*1/2 out of ****
Year: 1999. Starring Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Pryce, Nia Long, Thomas Kopache, Rade Serbedzija, Enrico Colantoni, Dick Latessa, Portia de Rossi. Written by Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage. Directed by Rupert Wainwright. Rated R.
If anything, "Stigmata" should be taken as a warning against releasing similarly-themed films relatively close to one another. Of the four supernatural horror flicks released this year, it is clearly the worst. I suppose I should have seen this coming. After all, "Blair Witch" thoroughly creeped me out, "Sixth Sense" was mildly spooky, and then "Stir of Echoes" had its moments, but wasn't anything I'd lose sleep over. Clearly, the quality of the horror this summer has slowly been dropping. Is it then any surprise that "Stigmata" is the dullest, most horribly executed piece of MTV-influenced tripe I have seen in a long while? No, not really.
Patricia Arquette plays Frankie Page, a hairdresser from Pittsburgh who receives a rosary as a gift from her globe-trotting mother. As it turns out, the rosary belonged to a recently-deceased Brazilian priest. The priest's church had been under investigation by Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne) because of the mysterious appearance of a bleeding statue. Father Kiernan is an investigator who has made a career out of disproving supposed religious signs, but this time he believes there is something to the bleeding statue. His investigation is soon called off, however, when the Frankie starts exhibiting signs of the stigmata, in which a person is inflicted with wounds like that of Jesus Christ. Father Kiernan is initially skeptical of Frankie' s story, considering she's an atheist, but once he witnesses the stigmata attacks himself, he dedicates himself to finding out what is going on. He eventually begins to suspect that his boss, Cardinal Houseman (Jonathan Pryce), is concealing something that could bring down the Catholic Church. As it turns out, the dead priest had been working on the translation of a "fifth gospel" before they were excommunicated.
The new Rupert Wainwright music video . . . I mean film "Stigmata" is the sort of film that starts off OK and only gets worse. Indeed, it would have been good if it were a music video, because it's only interesting for about five minutes. I'm not sure what Wainwright is trying to prove with his endless parade of slow-motion, double-exposure, and extreme close-ups (Whoaaaaaa!!!!), other than the fact that he has the most swelled head of any director in Hollywood and, yes, he has been to film school. His camera trickery is interesting for a little while, but eventually, it becomes headache-inducing. What this film needed is a second audio track to be played over the dialogue (such as it is), with Wainwright screaming at the audience, "See? Look at what I can do! I'm an EX-cellent dir-ECT-or." Maybe then he'd explain why he decided to start half of his scenes with slow-motion shots of water dripping in reverse, or why he included random superfluous shots as that of an egg frying (ooh, scary!). If there was some underlying meaning behind all this camera trickery, I didn't see it. Just when you thought it was safe to get involved in the story, here comes a double-exposure shot of two Patricia Arquettes collapsing into bed for no reason whatsoever. Arrrrrrrghhhh . . .
Then again, the superfluous camera trickery wouldn't bother me if "Stigmata" had a story or characters that were remotely engaging. Though Wainwright's vanity certainly doesn't help, he does seem to have been given a nearly unworkable script. Where are plot continuity and character development when you need them? Case in point: Frankie Page is the character that (I assume) we are supposed to identify and sympathize with, but we aren't given any back story on her character, or any reason to like her. The extent of her character development seems to be that she is a hard-working hairdresser (who can somehow afford a cavernous apartment on the top floor of her building) and she's kind of cute, so let's start the bleeding! The fact that she's clearly not the brightest bulb in the drawer doesn't help, either. According to Frankie Page, what is the first thing to do after receiving mysterious wounds on your wrists and back? Go clubbing! Sure, that makes sense. Arquette, Byrne, and Pryce give it the old college try, but their characters are so one-dimensional that they just appear to be sleepwalking. Scenes between Arquette and Byrne that were probably supposed to be sexually charged fall almost embarrassingly flat, because the setup of the romantic subplot is so clumsily handled that it almost reaches the point of becoming laughable. Even though Frankie Page's life is falling apart before her very eyes, she still finds the time to hit on a priest who wanders in to her hair salon. Even more curiously, he seems to be interested in her advances. Father Andrew's religious doubt pops up so suddenly that it seems more silly than dramatic. As for Pryce, he may as well wear a curled mustache and cackle, "I'll get you, my pretty," for all the depth his Cardinal Houseman is afforded. Trust me, I'm not revealing anything by telling you Pryce turns out to be a villain.
What's worse, after being faced with dull characters and the prospect of having annoying camera tricks and loud music jammed down our throats, we now have to contend with a story that starts off in one direction, veers off in another, then another, and ends up being totally incomprehensible. First of all, the film doesn't even bother to explain what should be very simple plot details. How does Frankie get the stigmata merely by touching a rosary? How come an atheist like her was chosen, since Father Andrew mentions that only very devout believers have ever received stigmata? Actually, I'm not sure what Frankie was posessed by. Supposedly, stigmata occurs when one is posessed by the Holy Spirit, but the film later has her being posessed by the dead priest, and later by some evil spirit (I think). Which one is it? The answer to this question, of course, is very simple: the possessing entity in each scene is determined by whichever effects and flashy camera work Mr. Wainwright wants to use this time. Furthermore, the ending is a ridiculously neat little wrap-up, and the filmmakers compound this problem by ultimately turning the film into a diatribe against the Catholic Church. If you do any research at all about the Gospel of St. Thomas, you'll find that it is not being suppressed by the Church (as the film seems to claim), but that it is readily available at your local library. There's nothing the Catholics need to worry about, though. "Stigmata's" religion is so off-base that it can't be confused for anything remotely resembling the real Catholic Church. If they wanted to portray Catholic priests as mobsters, they should have gone all-out and equipped them with sharkskin suits and tommy guns, which would have been far more interesting. I'm not Catholic; in fact, I don 't care much for the Catholic Church, but its cartoonish misrepresentation in this film should not be considered realistic by any means.
It's rare to see a film that fails on as many levels as "Stigmata" does. It' s not thought-provoking, though it would like to be, and it is definitely not scary, though it pretends to be. I'm not sure why they tried to pass this off as a horror film, because there is absolutely nothing scary about the story. Maybe it's an attempt to cover up the fact that none of the scenes have any dramatic weight whatsoever. The initial shock of seeing Arquette covered with blood is dulled by the fact that it happens over, and over, and over. Like so many films of the MTV generation, this one suffers from overkill. So much is overdone in "Stigmata," that it eventually has no effect on the audience, leaving us to pick out the film's (many) flaws. I'm also still trying to figure out why the quotation they take from the Gospel of St. Thomas is so Earth-shattering. When we finally hear it, the saying sounds like something every five-year-old learns on their first day of Sunday School, which means that for all its flash, the whole film is really much ado about nothing. The dog days of summer usually produce one monstrous dog, and "Stigmata" is it.
-reviewed by Shay Casey
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