'Stigmata' provides no salvation

This year's winning entry in Hollywood's annual "How can we offend the Vatican?" contest, "Stigmata" (previous winners include "Priest" and "Last Temptation of Christ"), comes to audiences courtesy of the falling regime at MGM studios and a curiously biblically named write Tom Lazarus.

Patricia Arquette plays a non-mouth-bleeding stigmatic in a film filled with so many plot holes, inadequacies and out and out douche commercial-esque, frolicking-in-the-grass interludes between she and non-love interest Gabriel Byrne that it's hard to imagine the Pope doing anything but laugh. Unfortunately for "Stigmata," though, it still manages to offend with its revisionist gospel of Jesus theories and tract-like lessons of the Church masquerading as dialogue.

Frankie Paige (Arquette) is a 23-year-old hairdresser who parties all night and doesn't believe in God. Her vacationing mother sends her a rosary that, unbeknownst to both of them, was ripped off the corpse of a priest by a Rio street urchin and, as all relics of the angry dead do, is about to bring a world of hell down on poor Frankie's wrists, feet, back and forehead. Naturally, the otherworldly powers of the rosary do not occur to Frankie and certainly not the priest sent to investigate her "case," Andrew Kiernan (Byrne), so they spend the remainder of the movie trying to figure out what evil force is possessing her.

Kiernan is under attack as well, a scientist in an industry, if you will, that relies not on fact but on faith. He investigates - that is, he disproves, in true Agent Scully fashion - "miracles" like crying statues of Mary and stigmatics like Frankie. But with Frankie he believes, although he cannot explain it. His superior at the Vatican, Cardinal Houseman (Jonathan Pryce), seeks to keep the Church stagnant and holy without interference from ideas that might rock the foundation of Catholicism.

Rocking the foundation of Catholicism is exactly what the so-called demon possessing Frankie wants to do. The dead priest had found what was presumably a gospel actually written by Jesus himself and was in the process of translating it when Houseman and the other cowardly lions in Rome shut him down. Apparently the only way to free the gospel is to make Frankie bleed from every orifice and speak in tongues. And let's not forget temptation - yes, Frankie even tries to seduce celibate Kiernan.

Of "Stigmata"'s many sins, none is so great as that of director Rupert Wainwright. Like so many flashy, insubstantial feature helmers of late who graduated from the music video circuit, Wainwright relies entirely too much on visual acrobatics and not at all on, say, logical plot developments, strength of character or anything else typically associated with a "good" film.

Arquette and Byrne are innocent bystanders in this horrid case of egomania run amok, although they certainly fail to do anything to help their cause. Nia Long makes an appearance as Frankie's purple-haired best friend and then disappears for the remainder of the film. The script by Lazarus and Rick Ramage is half-baked and filled with ugly quasi-witty, religion-tinged dialogue.

And what of offense to the Vatican? It wouldn't be surprising if a holy order of protest came down from up on high. No, the surprise would be that religious officials shelled out money for this pathetic attempt at holy horror in the first place.

09-10-99