The debate over what makes, or does not make, a movie anti-Catholic spawns as many questions as answers. People draw the “offensive line” in the sand largely according to taste and sensitivity.
Bless Me, Fodder
On the one hand, it is a truism that whenever an ardent follower of Jesus appears onscreen in the current cinematic canon, you can bet he’ll be depicted as any combination of the following: hypocritical, judgmental, insane, racist, or fodder for a gag line.
On the other, there is a brand of professional anti-Catholic watchdog that will find fault in anything less than saintly, flawless Christian characters. I once read a caustic review of The Sound of Music, which was labeled anti-Catholic because the young novice (Julie Andrews) elects to leave the convent at the end.
Some recent movies have competed in a game of “top this” in their efforts to show priests as bad or ineffectual (El Crimen de Padre Amaro, Dogma, The Boys of St. Vincent, Priest, The Order) or nuns as uptight and cruel (The Magdalene Sisters, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys). And sometimes the Catholic Church itself serves as a whipping boy to be whacked when the action slows down (The Butcher Boy, 40 Days and 40 Nights, Quills, Waking the Dead, Angela’s Ashes, Amen, Stigmata). But once in a rare while, the unspoken thrust of a whole movie, its major premise, is conveyed more covertly and therefore more insidiously — and with undeniable élan.
Imagine a movie about practicing Wiccans who live repressed and sour lives in a small village. Imagine these villagers being visited by a single Christian mom and her daughter who, by acts of charity and the subtle suggestion that the whole Wicca thing might not be so good for them, lead the wayward witches into an abundant new life.
Take another step. Make the village mainly Jewish and the mother-daughter duo Muslim. Paint the local Judaism as an obsolete religion begging for reformation, the Seder as an empty ritual, and the Star of David as an empty symbol. See the wussy rabbi cowering in the shadow of the zealous mayor, who’s a hypocrite.
Can you picture these?
Exactly. These movies could never get made, thanks be to God. The former would be mocked as Pollyannaish, the latter roundly condemned as anti-Semitic, and rightly so.
Yet if you substitute “Wicca” and “Jewish” for Catholic you get the basic plot of Chocolat, directed by Lasse Halstrom and nominated for four Academy Awards in 2000. The movie’s lush art-house cinematography and earnest, bouyant acting almost manages to hide the bigotry of its makers. By Oscar time that year, the patina on the Miramax hopeful had worn off; the golden statuettes went to other nominees.
There Goes the Neighborhood
Mr. Hallstrom’s photogenic movie is not a typical Southern California creation, but represents a cosmopolitan effort, being directed by a Swede, adapted by an American, based on a British novel set in France. All are parts of the world where the Church’s waning influence can hardly be considered an oppressive hegemony calling out for satire.
The story is told as lighthearted fable, with a gentle female voiceover leading us through the turns. “Blown in with a sly north wind,” a French village is visited by Vianne (Juliette Binoche) and her illegitimate daughter. They quickly transform a rundown dive owned by a crusty landlady (Dame Judi Dench) into a chocolate shop to die for. Before you can say spoonful of sugar, the modest shop is morphed into the set of a Martha Stewart commercial — a foreshadowing of the eventual Great Awakening of the whole village.
Vianne’s chocolate confections introduce an element of culinary (read sensual) delight never seen by the villagers, and produce gnostic transformations decidedly superior to the dreary local faith. For Vianne is both temptress and savior; her chocolate both Viagra and sacrament. Slowly but surely she plants seeds of tolerance, reconciliation, and free love. The town mayor, Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina) soon confronts the happy drifter — surprise, surprise — he is not amused by all the sweetness and light. It is Lent, he somberly intones.
Ah, Lent, that epitome of the dark force called Catholicism and handy means of highlighting what is wrong with these people. Ah, chocolate, that symbol of all things irrationally forbidden by the Church of Rome (along with sex, happiness, and being true to yourself). Chocolat manages to trundle out the Organized Religion Is Bad cliché through obviously slanted portrayals: The church-going Mayor Reynaud takes a mental roll call at the church doorway, mulls over how to stop the town’s new non-churchgoing upstart, and spends most of the movie gazing at a photo of his absent wife. The alcoholic bartender is a churchgoer who beats up his non-churchgoing wife (Lena Olin), and gets tips from the absentee-husband mayor on how to win her back. Throughout, the parish priest nervously reads his mayor-edited sermons, sits hapless in the confessional, and sneaks off to sing songs of the King (Elvis, that is) to calm the angst in his ectomorphic frame.
Making the Sublime Ridiculous
The mayor, the drunk, and the priest — virtually all the villagers — share one thing in common. The underlying cause of their narrowness, rigidity, and predictability is clearly the mantle of gloom spread over the village by the Catholic Church. It is downright tempting to conclude that someone sat down and tried to come up with a story that would best undermine the Catholic worldview, its sacraments in particular.
A few examples. Marriage au Chocolat is a male-based arrangement from which the woman must either escape forever or suffer in steely silence. (With the goateed exception of Johnnie Depp playing yet another brooding outsider, the males who inhabit the movie are either wicked or wimpy.) Confession is a haven for hypocrites, a chance for the “faithful” to hear insipid chit-chat about their Sisyphean lives. Holy Orders are about as relevant or commanding as yesterday’s Jello. And so on. The one overlooked sacrament was the Sacrament of the Sick, perhaps the one most needed by the movie itself.
Hollywood is virtually free of theologians, but when needed for a spectacular insult to orthodox faith, the sublime can be made ridiculous, as when a shot of the smug mayor kneeling to receive the Host is quickly followed by another of Vianne placing a small round cookie on the tongue of an enrapt customer. Hidden message: the Eucharist fails; chocolate prevails. Again, go back and imagine a Jewish family Seder being so intercut, and ask yourself if that would be anti-Semitic. But anti-Catholicism is a kind of anti-Semitism of the liberal establishment, to paraphrase the memorable phrase by historian Philip Jenkins.
When a band of riverboat gypsies led by Roux (Mr. Depp) arrives, they are met with the kind of xenophobic shunning we’ve come to expect from the villagers. Only Vianne, her daughter, and the newly healed victim-wife are nice enough to extend a warm welcome — warm enough at least for Vianne to soon bed down with Roux, an act that helps trigger the fiery second act clash between the close-minded locals and the open-minded vagabonds.
Meanwhile, the mayor weeps in frustration beneath a large crucifix in the perennially dark church. (Didn’t they have electric church lights in 1959?) Looking up at Jesus, he cries, “What should I do?” The answer apparently comes: The temple must be cleansed. Brandishing a letter opener, Reynaud storms across the street, breaks into the shop and hacks promiscuously at the fine chocolate sculpture display in the storefront. Quickly edited shots show a chocolate Mayan temple (the shop itself is named La Chocolaterie Maya) and various voodoo-shaped bon-bons getting splintered to bits.
Alas, his jihad backfires when the allure of a chocolate smear on his lip becomes too irresistible, as the first fatal lick descends into a chocoholic frenzy until he actually gorges himself unconscious. (In Joanne Harris’s novel, the mayor character is a priest.) Who wakes him in the morning to offer a steaming cup of cocoa-forgiveness but Vianne herself, and the self-righteous Reynaud is restored to sanity. In fact, the whole village follows suit as Vianne’s ad hoc fertility celebration supplants Easter Sunday. Even the pipsqueak priest finds his true voice, telling his flock that he’d rather not talk about the Resurrection that morning, opting instead for a speech about all the good things everyone has learned lately, like being yourself, and how bad it is to judge others, etc. As in, the real meaning of Easter according to the liberation theology of Mary Poppins.
Chocolat has been compared to The Spitfire Grill and Babette’s Feast in which misunderstood single women radically change a provincial community for the better. Despite superficial similarities, Chocolat is a kind of photo negative of these, both of which deftly knead Catholic ideas and symbols into their respective wholes. Rather, in spite of a massive Oscar-baiting advertising campaign that sold it as an artsy Foreign Feelm, Chocolat belongs more in the tradition of Footloose, Dirty Dancing, and Pleasantville whereby bland conservative towns at the end of repressive eras are granted emancipation thanks to a progressive rebel. This storyline wants to be an archetype when it grows up.
The most puzzling aspect of productions like Chocolat is their consistent failure to capture the attention of many souls beyond a few Southern California zip codes, and hence their tendency to be box office duds. It is an axiom that when a movie sets out to thump the Church, it will invariably fall within some variation of the Three Ps: protest from church groups, praise from the critic’s circle, and pitiful box office returns.
So the gulf deepens between what Americans will consume and what Hollywood serves up. Perhaps yet deeper is the desperation of some producers to earn peer acclaim as Artists in a highly profit-oriented industry that, in the name of art, has lost touch with so many of its constituents.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Patrick Coffin is a writer living in Los Angeles.
