Can God Take A Joke?

By RICHARD CORLISS

In September, the chunky young auteur faced a packed house at the Toronto Film Festival and smiled. "We're here tonight," Kevin Smith said, "and lightning has not struck the building. So I guess it's O.K. with the Lord." Smith, 29, had endured a rough six months, ever since the Catholic League, a lay group with 350,000 members and an intimidating letterhead, had pressured the Walt Disney Co. and its subsidiary Miramax Films to drop Dogma, Smith's rambunctious comedy about God, faith and a monster made of poop. Smith was able to make his movie freely, but if the protesters had had their way, he couldn't show it. To twist the famous bumper-sticker phrase, their karma ran over his Dogma.

Like the Synoptic Gospels, Dogma has a happy ending. Two, in fact. In the movie, God comes to earth, sets things right, then does a handstand. In the drama behind the film, Lions Gate, an independent distributor, opens Dogma this week after successful screenings at festivals in Cannes, Toronto and New York City. "Now we can put the rest of the stuff behind us and start fretting about the box office," Smith says. "I'm hoping that when people see the film, they'll say, 'Oh, it's not the movie that flips the bird at the church. It's actually kind of devout.'"

For all the fun it pokes at Catholic doctrine--that God is a woman (Alanis Morissette), that the last descendant of Jesus (Linda Fiorentino) works in an abortion clinic, that there was a 13th Apostle who was black (Chris Rock)--Dogma is a tortured testament from a true believer. In an age when not only belief in God but belief itself brings a smirk to hip, jaded faces, this is a film out of time, the most devout movie in a modern setting since Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951), and a worthy successor to The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's 1988 parable of doubt purified into faith. Love Dogma or dismiss it, but don't condemn the film for what it isn't. As Ben Affleck, one of the zillion-dollar stars in this $10 million film, says, "It's a rumination on faith. With dick jokes."

Every good Bible story needs a heavenly visitation. Bethany (Fiorentino) gets hers from the angel Metatron (Alan Rickman), who tells her she is Jesus' distant descendant and it is her destiny to save the world. Two fallen angels, Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Affleck), have found a doctrinal loophole that will allow them to return to Heaven by walking through a parish door in New Jersey. "It will undo the world," Bethany is told--unless she can stop the renegades from defying God.

So a skeptical Bethany travels from Illinois to Jersey, occasionally accompanied by a hot-wired demon (Jason Lee), a celestial muse (Salma Hayek), the 13th Apostle--and a pair of unlikely prophets, motormouthing Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith), the cynical chorus from the writer-director's previous films Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy.

Smith calls the film "a bizarre mix of lowbrow jokes and highbrow concepts and then vice versa." Ain't it, though? He mixes poop and prophecy, scatology and eschatology; he crams his script with enough belly laughs for six Adam Sandler movies and enough citations of angelology and the Gnostic gospels to make a Jesuit's head split. This is a Shavian debate--Don Juan in New Jersey--with potty mouth. Dogma, recall, comes from the Greek word meaning "to think." And that's what Smith wants the viewer to do.

Smith gets steamed when he thinks about the Dogma protests. "Every week I go to church, and sooner or later the priest makes a joke! How come a priest can mix religion and jokes, but if I do it, I'm anti-Catholic? That just burns my ass, because I'm out there trying to get people to think about God. I am working the good cause--and I'm anti-Catholic? I tithe! I don't bend down and tie my shoe when the basket comes around!"

His life can now return to bustling normality. He will continue with his comic-book writing, scripts for Miramax and Warner Bros. (a Superman draft didn't work out) and a prime-time cartoon version of Clerks for, of course, Disney. "It's just rife with irony, isn't it?" he says. "Let's see if we can deliver the PG my mother was always lookin' for." But his biggest project is to enjoy time with his new wife Jennifer Schwalbach, a former writer for USA Today, and their newborn daughter Harley Quinn. "I want to take the next year off and raise my child," he says. "Do something noble."

Smith has already done that by raising profound issues in a pop context, bringing God to the mallrats, making a good movie. That should be O.K. with the Lord.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles