disney is gearing up for next month’s British release of End of Days, another quasi-biblical battle between Good and Evil, with nary a whisper of controversy. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an alcoholic ex-cop who has to stop the Devil when he comes to Earth to find a mate. Gabriel Byrne plays Satan, though he seems to be hedging his bets, having just played a priest in Stigmata, a thriller that upset Catholics with its suggestion that the Vatican was covering up evidence about the true nature of Christ.
Director Peter Hyams told Premiere magazine that End of Days would not be just a case of Arnie “kicking the Devil’s ass”. “This is a movie that triggers your brain,” he said, before reassuring readers there would also be “a lot of computer-generated imagery” and that “a lot of things blow up and burn”.
So we can be sure that once Arnie is
done thinking, he will give that satanic ass a good computer-generated kicking.
There is a long tradition of satanic thrillers that includes The Devil Rides Out, Rosemary’s Baby and the Omen films and goes all the way back to Faust. In Roman Polanski’s new film, The Ninth Gate, Johnny Depp is looking for the book that holds the key to contacting Satan – and it’s not the Yellow Pages; while in Lost Souls, Winona Ryder discovers a plot that allows the Devil to assume human form.
Dogma can be dismissed neither as mere thriller nor as “just a very funny comedy”. Like Martin Scorsese, who directed Last Temptation, Kevin Smith is a Catholic who takes his religion seriously. And Dogma is reminiscent of Monty Python’s Life of Brian in its mixture of intelligence and puerility, the irreverent and the incisive, as it explores racism, sexism and commercialism within organised religion.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck head a starry cast as two angels who have been exiled to Wisconsin, but believe they have discovered a way of getting back into heaven, via a church in New Jersey. The problem is that, if they manage it, they will prove God is fallible and undo all his good works, including existence itself. The cast also includes Salma Hayek as a muse who is slumming it as a stripper and Alan Rickman reprising his droll sheriff of Nottingham as God’s right-hand angel.
Dogma provides viewers with a dense theological folklore and exotic characters (including a demon made of excrement) that can rival anything in George Lucas. It attacks its targets with satire rather than computer-generated special effects. It has the Catholic church adopting the slogan “Catholicism Wow” and replacing the crucifix with a more upbeat, winking, thumbs-up “Buddy Christ”.
Dogma satirises the church and Disney; whether it satirises God is debatable. Rather, it would seem to satirise the conventional image of God established four centuries ago when Michelangelo got the contract to paint the Sistine chapel.
Gabriel Byrne – a funny name for someone playing the Devil – joins a distinguished line of cinematic devils, from Emil Jannings in the silent days through Peter Cook in Bedazzled to Al Pacino’s Devil-as- a-lawyer in The Devil’s Advocate. The Devil can send shivers down your spine, but he can also make you double up in laughter. Billy Crystal’s take on the character in Deconstructing Harry was not that far removed from his turn as Oscar compre.
For a long time, the Devil ruled unchallenged in movies. God does not rate a mention in Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies, but the Devil gets an entry.
And why is that? In one of these weird twists of logic that so often inform religious thinking, for a long time God was banned from appearing in films.
When the British Board of Film Censors was set up in 1912 its two initial prohibitions were nudity and Christ, whose presence was traditionally conveyed by the reaction of onlookers or by a hand emerging from a cloak and alighting on the head of some suitably wide-eyed child. It probably never occurred to anyone that a film-maker might one day have the audacity to want to portray God on screen.
In The Ten Commandments in 1956, Charlton Heston established a cinematic image of God as an old man with a grey beard, which was consistent with the image from classical art, even though Heston was actually playing Moses. It would be another 24 years before he played God himself, in the Paul Hogan comedy Almost an Angel.
As the Hollywood actor closest in age to God, George Burns had been an obvious candidate for the role in Oh, God!, a 1977 comedy co-starring John Denver.
But these characters seemed bland compared with such memorable creations as Jack Nicholson’s randy Daryl van Horne (geddit?) in The Witches of Eastwick and Robert de Niro’s chilling Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart (in which Mickey Rourke’s character was called Harry Angel).
Only very recently has cinema attempted more radical interpretations of God. Eddie Murphy was a black God, or rather G, in Holy Man. While Murphy served up a laid-back, touchy-feely guru, Maurice Roeves was a foul-mouthed, vengeful deity turning Stephen McCole into a fly in The Acid House.
Murphy had had $100-million hits with The Nutty Professor and Dr Dolittle, and interest in Irvine Welsh, who adapted The Acid House from his own stories, was at its height after Trainspotting. But both Holy Man and The Acid House flopped at the box office.
Dogma is one of the few films to suggest there might be a big-screen audience for God and for witty and intelligent explorations of theology. But any such notions are perceived as a dangerous threat by some Christians, who would rather go back to the days when film- makers used a hand to signify the presence of God – a white, male hand. Smith chose well when he named his film.
Dogma represents a significant step forward, but God has a long way to go before he breaks out of the best newcomer category and presents a serious rival to the Devil on the big screen.
End of Days opens on Friday at mainstream cinemas and Dogma on December 30 at selected cinemas