director
Rupert
Wainwright
screenwriter
Tom Lazarus
story by
Tom Lazarus
Rick Ramage
producer
Frank Mancuso Jr.
cinematographer
Jeffrey L. Kimball
music
Elia Cmiral
Billy Corgan
editors
Michael J. Duthie
Michael R. Miller
cast
Patricia Arquette (Frankie Paige)
Gabriel Byrne (Father Andrew Kiernan)
Jonathan Pryce (Cardinal Houseman)
Nia Long (Donna Chadway)
Thomas Kopache (Father Durning)
Rade Sherbedgia (Marion Petrocelli)
Enrico Colantoni (Father Dario)
Portia de Rossi (Jennifer Kelliho)
Patrick Muldoon (Steven)
Ann Cusack (Dr. Reston)
Frankie Thorn (Donna's Customer)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 103m
u.s.
release: 9/10/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
|
According
to Stigmata, a luridly "sacrilegious" horror
movie, the Catholic Church is responsible for the biggest cover-up
this side of Dealey Plaza. Seems there are secret scrolls written
by Christ himself that may invalidate the necessity -- the very
existence -- of the Church. So of course the Church has
kept it under wraps all these centuries, and a presumably pissed-off
Jesus has been trying to contact us over the years by way of
stigmata -- bloody manifestations of the wounds he suffered during
his crucifixion. Question is, if J.C. wants to get the word out
so badly, why does he pick Frankie Paige (Patricia Arquette),
an atheistic Pittsburgh hair stylist, as his next stigmatic?
Did he get tired of all those boring, devout monks? Why doesn't
he just build a web site or something?
You're not supposed to ask any of those impertinent questions,
and the director, Rupert Wainwright (yet another veteran of commercials
and rock videos), doesn't give you time to, anyway. Stigmata
tries hard not to be a stodgy, old-school religious horror flick
(like, say, The Omen or The
Exorcist); no, it's way hipper than that -- it hypes
itself like a Mixmaster-MTV floor show in a rave club (sometimes
literally). If you don't like a shot, wait two seconds and it'll
change, although some of the most banal images -- like Frankie
wearing a crown of thorns and looking heavenward -- are apparently
so dear to Wainwright that we get to see them several times.
With grungy cinematography by Jeffrey L. Kimball and a soundtrack
partially blamed on Billy Corgan, you know you're in for the
latest in millennial-industrial trash, and there's hardly a laugh
to be found in it unless you get sick of the relentless visionary
anguish and start getting the giggles.
A priest kicks the bucket in Brazil, and his rosary winds up
in Frankie's hands; soon the bleeding begins -- first from her
wrists, then from mysteriously inflicted whip slashes on her
back. When Frankie first wakes up in the hospital, the doctors
suspect the wounds may be self-inflicted, but they let her go
home anyway -- presumably because she allays their fears that
she's suicidal by insisting, "I'd never do that. I love
being me -- ask anyone." I guess she's right, though I couldn't
say for sure; all we know about Frankie prior to her sanguinary
adventures is that she cuts hair and she likes to hang out in
dance clubs. (She's also dumb enough to take a bath during a
thunderstorm.) Patricia Arquette can be a vibrant, funny actress
in the right role -- True Romance
has earned her a lot of good will among movie buffs -- but she
can't do anything with Frankie except suffer and bleed. Arquette's
appealingly skewed front teeth have more character than Frankie
does.
Frankie's case draws relatively little media attention (we see
one tiny newspaper clipping), which is strange since she always
seems to pick the most crowded places -- a club, a restaurant,
a subway car, a city street -- to launch into one of her manifestations
and start flailing around. Nevertheless, the Church, represented
by shadowy cardinal Jonathan Pryce, sends out a special guy to
check Frankie out: Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne), a priest
with a background in biochemistry. Father Andrew had a whole
other life before entering the priesthood -- he's not a virgin
-- so we get a few awkward scenes in which a possessed Frankie
rubs her merchandise all over the flustered Father Andrew. It's
never clear who's possessing Frankie -- whether it's the spirit
of Christ himself or something a bit more destructive. I ask
because there's a scene where Frankie kicks the priest's ass
all over her huge loft (do 23-year-old hairdressers make enough
to afford that kind of hook-up?). Whatever's inside Frankie,
it doesn't like men of the cloth all that much.
Stigmata does most of its work with woozy flash-cuts;
at times, I thought I was watching Jacob's Ladder 2, complete
with a freak-out scene on the dance floor. You keep expecting
some sort of twist, some reason for Frankie's involvement besides
the random circumstance of her getting that rosary. Why make
such a big point of her being an unbeliever when nothing much
is done with that angle? And why wouldn't the Church just shrug
and laugh Frankie off, calling her a hysteric just trying to
get attention? Oliver Stone would have known what to do with
a juicy premise like this one -- he would've politicized it and
turned it into an all-out assaultive inquiry into the Church
and its way of blotting out awareness of anything that doesn't
fit its beliefs. And he would've ignited the sort of controversy
that Stigmata is now getting (from the Catholic League)
and doesn't really earn. Stigmata turns the Catholic Church
into just another corporate villain trying to hide stuff -- it
might as well be the government or a tobacco company. Most of
the time, though, it's just a cheeseball horror flick using Christian
iconography to pass itself off as deep and heavy. In that respect,
it's a lot more like some of those old-school religious horror
movies than it lets on. |