16.5.09
Separation of Church and Film
GOD help us. By the time Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons” opens on Friday, the movie — a follow-up to Mr. Howard’s 2006 “Da Vinci Code,” both based on novels by Dan Brown — will already be officially controversial, thanks largely to the reliably splenetic William Donohue, president of the Catholic League. He has accused Mr. Howard as well as Mr. Brown of “smearing the Catholic Church.” Mr. Donohue is now two months into an extended anti-“Angels & Demons” campaign, whose centerpiece is a pamphlet titled “Angels & Demons: More Demonic Than Angelic.”
Mr. Howard, for his part, has been defending his film vigorously, most recently online in The Huffington Post, where he suggested that “Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome.” To which Mr. Donohue responded in a news release, “Howard must be delusional if he thinks Vatican officials are going to like his propaganda.”
Expect more of the same in the days, perhaps weeks, to come. And if that prospect fills you with dread, try to remember that in the Roman Catholic Church despair is a mortal sin.
And if you’re a nonbeliever, you might find strength in the famous aphorism of the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel: “Thank God I’m an atheist.” Buñuel also once said that cinema “is a machine that manufactures miracles,” but it’s unlikely that he meant that statement literally or that he was thinking about movies on religious subjects, which tend to be stubbornly unmiraculous as works of art.
Strangely, he made some good ones himself, including two affectionately comic portraits of saints of the holy-fool variety, “Nazarín” (1959) and “Simon of the Desert” (1965). He also made, in 1968, a prankish ecclesiastical picaresque called “The Milky Way,” which consists almost entirely of violent theological debates on some of the tastier heresies in church history: a Jesuit and a Jansenist fight a duel with swords; a mad priest, sitting by the fire in a cozy country inn, refutes an objection by throwing coffee in his interlocutor’s face. It’s hard to avoid thoughts of Mr. Donohue and Mr. Howard, going at it with sabers and piping-hot beverages instead of pamphlets, blog posts and the inevitable cable-news talk-show appearances.
The awful thing about these religious-movie dust-ups is that there’s no resolving them to anybody’s satisfaction, either believers’ or nonbelievers’. Both positions have a bit of the truth on their side — Mr. Donohue isn’t entirely wrong to mock Mr. Howard’s pro forma genuflections to the spiritual concerns of Catholics. “I believe ‘Angels & Demons’ treats the Church with respect — even a degree of reverence — for its traditions and beliefs,” Mr. Howard wrote for The Huffington Post, but that statement is considerably less convincing than his exciting-mystery defense, which is very much to the point.
The truth is that “Angels & Demons,” like “The Da Vinci Code” and the other church-conspiracy novels that have multiplied like loaves and fishes in its aftermath, really has nothing to do with religion, and verbal (or cinematic) gestures of reverence only obscure their fundamental irrelevance to matters of faith. Mr. Brown’s preposterous, cleverly plotted books are about the Roman Catholic Church as an institution, one that has been for many centuries extremely powerful and, at times, fearsomely secretive — and any institution that keeps too many secrets is going to generate conspiracy theories, some plausible, some (the best-selling kind) lurid. The novel “Angels & Demons” has to do with a plot to blow up the Vatican, which may or may not be the work of a contemporary version of the Illuminati, an ancient underground society of scientists and artists that sometimes, as in the case of Galileo, ran afoul of church dogma; there may also be a bad apple or two in the Holy See itself.
This crisis, as in “The Da Vinci Code,” requires the cryptographic, treasure-hunting expertise of a Harvard professor named Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), who again winds up running around like a madman in search of long-buried secrets, the revelation of which would alter the world as we know it, etc. Oh, and a new pope’s being elected too. The climax involves jumping out of the papal helicopter without a parachute: talk about a leap of faith.
That is just about the only act of faith depicted with any conviction in the novel, despite Mr. Brown’s occasional attempts to convince his readers that he has something to say about the conflict between religion and reason. As with most fiction writers and filmmakers, what Coleridge called “willing suspension of disbelief” is of far more urgent importance than any question of spiritual belief, and there’s no sense getting your cassock in a twist about that; it’s in the nature of storytelling, deep as original sin.
Movies that are genuinely interested in faith — specifically the Roman Catholic faith — tend to be simpler and to focus on mysteries that can’t be solved by breaking codes or diving from moving aircraft. You can learn a lot about the agonies of doubt from Robert Bresson’s stark, affecting “Diary of a Country Priest” (1951), or about the comparable torments of unswerving faith from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s transcendent “Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928), which pits the heroine, who believed herself a messenger of God, against the medieval church at the height of its institutional power, to the sorrow of both. Mr. Brown’s exciting-mystery concoctions don’t go there, and probably shouldn’t; this is territory where even angels, rightly, fear to tread.
Maybe the most sensible way to look at this vogue for conspiracy thrillers on ecclesiastical themes — a pop genre that has also recently been represented by the nutty, sort of enjoyable network mini-series “The Last Templar,” based on the Raymond Khoury best seller — is as a manifestation of a certain, let’s say, ambivalence about the institutions of what a Republican cabinet member not long ago called “old Europe.” We don’t trust hierarchies much any more, and in an age of indiscriminately available information the practice of secrecy of any kind seems almost offensive. (Besides, codes are fun.)
Film may, as Buñuel said, be able to manufacture miracles, but they’re generally rather mundane ones: elaborate and costly, yet easy to explain. Where filmed entertainments like “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Last Templar” go wrong is, invariably, in their half-hearted attempts to go right — to suggest, as both do in their denouements, that there might indeed be something more in heaven and on earth than the worldly mysteries their heroes and heroines have so breathlessly solved. A good plot is a beautiful machine, but only the very credulous expect to find God within.
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