STIGMATAHorror, 1999, USA, 103 minutes
Directed by Rupert Wainwright
With Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne and Jonathan Pryce
One Spec out of Five
Headline: Like, a virgin
The Vatican has released a list of their favorite films which uplift the human spirit and celebrate Christian values; Stigmata was not one of them. You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to know why this movie is in a downward spiral from reel one. Stigmata is a feature-length music video with a story as thin as a communion wafer. Director Wainwright’s gospel according to MTV is burnt onto every millimeter of film, his cinematic style carbon-dated early 80s: we get every slow-mo pigeon, flickering candle and overflowing bathtub Prince didn’t use for his video When Doves Cry. And the ever-falling rain with nary a rainbow in sight is straight out of Bladerunner. We’ve been in this city of the damned before (Pittsburgh sitting in for Sodom) and know our way around.
Unlike “the greatest story ever told” the plot this time is about as compelling as wine turned into water. Frankie Paige (Patricia Arquette) is a young graduate of a hairdressing academy from Naples, Florida, who has ended up in the big, bad urban center of her dreams. Now she works at “The Cut” - the kind of hip alternative place where a person can either get their hair done or have their nipples pierced. Frankie - who spends every night in a demonic underground club (get it?) where shots pour like blood from wounds and every dance is a gesture of profound degradation and every song is written by Billy Corgan - is the profane side of this binary equation.
Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne) represents the token sacred side of life. Kiernan, a suave Jesuit, is no blind follower, however. He’s a complex man, an organic scientist turned priest in order to reconcile the mystery of life - a “big hole” science can’t fill without religion’s shovel. Father Kiernan works for a kind of Vatican X-files unit, travelling around the world in search of miracles he can debunk or establish as fact, according to his rigorous methods of snapping photographs and taking blood samples from weeping icons.
His sinister boss, played by Jonathan Pryce with grave elegance and a wink (he knows this is a B-movie) sends Kiernan to investigate poor Frankie, who begins to suffer the “five wounds of the stigmata” in alarming displays of bleeding and writhing on crowded public transport. She may be our next Lady of the Subway.
This is where the hyper jump-cuts and blue-lit “religious wounding” scenes achieve a kind of orgiastic, over-the-top momentum breathtaking in their secular shamelessness. With an obsessive, fetishistic abandon of narrative logic, we are repeatedly made witness to deadening visual excess: Arquette as she wrestles with an unseen demonic/angelic violator who throws her across rooms, rams invisible nails through her wrists, tears her clothes off revealing a navel-ring and cool tattoo, and whips her back into a sanguine mess. All this while the cool-eyed priest watches and secretly lusts in his heart, tempted by the tormented woman.
Stigmata comes close to the sort of weird porn that trades in images of nuns with a strange devotion to crucifixes - and barely manages to discharge its erotic surplus with a violent climax lifted from a far more sensitive script. Frankie, a kind of skanky Joan of Arc, is a messenger sent to reveal a long-suppressed “Gospel of Jesus” which threatens Catholicism (as in The Da Vinci Code) by suggesting that God requires no intermediary and is founded not on a rock but every pebble on the beach: Martin Luther meets Buddha.
Kiernan exposes the papal conspiracy, defeats his boss, and carries the exorcised Frankie from a burning bed into a misty garden full of flowers. Deep character issues are now easily resolved. The priest/scientist has found new faith with the love of a good woman, and the lost white trash hairdresser is born-again and a magnet for doves.
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