Every Dogma Has It’s Day

by Mike O Connell, Associate Editor

There used to be an old joke about Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. It went something like, “Schwarzenegger is such a bad actor that with each movie he adds a new emotion to his repertoire. In Terminator, he was angry, in Predator, he was scared, and on and on.” Presumably he rounded out his emotional pallet with goofy parental overindulgence in Jingle All The Way. Filmmaker Kevin Smith is in a similar situation. With each new movie he writes and directs, he tackles a single emotion and picks it apart. Mallrats examined suburban love, Chasing Amy dissected jealousy, and now Dogma puts faith, in particular Smith’s own brand of Catholicism, under the microscope. What we get may not necessarily be enlightening, but at least it’s thorough.

Dogma’s protagonist is a young woman named Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) who is going through her own crisis of faith. Not only does the formally devout Catholic work in an Illinois abortion clinic, her inability to have children has led to the break-up of her marriage. Longing for the fulfilling faith of her childhood, she simply goes through the motions of attending church and praying before bed. Enter the angel Metron (Alan Rickman) with, to quote the Blues Brothers, “A mission from God.”

As part of a rededication of a church in New Jersey, an overzealous cardinal resurrects an outdated practice whereby anyone who enters the arched entrance of this particular church will enter Heaven when they die. Since this action is sanctioned by the Pope, a loophole has been created that will allow those angels banished to Earth to sneak back into Heaven. Bartelby (Ben Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon) are two angels kicked out of Paradise for disobeying God (and getting drunk). Cardinal Glick’s (George Carlin) loophole is their ticket home.

But there’s a problem. If Bartelby and Loki succeed in re-entering Heaven, they’ll demonstrate that God is fallible and thereby unravel the web of faith that holds the universe together. The end result is the end of everything and the beginning of nothingness.

To prevent this from happening, Metron sends Bethany on a divine mission. She must go to New Jersey and prevent Bartelby and Loki from entering the church. In typical Biblical fashion, the angel doesn’t give her a plan or the necessary means to carry it out. He does tell her that she will meet two prophets who will show her the way.

Incredulous, Bethany continues on with her life. That is, until the next evening when she’s attacked by three roller-hockey minions of the demon Azrael (Jason Lee). This fallen angel wants Bartelby and Loki to succeed in their quest so that Hell will be erased along with the rest of existence. From out of the shadows come Bethany’s saviors, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith). They dispatch the three punks and immediately start putting the moves on our heroine. Eventually, she convinces them to take her to New Jersey to save the world.

Moviegoers will recognize the Jay and Silent Bob duo as the philosophical stoners who served as a wasted Greek chorus in Smith’s previous films. In Dogma, they move to center stage, or perhaps slightly off-center stage, where they contribute directly to the action. For the most part, they presence is welcome, as they pepper the film with their usual comic banter. It’s only near the end, when the Earth is at the brink of Armageddon, that their limited portrayals demonstrate what caricatures (as opposed to characters) they really are. But by then, you can forgive a little lack of depth and appreciate a touch of comic relief.

Strangely, Bethany’s quest is very much like that of Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz. She’s trying to find her way back to something that she has lost (faith). On her journey, she meets an odd collection of characters that want to help her. Chief among these are Rufus (Chris Rock) and Serendipity (Salma Hayek). The former is the thirteenth apostle who was written out of the New Testament because he’s black. The latter is a muse responsible for 19 of the top 20 all-time movie money-earners. Both willingly offer dubious advice to the confused crusader.

Fiorentino plays Bethany as a woman who, though she’s gone through a great deal of pain, still wants to believe in God. Opposing her are the two wayward angels portrayed by Affleck and Damon. While Damon’s character has the more interesting history (he was the angel of death), Affleck is a much more fascinating character. As a watcher, Bartelby is witness to all of humanity’s little quirks and foibles. At the beginning of the movie, he views humanity with a degree of affection. By the end, though, he resents humanity and happily participates in its destruction.

The most entertaining performance comes from veteran comedian Carlin, whose Cardinal Glick gleefully proposes such radical changes as replacing the crucifix with the thumbs-up “Buddy Christ” statue. Imagine what would happen if the brain trust behind New Coke took a whack at the Catholicism and you’d get a fair approximation of what Glick has in mind. It’s sinfully hilarious.

Aside from Carlin and the aforementioned Jay and Silent Bob antics, Dogma is surprisingly thin on comedy. There are some jokes and a few satirical send-ups, but often the tone of the film is very sober. One supposedly irreverent sequence in which Bartelby and Loki rain vengeance upon the idol-making executives of a Disney/McDonalds-like corporation falls very flat. You can be dark and shocking, but there has to be something “funny” to qualify it as black humor.

The problem is that Smith seems more involved in the history of angels and heaven and working out the intricacies of his religious loophole than moving the action along. There are way too many scenes of people sitting around tables discussing God, or who God is, or why God did that, or is God female, and not enough actual movement of the story at hand. Bethany’s journey only has a few speed bumps to it before she arrives in New Jersey. At that point, she has no idea about how she’s going to stop the two angels from destroying the Earth.

Although Smith’s theological ponderings are often engaging and some of the performances (Fiorentino, Affleck, and Carlin) are memorable, Dogma as a whole is very unsatisfying. Part of the problem is that the intricate character comedy that Smith introduced in Clerks and perfected in Chasing Amy gets squashed under the grand scope of the metaphysical storyline. While it’s nice to see that Smith can tell a BIG story about God and angels, you can’t help longing for the little, human stories he told in his earlier films.