A quarter of a century ago, it seemed like nobody wanted Dogma. Kevin Smith’s subversive comedy about a pair of disgraced angels (played by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) was met with fierce protests soon after it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Writer-director Smith, riding high off his 1997 romcom Chasing Amy, received 300,000 pieces of hate mail, including several “bona fide death threats”. Religious campaign group the Catholic League picketed outside cinemas. Critics also sharpened their knives, with The Independent’s Gilbert Adair among those who crucified the film. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, not a single idea, not a shot, not a camera movement, not a performance, not a gesture, not a gag, nothing at all, I repeat, works in this movie,” he sneered.
Some of us, though, couldn’t get enough of the film, which celebrates its 25th anniversary on 12 November. I was a Sunday School-attending teenager when I first stumbled across Dogma on late-night television, and I was hooked from the moment Linda Fiorentino’s beleaguered abortion counsellor Bethany set upon Alan Rickman’s Metatron, the flaming voice of God, with a fire extinguisher. He had appeared in her bedroom to recruit her on a quest to stop Bartleby and Loki, Affleck and Damon’s fallen angels, from making it to a church in New Jersey. There they intend to use a doctrinal loophole known as a “plenary indulgence” to wash away all their sins and sneak back into heaven. What they don’t realise is that in doing so they’ll disprove the fundamental concept of God’s omnipotence and immediately wipe out all of existence.
