Overall Rating
  Awesome: 9.21%
Worth A Look: 32.89%
Just Average: 13.16%
Pretty Crappy: 25%
Sucks: 19.74%
13 reviews, 74 user ratings
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| Stigmata |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Starring Patricia Arquette's teeth."
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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 got (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.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=1610&reviewer=416
originally posted: 12/30/06 14:34:45
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USA
10-Sep-1999 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
20-Jan-2000 (R)
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