Our senior correspondent Audre Myers has been asking for a review of today’s film, Stigmata (1999), for at least a year now.  I can’t recall what prompted the initial request at this point, but it did engender some minor controversy from Ponty, who immediately expressed his disdain for the film.

We’ve been here before with Bicentennial Man (1999), a flick that Audre praised and Ponty panned (my take:  it’s pretty good, if a bit long).  So where will I fall this time around—Team Audre or Team Ponty?

The film follows a scientist-turned-priest, Father Andrew Kiernan, as he investigates a case of stigmata in Frankie Paige, a free-living, fun-loving hairdresser in Pittsburgh.  The story opens with Father Kiernan investigating a statue of the Virgin Mary weeping blood in a church in Brazil.  The church was that of Father Paulo Alameida, a popular priest with an almost cult-like devotion from his parishioners.  Father Alameida is dead, his body prepared for burial and on display in the church.  A young boy steals Father Alameida’s rosary from his corpse, and hands it off to Frankie’s mother; the mother sends it to Frankie, who then begins to experience the stigmata.

Indeed, Frankie suffers through all the stages of Christ’s Suffering—the nail-scarred wrists, the crown of thorns, etc.  Father Kiernan investigates, but when he learns that Frankie is an atheist, he believes that the stigmata cannot be from God, as only devout believers have ever experienced any of the five wounds of Christ.

Frankie attempts to go about living her life of hairdressing and 1990s-style partying (lots of industrial house music in dimly lit clubs, basically), only to suffer from the wounds at inopportune times.  At one point, she freaks out in a club and vandalizes a car with strange symbols while shouting in Aramaic.  She then speaks Italian in a male voice, further confounding Father Kiernan.  She also writes strange symbols on the wall of her apartment.

There is also shadowy research into a “new” gospel, which purports to be Written by Jesus Christ Himself.  The Vatican works to suppress this new gospel, as it radically challenges the hierarchical structure of the Church.  This gospel is in Pittsburgh, and seems to be linked to Frankie’s afflictions.

A group of corrupt priests perform an exorcism on Frankie, which they use as an opportunity to attempt murder against her, but Father Kiernan intervenes in time.  The spirit of the late Father Alameida has possessed Frankie as revenge for his own untimely end, a result of his research into the new gospel.

There’s a lot of flames and fireworks (literally and figuratively, respectively) at the end, and somehow Father Kiernan exorcises Father Alameida, saves Frankie, and finds the extra gospel.

I remember Ponty’s main critique being that the film is boring.  I’m not sure that’s quite how I’d characterize—there is certainly a lot going on—but it does seem fluffy, let’s say.  The flick clocks in at 103 minutes, which would be a short film by today’s standards, when 200-minute movies are the bladder-distressing norm, but it could have been trimmed to 75 with no issues.

Here is my main takeaway:  the film is very 90s.  It feels very much like a relic of its time.  Here are some of the late 90s elements I noticed, and they were so on-the-nose, it detracted from the film:

• Patricia Arquette as Frankie perfectly portrays the late 90s “frivolous woman”—a young, attractive single woman engaging in lots of consequence-free partying and sex, and generally living this kind of hippie-dippie life.  She even wears one of those tie-dyed heart shirts that were so popular at the time.  And her name is “Frankie.”  What was—and is—it with filmmakers giving women men’s names?
• The aforementioned industrial-techno-house music.  Thank God that era of digital music is over.  The score is soaked with it in every scene, it feels like.
• The blue-ish-grey color gradient that The Matrix (1999) made so popular.  The film is so dark visually, it’s like it’s trying to make you depressed.
• The inherent suspicion of religion.  The Catholic Church was not doing well at this point in time, and coupled with the Church’s reputation for secrecy and hidden knowledge, it was an easy target for a “skeptic” priest to attack and fume about.
• The questioning of the Catholic Church’s doctrine against priestly marriage.  Naturally, there is huge sexual tension between Father Kiernan and Frankie, and Frankie flies into a possessed rage after Father Kiernan narrowly resists her attempts to seduce him.  While I think the Catholic Church’s restrictions on priests getting married don’t make sense theologically, biblically, or practically (there’s no restriction in Scriptures against a priest being married, and the restriction is also just inviting your entire clergy to get overrun with homosexuals and/or sexually frustrated men who are going to dip into company ink if they can’t control themselves), Hollywood loved the idea of sex being somehow more valuable than holding to your “outdated” religious convictions.  Sadly, Hollywood still does love that idea.
• The stupid “Gospel of Thomas” plot, which was just a way for “freethinkers” (atheists) to look like edgelords when talking about religion.
• The film takes place in Pittsburgh, which was probably cool and mildly gritty in the 1990s, but now is an urban hellscape where no sane person would live, much less a frivolous, flirty hairdresser.

There’s probably something else I’m missing, but the entire film kept saying, “I was made in 1999!”  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it really grated on me.  Further, given the benefit of twenty-five years of hindsight, I can see so clearly what I couldn’t when I was fourteen-years old:  this film and others like it were setting the groundwork for all the horrible social decay we’ve seen over that time.  I’m not saying Stigmata is the reason everything is awful now, but it was one of legion films that attempted to undermine the social and religious order that held the West together for two thousand years.

But did I like the film?  I did not think it was boring, but I also did not find it particularly entertaining.  The mystery of the missing gospel was not all that compelling, and I think knowing that the whole film was basically an anti-Catholic, anti-tradition psyop reduced my enjoyment (I’m not Catholic—I’m Baptist—but I could tell right away that the film was basically saying, “look—organized religion is bad!”).  It was a decent way to pass a rainy afternoon, but it’s not one I’ll go seeking out again.