Stigmata -- That's Gotta Hurt by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
The year was 1990, the movie was Miller's Crossing, and the man was Gabriel Byrne. Byrne had the plum role of Tom Reagan, Irish gangster, a smart guy in a tough town. Byrne spent the whole movie laconically spitting out hard-bitten Coen Brothers dialogue as if he were born to it. He didn't have the Bogart charm but had all the Bogart flair, with the cynical coolness thrown in. Miller's Crossing didn't break any box office records but has its place on many critic's ten best of the '90's lists. (Personally, I like Miller's Crossing better than Fargo, the Coen Brothers movie that made the AFI 100 list.)
The year was 1993, the movie was True Romance, and the girl was Patricia Arquette. Arquette played Alabama Worley, who hooked up with Christian Slater on a cross-country road trip in search of a better life through drug trafficking. True Romance was the movie that introduced us to a young screenwriter named Quentin Tarantino, and there hasn't been a more attractive performance in any Tarantino movie than Arquette's. True Romance is no Pulp Fiction, of course, but it has lots and lots of things to like.
Hold on to these memories. You'll need them if you go see Stigmata.
Arquette plays Frankie Paige, a Pittsburgh hairdresser working in the Dennis Rodman Memorial Beauty Salon, offering a wide range of services from hairstyles and manicures to tattoos and piercings. Frankie is a twenty-three year old party girl (Arquette is actually 31) hanging out in the best dance clubs and coffee houses. She lives in the type of fabulously decorated Art Deco loft apartment you only see in the movies.
Arquette's mother (who we must assume is paying for all this) travels to Brazil and sends her the rosary of a dead priest. That evening, Arquette is lounging in one of those bathtubs you only see in the movies, surrounded by votive candles. Suddenly a dove flies through the apartment, all portentous and symbolic. And then, to the tune of the Smashing Pumpkins and with full music video accompaniment, big, bloody holes appear in Arquette's wrists. The shots of Arquette writhing in pain are accompanied by close-ups of nails being driven into the wrists of a crucified man to make sure we get the point: Arquette is being afflicted by the stigmata, the representation of the Five Wounds of Christ on the cross. (I count seven, but who am I to argue?)
There are four such scenes in the movie, with Arquette getting wounds on her hands, head, feet, and back in slow motion. (She's wearing platform shoes in the scene where here feet are pierced, which makes for a particularly silly vision.) After the second such attack, Gabriel Byrne shows up to investigate. Byrne's character, a priest / organic chemist, is the Vatican's answer to the Men in Black. Or, if you like, he's the keeper of the Catholic version of the X-Files. His role is to investigate paranormal happenings and either disprove them scientifically or hide the evidence. (One imagines him traveling to New Mexico and surreptitiously scarfing down tortillas with Christ's image on them.)
Anyway, Byrne reads about Arquette's stigmata through the Vatican's press clipping service (one wonders if they get Weekly World News). He investigates briefly, initially dismissing the idea that the irreligious Arquette could have stigmata. However, after seeing the spirit of the dead Brazilian priest possess Arquette in a rain-slicked alley, he becomes a believer. Things get even sillier from here, as the plot begins to turn around a long-lost Gospel that has severe implications to... er... the value of the Vatican's real estate holdings. And it gets even sillier when the plot threatens a romance between Byrne and Arquette.
The problem with Stigmata is that it doesn't have any sense of humor to balance out the sheer overwhelming preposterousness of the story. There's a scene, late in the movie, where Arquette is possessed by a demon, and it's almost exactly like a similar scene in Ghostbusters. One almost expects Arquette to whisper huskily to Byrne, "Do you want this body, sub-creature!" But there's no levity to leaven the movie, no sense by the actors that this is all just a colossal joke.
Stigmata is not a bad movie, in the sense of having bad acting or production values or a lifeless, boring script. But it's not good, either. Stigmata is a trashy, violent, witless movie, beset with a deeply confused notion of the supernatural and a defiantly dumb ending. It has a little, tiny bit of guilty-pleasure entertainment value, but it's not worth passing by either Miller's Crossing or True Romance on your video-rental shelves.
-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
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