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“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” Narrator Bill Maher sums up his personal attitude towards organised religion in this very funny docu-comedy, whose title is a portmanteau of Religious and Ridiculous.
Maher is a stand-up comedian best known in the US. He has hosted the talk show Politically Incorrect on ABC, and written such bestsellers as When you ride alone, you ride with Bin Laden. In Religulous he talks to religious leaders and regular folk about God, religion and faith. Director Larry Charles is best known for the film Borat and the TV series Curb your Enthusiasm.
Like Borat, Bill (looking suspiciously like a man sporting a rubber mask of himself) spends the film simultaneously interviewing and poking fun at the types of zealots who are – let’s face it – not the brightest of Jesus’ sunbeams. With perhaps the exception of a Rabbi inventor, who uses his many inventions to find labour-saving Sabbatical loopholes.
Maher sizes up his audience. He seems to say, “In case you’re in any doubt about your own religious status, watch this movie. Love it? You're probably an agnostic, middle-left leaning intellectual. Hate it? It’s likely you’re a religious fundamentalist, quite possibly self-flagellating as you watch.”
Like Michael Moore, Maher uses cynicism and sarcasm to examine his controversial subject matter. But they turn out to be slightly blunt tools. The film is far more of a vehicle for shallow entertainment than profound enlightenment – and in this it succeeds brilliantly. Also in the vein of his predecessor, Mayer’s documentary makes no pretence of objectivity either, offering his own beliefs in place of his subjects’. These are generally ignorant bigots, not devotees who choose to take the holy book as a spiritual guide rather than a literal history.
His anti-pilgrimage is peppered with asides and achingly obvious music (the Doobie Brothers’ Jesus is just alright). Equally predictable is the mining of Hollywood’s golden age of biblical epics (Charlton Heston-as-Moses etc). The crew follows Maher through a series of comedy vignettes: some foreseeable, and some not. When Maher confronts the congregation at a North Carolina truck-stop chapel, the audience has a reasonable idea of what will unfold.
Maher visits Florida's 'Holy Land Experience' – where The Passion of the Christ is enacted daily, complete with concrete cave and backing singers. He goes to Utah and mortifies the Mormons, interviews Puerto Rican cult leader Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda (a self-proclaimed descendant of Christ), gets righteously stoned with the leader of a marijuana-based religion in Amsterdam, and meets a slightly addled priest after being turfed out of the Vatican.
In case you’re thinking he’s specifically anti-Christian, Judaism and Islam receive an Old Testament style flogging too, while pantheistic faiths get off scot-free.
The verdict? Depending on your own belief system Religulous is either hilarious or deeply offensive. Take a friend, and enjoy it, but don’t expect an epiphany. For that you might want to head to Amsterdam.
Credits
Director: Larry Charles
Producers: Jonah Smith & Palmer West of Thousand Words, and Bill Maher
Director of Photography: Anthony Hardwick
Cast: Bill Maher
Religulous is now playing at the Academy Cinema in Auckland.
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