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DOGMA
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Your karma ran over my dogma, read an early-Seventies bumper sticker from my wastrel college years. "It's not fair!" whines the petulant child when confronted with authority. DOGMA, Kevin Smith's latest production, wobbles between these two poles. Though limited, the movie is at least about ideas, and frequently entertaining, so it is worth seeing.
Two smartass angels, Loki and Bartleby (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), think they have found a loophole that will let them return to heaven -- the plenary indulgences being offered by Cardinal George Carlin as part of the Catholicism Wow! campaign featuring Buddy Christ. They have four days to get to Red Bank, New Jersey, and if they do, for almost-nonsensical reasons articulated at great length by Alan Rickman's morose angelic herald and Chris Rock's thirteenth apostle (Rufus), existence will come to an end.
Rickman and Rock draft Linda Fiorentino, reprising her world-weary tough bitch persona from THE LAST SEDUCTION. Accompanied by plus two prophets (director Kevin Smith and his friend and co-scriptwriter, motormouth Jason Mewes) and a muse (Selma Hayek, whose entrance, as in virtually every movie role she has, has her dancing atop a bar), they set out to find and stop the two angels before this "perfect world" (as Affleck calls it) comes to an end.
Except for Silent Bob, who says only three words in the whole movie, everyone other character is foul-mouthed, which is tiring, un-clever, incongruous (would an angel who has spoken to God curse by saying "Jesus Christ"?), and slows the story (if all the cursing were removed, the movie would be twenty minutes shorter, which it needs to be). Perhaps offended by this, some grumpy reviewers have seen the movie as anti-Catholic, but Smith is clearly a religious conservative who deplores the cheapening of doctrine and the church's image makeover. Loki and Bartleby are presented as sulking children, God (when She appears) is benign, wise, and (thankfully) silent. Those who have lost faith regain it. And the world is saved.
Though the story line is clever, the direction is lumpy and crude. Too many scenes run long, there is far too much exposition, and the special effects are used mostly for gross-out value. Worse, almost no one in the movie can act. (Bud Cort -- remember "Harold and Maude"? -- has an early appearance, perhaps a harbinger of flat affect to come.) Jason Lee chews the furniture. Rock, Affleck, and Hayek all substitute shouting and face-making for any semblance of genuine feeling. Fiorentino is wooden; in an early scene, Janeane Garofalo, onscreen for all of a minute and a half, out-acts her spectacularly. Even Rickman (looking like death warmed over made worse by deliberate white pancake makeup), who is a fine actor, deploys only a bit of his talent.
In many ways (such as his affection for throwing shit about the screen), Kevin Smith (who reprises his continuing cameo as Silent Bob) resembles Terry Gilliam, whom he evidently admires. Indeed, the opening title sequence is a direct steal from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." This movie has flaws reminiscent of Gilliam's "Jabberwocky," but perhaps some day Smith will have a "Brazil" in him.