The regime's bumbling fight with the Vatican led me to rewatch Kevin Smith's sporadically entertaining 1999 flick Dogma, which tells the story of two banished angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) who find a loophole to get back into Heaven.
The loophole involves a New Jersey church that will offer papal reconciliation to anyone passing through its doors on a certain day. The angels, who were exiled to Wisconsin, begin to make their way to New Jersey, unaware that if they succeed all of creation is voided because God can't be proven wrong about their banishment.
At the same time, a Catholic abortion clinic worker with a special lineage (Linda Fiorentino) is commissioned by God's herald (Alan Rickman) to stop the angels. She would be accompanied by assorted human and celestial beings (Smith, Jason Mewes, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek), each contributing to the picture's dissertation on Catholic theology and the wide gulf between practitioners and the pulpit, presented in the most outrageously wild and often stunningly vulgar way possible.
I was still a regular attendant at Mass in 1999, so the picture resonated with me differently then. I wondered about the non-Catholics, though. Would they get the serious questions under the gags -- and there are many of both? I suppose I still do wonder that.
Smith's films are always heavier on wit than craft, I think, and Dogma is certainly that. It is worth noting, however, that Smith's claim that institutions are failed by their strictures is still relevant and very true.
Also in the cast are George Carlin and Jason Lee, and Bud Cort and Alanis Morissette have cameo roles as God.
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