"You don't believe in God?" Tom Hanks' character asks Audrey Tautou, who plays his partner-in-ciphers in The Da Vinci Code.
"Do you believe in God?" Liev Schreiber's character asks a therapist who doubts that his adopted son, Damien, has devil genes in the new version of The Omen.
"Get right with God," William Hurt preaches in the small, intense film The King, but he's playing an evangelical minister, so he's a lot more certain.
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With echo upon echo of faith-based dialogue, movie theaters today often sound like church. But what seems like a new willingness to explore questions of faith -- as if Mel Gibson's blockbuster The Passion of the Christ had made religion safe for Hollywood -- has the spiritual depth of the Daily Show segment This Week in God, with its quiz-show-style God Machine that spits out religions to satirize.
The Passion may have proved that religion could be marketed to a large audience, but the current films use
religion merely as a topical hook. The Da Vinci Code is a mystery whose largest theme is not Jesus' divinity but the possible corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, a subject more political than spiritual. The Omen, which hits screens in Taiwan on Tuesday, is a flat-out genre movie, a remake of the 1976 thriller that happens to hinge on the idea that a little boy is the devil's son. Even a more thoughtful film like The King, with Gael Garcia Bernal as the illegitimate son of the minister, is less about religion than hypocrisy: Can the born-again minister live what he preaches?
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What's surprising -- especially in a country with a politically organized religious right -- is the skepticism running through these films. Institutional religion is often villainous here, while genuine matters of faith are given the familiar Hollywood bromide treatment.
This has little to do with the breakthrough of The Passion of the Christ, which really did involve an element of faith. Presenting the story without question, that film either spoke to an audience or not, based on each viewer's belief in Jesus' suffering.
The current wave of religious-themed films doesn't speak to the audience's beliefs, but to its taste for pop entertainment, like Da Vinci. That film's enormous box office seems to be holding up; the novel is already a cultural phenomenon, and it is even less about faith than the movie is. What sets the book apart from other best-sellers is its subject: Did the Catholic Church murder through the centuries to cover up the idea that Jesus was mortal and had a child? The book's potted history lessons about Knights Templar and the sacred feminine follow an old publishing formula: Novels that make people think they're learning can draw readers who don't usually like novels. But it's the tantalizing centuries-long cover-up that drives the page-turning chases and murders.
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And while the movie's fidelity to the book is the flaw that makes it seem like some lifeless, illustrated version of the swifter novel, one of the film's biggest departures is its blunter dialogue about faith. Akiva Goldsman's leaden script, not Dan Brown's novel, has Robert Langdon (Hanks) and Sophie Neveu (Tautou) stop for a chat about whether a deity exists. Sophie answers no to the God question, saying, "I don't believe in some magic from the sky, just people."
By the end, when her skepticism has been challenged, Langdon tells her that it doesn't matter whether Jesus was mortal or divine. "The only thing that matters is what you believe," he says. That line, invented for the movie, sums up its attitude toward faith: a reassuring humanist shrug that says, "Whatever."
Schreiber's character in The Omen, an American diplomat named Robert Thorn, tries to maintain a pragmatic view, too. "There is no devil, there is no God, there is only here and now, life," he says, an attitude that's hard to maintain if you're raising the ultimate bad seed. Like The Da Vinci Code, the new Omen has its hero searching for the truth through exotic settings; here it's Rome and London (although most of the film was shot in Prague). And the Catholic Church doesn't come off much better than in Da Vinci. An evil priest first suggests that Robert deceive his wife and substitute Damien for their stillborn son.
"The true nature of evil has never been more apparent" than today, the film's director, John Moore, says in its production notes. And the movie includes some topical flourishes; the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US are seen as harbingers of Armageddon. Yet the new Omen, like the original it so closely resembles, is really about the chase.
The King is about evil, but even more about fathers and sons. When Elvis (Bernal) looks up the father he has never known, Pastor Sandow (Hurt), the minister rejects the son as part of his sinful past. It's no surprise that movies filled with Christian symbolism are also about fathers and sons, but here the religious theme serves the story of Elvis, not the other way around. The minister's rejection sets off a chain of events that leads to violence and issues of guilt and retribution. But when Elvis throws his father's words back at him at the end and says, "I need to get right with God," it is a taunt and not an expression of spiritual discovery.
In Hurt's bold depiction, the minister is the picture of pride and vanity. Bouncing along to Christian rock, he's the uncool middle-aged guy who can't see how uncool he is.
The satiric version of that exists in the funny 2004 film Saved!, set in a Christian high school. Martin Donovan plays Pastor Skip, who turns cartwheels onstage at a student assembly and yells, "Jesus is in the house!"
Like The King, Saved! is less about faith than about the smugness, hypocrisy and self-righteousness organized religion can foster. Mandy Moore plays a prom queen who pridefully parades her Christian goodness because she wants to be admired, and Jena Malone plays a pregnant teenager who causes people around her to question their rigid judgments. This satire makes clear what the current religious-themed films say in a more subversive way: Faith may (or may not) be deep, but organized religion can be devilish. And when someone in The Da Vinci Code says, "My God, I don't believe this," he doesn't mean it literally.
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