Story courtesy of Steve Rhodes

'Dogma' dares church with dark humor

BY HARLAN JACOBSON, Special for USA TODAY

CANNES, France - The funniest line heard at Cannes comes in the most controversial film at the festival, Dogma, the latest from Clerks director Kevin Smith.

Comedian Chris Rock tells a story of how Jesus was black, and the last scion of Christ (played by Linda Fiorentino) is the great-great-great-ad-infinitum-niece of Christ, descended from one of Mary and Joseph's other children. The awe is broken when Jason Mewes wrinkles his brow and asks, "So does that mean she's black?"

The film hardly offers offense to blacks, but there probably will be Catholics unhappy with the religious satire, which showed out of competition over the weekend.

Dogma stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels trying to get back to paradise. But if they do, the history of mankind will be undone, so a lapsed Catholic (Fiorentino) is recruited to stop them. The film is reminiscent of 1975's Monty Python and the Holy Grail and is the kind of satirical take that can be written only from the inside. Only someone of the Catholic faith could use its elements to challenge it so adroitly.

The fast and witty result may incite protest by Catholic groups that do not see Scripture as a jumping-off point for art - language, sex and a walking pile of excrement sent from the devil to carry out the wayward angels' mission. A lot of films, including Antonia Bird's Priest, have drawn fire for less.

It's not Catholic people but the Catholic League that Miramax co-chief Harvey Weinstein is concerned about, he said at an in-the-street impromptu news conference after the Dogma screening. "I want to show it to the pope," he said. "I don't think he'd be offended. I think he's cool."

Weinstein came to Cannes in search of a Dogma distributor; he and his co-chairman brother, Bob, spent $14 million to "remove" the picture from Disney-owned Miramax.

"Disney is too easy a target," Harvey Weinstein said. "It's a comic fantasy, and we didn't want the movie to be clouded by the politics. I think other distributors can do a good job on this one, maybe a better job, because they can avoid the politics."

As of Sunday night, Weinstein had found no takers. The fact of the matter is few distributors are inclined to bail out Weinstein, a high-voltage competitor, and fewer still can strategize a way around the risks - the way Miramax did as far back as The Crying Game in the pre-Disney days.