Stigmata (1999)

It doesn't matter if you don't know what "Stigmata" is; In fact, the makers of this film seem to assume you do not anyway, so they are more than happy to explain it to us 90's,hedonistic, Philistines anyway. In fact, the makers of this film like to underestimate us throughout. They assume we don't know anything about religious fanaticism; They assume we have never seen a David Fincher film; They assume that we haven't seen "The Exorcist;" They assume that we believe all cool, hip, 90's, single girls live in lofts, have lots of candles and lots of expensive, modern furniture. In fact the makers of this film assume we are 14 year olds. I guess that's why they rated the film R. So we'd want to sneak in and see it.

Gabriel Byrne plays an "investigator" for the Catholic church so we see him go to a Spanish type town and there he sees a statue of the Virgin Mary where the eyes bleed. We know Byrne will be a "good guy" even though he acts like one of the Catholic church's minions at first. He looks too damn sexy in his omnipresent black trench coat to be bad. When we meet Jonathan Pryce as a sort of Godfather in the church, we know he is evil. Bad Deacon, bad bad. Boo. Hiss. Byrne is sent to investigate a weird happening in Pittsburgh. Patricia Arquette is being victimized by some sort of invisible apparition. Arquette may live in Pittsburgh but you think she's in New York. She has a cool loft but it rains all the damn time so water leaks all over the place. She has so many candles, you think she must have a brother whose a beekeeper. She has so much cool furniture, you think she must be independently wealthy, or have stock in Ikea, when in fact, she is a hairdresser. She's cool. Not cool like in reality, but cool like in movie-make-believe-land. Cool like the kids on "The Real World." Her name is Frankie. Even her name is cool. Frankie keeps getting beat up and bleeding all over the place (by thin air - wuss) but she's an atheist, so Byrne thinks she can't be a "victim" ("carrier?") of Stigmata. After all, she drinks, chain smokes, fornicates, and listens to loud, bad rock music, so she can't be very religious or spiritual now can she. But we know she is truly "stigmatized" because her mother, who is really just a bad, unrealistic, script-reading voice on the phone, has sent her a crucifix that belonged to the dead priest whom we've seen at the church where the statue bleeds from the eyes that Gabriel Byrne visits at the beginning of the film that lives in the script that Jack built. Director Rupert Wainwright, who brought us Disney's" Blank Check," (enough said) actively sucks the cock of David Fincher in the film. He so badly wants to be taken seriously and so badly wants the film to be dark, gritty, artistic and cinematic that he works every scene into an MTV-like frenzy of colors, rapid-fire images, pounding industrial rock music and sets where newspapers and litter float in the breeze. But it is all for naught really.

The film is simply too phony and contrived to be gritty, realistic or even to be taken seriously as artistic. Wainwright doesn't create, he plagiarizes. Fincher should sue. We know the film's bad when the stupid subtitles, which pop up whenever someone speaks in any language other than English, can't even be seen because of the white images on the film. Wainwright spent so much money on effects and props and stuff that he couldn't make the subtitles readable? Thank God they translate this stuff for us. I don't think I understand the word Pittsburgh with an Italian accent. Scripters Tom Lazarus, who has done sound for Jim Jarmusch and even wrote a "Charlie's Angels" episode, and Rick Ramage, who hasn't done sound for any film but has acted in a film called "Molested," make the Catholic church the bad guys. I agree with this idea. But Lazarus and Ramage do it with such obvious contrivance and poor writing that one almost wants to defend the damn Vatican. Sure the Catholic church is evil, they've done more to damage religious spirituality in the modern age than any secular ideology, but they are better at retaining their power than Lazarus and Ramage give them credit for here. The whole secret of "Stigmata" involves the church trying to subjugate something that is so obvious to all of us hedonists out here, there is no real need to try and disavow it or hide it. Still," Stigmata" ends with a title card that implies this story is very loosely based on a true situation where the Catholic church has tried to suppress a supposed historical document. The Catholic hierarchy is just bad. Worse then those Russians or those Iranians!

Notes: Also with Nia Long. Patrick Muldoon is in the film briefly. Music by Billy Corgan and Mike Garson. Corgan performs the pieces written by Garson as well as his own compositions. Pop songs by David Bowie, Chumbawumba, Bjork, Sinead O'Connor, Massive Attack, and Natalie Imbruglia are used.

During production, the film was known as "Toby's Story," though I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Letter given out at Press Screenings:

"Working on Stigmata was a real journey for all of us. What started as a neat jumping off point for a high concept horror movie became more and more fascinating and bewildering. So many things that seemed just physically impossible turned out to have been medically documented hundreds of times over. Elements of our culture that we had always taken for granted - the New Testament for example - turned out to be minefields of contradiction and even conspiracy. While it must be said that Stigmata is not a true story, and that its characters are fictional, many of its most dramatic events are based on actual stigmatic accounts. As you can guess, the film involved quite a substantial amount of research - from examining historical records on the actual methods of crucifixion, to studying the strands and layers of the New Testament; from the journals and diaries of noted stigmatics of this century (for example Padre Pio, who has recently been beatified by Pope John Paul II), to the writings of female medieval mystics such as Juliana of Norwich and Theresa of Avila; from research on extraordinary human behavior in "supernatural" situations, to the written history of the pre-Roman Christian Church; from the internal security systems of the Vatican to the rituals involved in possession and excommunication. Our research took us places our imaginations could not. In point of fact, we were intent on trying to keep Stigmata within the realm of an audience's acceptable reality. We didn't want to be sensational or exploitative for entertainment's value. It was our goal to present this story as an unbelievable, yet wholly possible phenomenon. While the film is certainly not a documentary, in the realm of the" supernatural," we have found truth to be stranger than fiction."

Rupert Wainwright, Director

Frank Mancuso Jr., Producer

Tom Lazarus, Screenwriter

Rick Ramage, Screenwriter

Los Angeles, July 1999

Report Card

Script: D

Acting: D

Cinematography\Lighting: C

Special Effects\Make Up:A+

Music: C

Final Grade: D-