(Courtesy California Aggie Online)

By David Conner

After an independent blow-up, a major flub and a success, Kevin Smith finally got the go-ahead to make a film his way. Neither as simple as Clerks or as polished as Chasing Amy, Dogma appears to be Smith's best try at uncharacterizing himself as a filmmaker of any genre which we have seen him in.

About as convoluted in plot as a Toni Morrison novel, the film is a work just to watch. The real effort, though, was undertaken by the writer and director - who has undoubtedly made his most complex and most commendable work yet.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are two fallen angels who have found their way back into Heaven through a loophole in the Catholic doctrine.

But if they succeed, all life on Earth will end. Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) is called upon by God to stop them. Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith, respectively) join her as prophets, along with the 13th apostle, Rufus (Chris Rock). Serendipity (Salma Hayek) is a stripper muse.

This film is hard to place. It certainly isn't a comedy, it isn't a drama, and it misses the mark on religious satire as well. Dogma is a very serious film with some good bits of comedy thrown in. While trying to make the audience laugh, Smith attempts a serious religious and cultural discussion that sometimes results in crossed eyes as the audience tries to follow both.

This new and culturally conscious side of Smith is hardly blasphemous, and only a bit heretical. George Carlin's character, Cardinal Glick, announces that Catholicism will retire the "depressing" cross and renovate Jesus with a smile, a wink and a thumbs-up instead of puncture wounds. These wisecracks are just part of Smith's scaffolding of humor. What he has to say about religion isn't insulting as much as it aims zealots to motivate from "mourning their religion" to "celebrating it." Catholics, after all, will probably grasp the film's catechism much more easily than the uninitiated.

So, is the film funny? Of course - Smith's comedy is precious. Jason Mewes is every bit as funny as he was in Clerks, and almost as funny as his drink-puke-pass-out-drink-again performance on the film's DVD voice-over track. This comedic fantasy grows cumbersome when the comedy relies on its fantasy environment. Without setting parts of the situation up until nearly halfway into the film, Smith alienates some of his audience, who are then left to pick and choose from the ripe jokes of Dogma's rich descriptive landscape. While the post-modern interpretations of John Hughes' films are easily digestible, the parallel deconstructions of God are more of a task for Smith's anticipated audience. While it is funny to watch Mewes fantasize about sex with God's embodiment - a mute Alanis Morrisette - we can't help but think that he just wants her to go down with him in the theater.

Damon and Affleck are well-versed actors in their own right, but the script they are given demands that the angels be far more flat than their potential to act. The angels bring Dogma to a grinding halt nearly every time they appear for drawn-out philosophical conversations that neither shed light on any mysteries or serve to advance the plot. Perhaps that is because the most serious conversations we have seen come out of Smith's films have been musing in the male fantasy world of lesbian sex, and the misogyny of conquering a lesbian relationship in the name of heterosexuality.

Well, perhaps Smith is far more intelligent than we ever expected. If so, Dogma is almost irrefutable proof that the writer/director/actor has more going on in his head than lesbians and rigor mortis-themed necrophilia scenes. If, as the angels discover, a loophole in Catholic doctrine can cause the end of the world, Smith seems to have made his point, disguising it even under the guise of incomprehensibility. And, if Smith doesn't believe in the validity of Catholicism at least to some degree, he would have picked a better subject to expend the talents of so many fine actors. The truth about Dogma is that Smith has packed this film so full of symbolism and layered on enough levels to keep English professors journalizing on it for years.