HOLIDAY FEATURE: As millennium ends, forces of good triumphs over cinematic evil

c. 1999 Religion News Service UNDATED _”Guy cuts an avocado open and sees the Virgin staring at him,”a world-weary bishop observes in the upcoming”The Third Miracle.””It’s the millennium coming, isn’t it?” Sure feels like it. After years of being pushed off-screen by secular stories, the forces of evil returned with a vengeance in 1999, in […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _”Guy cuts an avocado open and sees the Virgin staring at him,”a world-weary bishop observes in the upcoming”The Third Miracle.””It’s the millennium coming, isn’t it?” Sure feels like it.

After years of being pushed off-screen by secular stories, the forces of evil returned with a vengeance in 1999, in movies from “The Blair Witch Project” and “Stigmata” through “The Haunting” and “End of Days.”


Now, the forces of good are massing for a comeback.

In last month’s “Dogma,” an assortment of angry angels and flawed mortals discussed such Sunday-sermon issues as the nature of free will and the logic of papal infallibility. In this month’s “The End of the Affair,” Ralph Fiennes loses lover Julianne Moore not to another man, but to the arms of the church. In “The Green Mile,” prison guard Tom Hanks finds a mysterious man with miraculous healing powers; in the still-to-come “The Third Miracle,” due Dec. 29, flawed priest Ed Harris is dispatched by his bishop to investigate rumors of a modern saint.

Interestingly, although most of these films are about as doctrinally sound as “The Omen,” a few turn on legitimate articles of Catholic faith. “Stigmata,” “The End of the Affair” and “The Third Miracle” all examine the processes by which a mortal is declared a saint. And although I don’t remember the Christian Brothers ever telling me about nasty creatures called “excrementals,” much of the rest of “Dogma” has its genesis in legitimate church teachings.

Some of this spiritual questing is undoubtedly a sign of the times, yet the millennium doesn’t completely explain why the cinema’s newfound spirituality has such a decidedly Catholic slant.

Where are the movies about courageous rabbis or Jewish monsters like the Golem? Although “The Green Mile” is set in the Baptist South, where are all the other movies about charismatic ministers, let alone mystical Buddhists or Hindu gods? How did the Catholics end up with this most-favored-faith status?

The historical answer is that Hollywood has always been reluctant to explore Judaism, partially because so many early filmmakers were Jewish themselves, and eager to quietly assimilate.

It has also always seemed a little uncomfortable with the Protestant denominations, perhaps because Baptists and Lutherans were uncommon in the immigrant communities where the movie moguls had grown up. Dismiss all Eastern faiths as un-American _ and for decades, many did _ and that left the Catholics as the favorite faith-on-film creed.

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Some of that changed as time went on. Bland nondenominational pastors often showed up in studio movies in the ’30s, and by the ’40s, even a few careful pictures about anti-Semitism were allowed.


Yet the priests and nuns of the Roman Catholic Church remained the moguls’ favorite characters, and with good reason. The ornate Latin and Gothic trappings of the Mass (at least, pre-Vatican II) were simply made for horror movies; the ancient vow of clerical chastity was perfect for adding some romantic tension to melodramas; the solemn seal of the confessional provided an exotic twist for murder mysteries.

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Not all of that attention has been bad for the faith. Apart from occasional sensations like the controversial “Priest” and raucous comedies like “Heaven Help Us,” the movie image of the Catholic clergy has been so positive it’s a wonder it hasn’t served as a better recruiting tool.

In the ’30s and ’40s, Spencer Tracy and Bing Crosby always seemed to keep their Roman collars in the same drawer as their sports equipment. Later, after the tumult of the ’60s, the movie priest emerged as a tantalizingly handsome, occasionally anguished intellectual.

Yet even positive stereotypes can do harm, and true to Hollywood’s age-old rules, most of those movies have parroted outdated assumptions and presented tiresomely male-dominated stories.

Few “Catholic” movies, however serious, are willing to honestly explore questions of faith and morals. The new “The End of the Affair,” for example, carefully plays down the strong spiritual debate that ran through Graham Greene’s original novel; “The Third Miracle,” while more devoted to its saintly subject, can’t resist spending nearly as much time on its priest’s almost-affair with the saint’s daughter.

Occasionally a film does get the subject right. The 1996 indie “Entertaining Angels,” while inexpensively and rather awkwardly made, was nonetheless a valiant attempt to tell the story of Dorothy Day, the Catholic activist and social reformer. The year before, “Dead Man Walking” gave us, in Susan Sarandon, the sort of progressive nun who’s far more common in real life than in Hollywood movies.


Both those films showed there is a church beyond the male hierarchy, and a broad range of complicated Catholic issues. And the upcoming “Angela’s Ashes,” while hardly a spiritual film, beautifully illustrates both the hope religion can give to lives, and the shame and self-loathing it can blight them with.

We need more movies like them.

And we need more movies like Robert Duvall’s “The Apostle” _ one of the rare modern pictures to actually have a Bible-quoting preacher as its hero, instead of its villain. We need more movies like Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” one of the even rarer movies to explore a religion besides Judaism or Christianity. We also need a movie that’s finally willing to do the same thing for Islam. And Hinduism. And, yes, atheism as well _ because the refusal to believe is a belief system, too.

Then, Hollywood’s new move towards God and the Devil won’t just be another sign of millennial madness or one more cute show-biz trend. It will be a sign that the movies are growing up _ and finally taking seriously the very subjects its audience has been taking seriously for thousands of years.

DEA END WHITTY

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