Toronto 2008: Bill Maher's 'Religulous' (plus two terrific docs)
Sep 10, 2008, 02:49 PM | by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Film, Toronto Film Festival 2008
Bill Maher, with his wryly contemptuous hyper-confident gleam, doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who loses sleep about a lot of things, but I've sometimes wondered if it bothers him that he isn't fawned over by the media the way that Jon Stewart is. They're our two reigning genius dissecters of the American political circus (Stephen Colbert is something else--a postmodern satirist), but Maher, unlike Stewart, puts his personal idiosyncrasies right out there, and his prejudices, too--about sex (which he appears to value more than love), marriage (he's not a fan), and religion (he's really not a fan). Maher is more than happy to be the skunk at the garden party, and a gloriously un-P.C. one at that, and that's one of the reasons that some people can't stand him. (I know: A number of them work at EW.)
To me, though, Maher's merciless honesty, not just about politics but about who he really is, is what makes him such a singular and exciting comic artist. He's a bombs-away confessional truth-teller, and in Religulous, his winkingly blasphemous detonation of all things holy and scriptural, he's like Lenny Bruce with an inquiring mind and a video camera.
In this documentary collaboration with Larry Charles, who also directed Borat, Maher travels all over America, and also to Jerusalem and the Vatican, grilling people about their religious faith. He talks to ministers, rabbis, clerics, Middle American true believers, his own mother (who is Jewish--though Maher was raised Catholic), a guy who helps gay men get in touch with their inner straight Christians, and a fellow who plays Jesus at an evangelical theme park.
Maher has come not to question religious dogma but to bury it. He's out to burn holes in the Bible and to trash its literal followers--to declare open season on their contradictions and hypocrisies, heaping ridicule upon all they hold dear. Does he take cheap shots? I'm pleased to report that he does--more than you can count. Yet Maher, who is selling not Atheism but doubt, doesn't disparage religion with the toxic misanthropy of, say, his fellow faith-basher Christopher Hitchens. Maher may be merciless, but he's also curious--that's why he's such a terrific interviewer--and there's a divine hilarity to his belief that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are fairy tales for adults. In Religulous, Bill Maher is like a sacrilegious rim-shot Joseph Campbell, ferreting out the links between our tall tales of God.
In addition to being funny as...well, hell, Religulous is a galvanizingly topical movie, since Maher's ultimate concern is the connection between religion and politics in America today. It's his view that anyone who is powerful enough to have his or her finger on the nuclear button should not be overly eager for the Rapture. You got a problem with that? Religulous might be called the first official movie jape of the Sarah Palin era.
* I'm not generally in the habit of praising documentaries for being good for you, but Food, Inc. is more than a terrific movie--it's an important movie, one that nourishes your knowledge of how the world works (or, in this case, has started not to work). The movie draws, among other things, upon the muckraking testimony of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) to create an essential, disturbing portrait of the industrialization of what we eat. It's about the way our food has undergone a corporate-chemical change during the last 30 years. The ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, the flavorless white-meat chicken (and you thought that breast enhancement was just popular for humans), the homogenized junkification of beef that was pioneered by the fast-food industry and then spread beyond those chains to the daily supermarkets--the movie weaves these phenomena into a larger, sinister narrative of conglomerate control. Food, Inc. is a movie that's hard to shake, because days after you've seen it, you will find yourself eating something--a hamburger, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen hothouse tomato--and realize that you have virtually no idea what it really is.
* In the late '70s and early '80s, New York really was sin city. It had Studio 54, it had the mythical sleaze of Times Square, and it had Plato's Retreat--the Manhattan sex club for swingers that represented the ultimate democratization of porno chic. The club didn't really have a velvet rope policy, so more or less anyone could go (as long as they showed up as a heterosexual couple). Yet those that did acquired the aura of hip erotic revolutionaries.
A lot of them, however, were just suburban schlubs, and American Swing, a droll and open-eyed and very shrewdly made doc about the rise and fall of the infamous Plato's, does justice to their strange...normality. The least classy person there was the club's owner, Larry Levenson, a nudnick who presided over the nightly bacchanals and, by all accounts, helped to make them as friendly--and about as glamorous--as a bar mitzvah. Levenson emerges as such a scuzzy figure on the era's totem pole of dirty-minded ringleaders that he makes Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt look high-minded, yet his success and descent (the movie doesn't say enough about his shadier backers) makes for a great story. A lot of Plato's veterans, now getting on in years but all matched with fascinating photos from their if-you-got-it-flaunt-it disco prime, describe exactly what it was like to be there in this Romper Room of middle-class exhibitionism, with its petri dish of a swimming pool and its thoroughly disgusting lasagna-and-chicken buffet. Plato's Retreat was a buffet of bodies, and American Swing catches the moment when our culture could think that tasted good.
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