Director Kevin Smith has
certainly been no stranger to controversy. It's just that up until
Dogma, Smith's tweaking of the Catholic faith and the celestial concerns
of heaven, his irreverence was focused on more earthly matters.
His debut film, Clerks, embraced with profane glee the lives of retail employees. Mall Rats did the same for shopping mall dwellers, and Chasing Amy examined the unrequited love between a straight man and a lesbian. Dogma has Kevin Smith, with his scatological and subversive sense of humor, telling the story of two angels, played by Ben Affleck (Shakespeare in Love) and Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting), who get stuck on Earth for an eternity for defying God. Since Wisconsin is no place for angels to dwell, they hatch a plot to return to heaven. By entering through the portals of a newly re-dedicated church, they can be re-sanctified and, once again, eligible for paradise. But, since they are basically conning God, they end up threatening human existence itself. Just like that other practising Catholic, Martin Scorsese, whose The Last Temptation of Christ received a similar fanfare of hostility from true believers, Kevin Smith is trying to ask pertinent questions about his own faith. "[This movie] doesn't attempt to hold out answers to any of those questions," Smith explains. "It's meant to make you laugh." This means, of course, that Smith doesn't see much difference between this film and any of his others. "How seriously can you take a movie thathas a rubber poop monster in it?"
But it wasn't the
dung creature that was the source of all the outrage. Most of it focused
on matters like having Bethany (Linda Fiorentino of The Last Seduction),
the one human Since we are talking satire here, often humor can help us get at bigger truths. Dogma is simply a film about faith where sacred cows suddenly grow moustaches. Jason Lee, a veteran of Smith films who plays a muse trying to escape from Hell, puts Dogma in perspective. "It's not like Primal Fear with a priest videotaping boys and girls having sex. This has [comedian] George Carlin playing a Catholic cardinal." And with a tongue firmly planted in his cheek, he adds, "Come on, that's very funny." Kevin Courrier |
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