Cinema
Stigmata (18, selected cinemas) Limbo (15, selected cinemas)
Losing faith
Mark Steyn
Stigmata is godawful. Directed by Rupert Wainwright, a British film-maker with all the religious sensibility of Madon- na's decorator, its thesis seems to be that Catholicism is kinda cool once you get those uptight priest dudes out the way and oomph up the music. Wainwright's heroine is Frankie (Patricia Arquette), a Pittsburgh hairdresser who boozes it up, smokes it up, shags like a minx, and is a non-believer until she begins to display on her body the marks of Christ on the Cross.
She takes her bleeding limbs over to Father Andrew (Gabriel Byrne), who's suitably impressed. Unfortunately, Cardi- nal Houseman (Jonathan Pryce) is less enthusiastic, and determined to shut down the investigation. Whether or not Miss Arquette's wounds are those of Jesus, her career's certainly in need of some kind of resurrection after this dim movie. Wain- wright, who shows no evidence of being able to direct actors, manages to elicit three all-time dud one-note performances from Pryce (glowering), Byrne (brooding) and Arquette (sleepwalking). The empti- ness at the heart of this film gapes from every gaudy setpiece: there's more under- standing of Christian faith in Mel Brooks's Spanish Inquisition dance number in Histo- ry of the World Part One.
Limbo is not another religious experi- ence, but only John Sayles's latest film, which, for his fans, is pretty much the same thing. Sayles subscribes to the Clintonian theory of 'compartmentalisation': there's John Sayles, the independent director who refuses to sell out, and John Sayles, the hotshot Hollywood rewrite man you can rent by the hour (the eventual final draft of Apollo 13, for example, bears his tweaks), and ne'er the twain shall meet. A pity, because halfway through Limbo you begin to pine for Tom Hanks to drop out of the sky in an astronaut suit.
Limbo is set in Juneau, Alaska, where the winters are ten months long, but not as long as a John Sayles film. If it didn't have Sayles's name on it, even hardcore fans might find this movie earnest, patronising, dreary, studied, in some details dully plau- sible, in others laughably fake. Sayles is supposedly a paragon of intelligence and integrity, but his intelligence doesn't extend to such elementary aspects of film-making as cast chemistry. The director presents us with the sort of community you can find all over the frozen north — the foundering industry (there's a salmon cannery, but who eats canned salmon anymore?), the her- itage entrepreneurs (who want to. turn Alaska into — altogether now — 'a theme park'), the incomers (tough dykes from Seattle running a restaurant with curly endives), the bar where everybody knows your name and, God, how you'd like to go somewhere where they didn't.
In this already unpromising landscape, Sayles zooms in on two losers — David Strathairn as a sad-eyed, grey-haired, grey- faced, grey-sweatered fisherman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as a sad-eyed grey- voiced bar-room chantoosie who sings folky dirges about how `you pull me like the moon' (very menstrual). Miss Mastrantonio is all too convincing as an example of the bargain-basement Joni Mitchells you find in bars all over the northern states and Canad,a. But just because she's convincing doesn't mean you want to watch her.
Mastrantonio and Strathairn are fine actors but, as principals in a tentative rela- tionship, they combine to suck the life out of every scene. You know they'll eventually hook up, eventually go to bed, but you don't know why on earth you should be interested. Everything she says and he mutely accepts — her allergies, her limited fecal imagery about `keeping her shit together' — has the same grim suffocating quality as being in a really bad relationship yourself. You can't really blame her teen daughter (Vanessa Martinez) for indulging in a little auto-stigmatisation over her mom's ghastly relationships and mutilating her arms.
And then, suddenly, an hour and a half in, something happens. A drug deal in which they become unwittingly involved goes wrong and they wind up stranded on an uninhabited inlet up the coast. Despite the cold, the lack of shelter and the fact that they have to gut their own fish, the trio's clothes remain remarkably unstreaked and ungrubby: this section of the film smells false, even without Sayles falling back on therapy-in-the-wilderness clichés that even the most tired Hollywood journeyman would balk at.
But just when you think there's no end in sight, it ends. And you were right, there was no end in sight: the film just stops. At first, I assumed the final reel must have gone missing, but the insert-your-own-end- ing-here non-finale was apparently inten- tional. At the Cannes Film Festival, the dime-store no-end trick was booed by the critics, bless 'em. Sayles thinks it forces the audience to think through the resolution of the drama for themselves. The truth is it doesn't matter how it ends. Let's just be grateful that it does.
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