Film: Matt Zoller Seitz

DOMINION: THE PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST

Directed by Paul Schrader

I had the same reaction to Paul Schrader's Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist that I have to most of Schrader's movies: respect unaccompanied by love. I respect Schrader's refusal to make anything except Paul Schrader movies for nearly 30 years. And in this particular case, I'm thrilled that two years after production company Morgan Creek and releasing studio Warner Brothers hired Schrader to direct an Exorcist sequel, shelved it and hired Renny Harlin ("Deep Blue Sea") to do a top-to-bottom reshoot, Schrader's Dominion eventually clawed its way back from limbo and into theaters. Like a lot of Schrader's films (as both writer and writer-director), it's literate and unfashionably interested in morality, religion and philosophy, and a definite improvement over Harlin's travesty, which poured on the blood and perversity and turned Merrin into an Indiana Jones type. Unfortunately, it's also slow and glum, theologically and philosophically murky, and not nearly as visually inventive as it should be, given the subject matter. It's the sort of movie you look for reasons to like, and when it's over, you're still looking.

Set mainly in British-controlled, postWorld War II Kenya, Dominion stars Stellan Skarsgard as Father Merrin, the priest played by Max von Sydow in the original Exorcist. After a grueling opening scene set in Holland in which Nazis force Merrin to select one villager for execution, the movie picks up with the defrocked, disillusioned, officially faith-free Merrin getting drawn into the excavation of an ancient temple filled with demonic imagery that seems to have been buried right after it was built. There seem to be two templesa Christian one built atop a pagan one, as if the former is literally oppressing the latter. This jibes with the drama going on aboveground: The demon (or devil) who escapes the pagan temple and possesses a deformed local teenager (Billy Crawford) is not just an evil spirit, but an agent of chaos stirring up ill will between black Africans and their white colonial masters (whose ranks include temple-looting British soldiers).

Dominion is filled with lines and images that strongly connect it to Schrader's filmic obsessions, chiefly The Searchers. Like a Bible-toting version of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards, Merrin is a stoic outsider who heals a broken world with no use for men like him. An early line of dialogue reveals that Merrin is still listed as a "displaced person" after the war, and the final shot is a near-exact replica of the final shot in Ford's classic. There are also echoes of another Schrader favorite, Robert Bresson's austere Diary of a Country Priest. But while these references may endear the film to Schrader fans, they don't help it as entertainment or drama. Dominion is dull, prosaic stuffa character portrait that often fails to develop its hero beyond the obvious Screenwriting 101 tropes (hero detaches from cause, then rejoins cause).

The root of the problem, I think, is that Schrader has made a supernatural horror film about a briefly atheist ex-priest who rediscovers his faith and saves humankind from Satan by debating him, yet neither Merrin nor the movie seems to believe in the horrors and miracles onscreen. Schrader treats good and eviland their personifications, God and the devilmainly as philosophical/metaphoric concepts rather than palpable forces that can save or destroy you. Schrader's approach is fine for a poem or a graduate thesis, but self-defeating in a supernatural horror picture whose success rests on its ability to convince us (if only for two hours) that good and evil are more than concepts. When Merrin debates Crawford's possessed teen, it feels not as if he's debating actual evil, but a self-aware, theatrical symbol of evil, which makes the sequence feel oddly weightless.

As Merrin looks upon both the British and the Kenyans, he doesn't seem like a faith-shaken ex-priest, but a lifelong atheist who finds all this religion stuff awfully silly but keeps quiet because he doesn't want to be rude. Any religious opinions that do creep into Merrin's mouth are curdled by contempt. ("People were sacrificed here!" says Gabriel Mann's young priest, Father Francis, inspecting an altar. To which Merrin snaps, "It's almost like a scene out of the Inquisition, isn't it?") When Merrin finally busts out the holy water and goes into theological combat, the moment seems motivated not by a profound spiritual reawakening, but by genre conventions. I appreciate Schrader's determination to be himself in an industry that loathes individualists, but I still think he was the wrong person to make this movie. At times, Dominion nearly becomes the ultimate oxymoron: a secular humanist critique of religion that ends with God defeating Satan.

A LEAGUE OF ORDINARY GENTLEMEN

Directed by Christopher Browne

"In the United States of Entertainment, the one sin you cannot commit is to bore somebody." So says Real Sports contributor Bernie Goldberg in an early scene from League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a documentary about the reinvention of professional bowling, which went from America's most-watched sport to a subculture in the space of about 50 years. Goldberg's comment informs every scene in Christopher Browne's documentary, which is set mainly in 2002 and early 2003, after ex-Microsoft executives bought the Professional Bowler's Association and brought in Steve Miller, former Head of Global Sports Marketing at Nike, to purge the sport of its Fred Flintstone associations.

Miller believes the Nike/ESPN personality-driven sport model can "save" bowling, increase tv coverage, jack up ad rates and convince the public to think of it as "a real sport." He lays out his plan in a PBA meeting reminiscent of the scare-the-hell-out-of-the-troops scenes in Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, warning players that unless they bring their life stories and most saleable personality traits onto the lanesand do it at a certain "decibel level"the sport will never be big again, and they'll never make big bucks. The revamped matches are modeled on pro-wrestling and trash talk shows; the bowlers strut onto the lanes accompanied by blaring music and are encouraged to taunt each other between throws while announcers speculate on what they might be feeling.

This is all good news for Pete Weber, who established himself in the 80s as a John McEnroe-style cranky showboat (his signature gesture is the crotch chop, a move filched from pro wrestling's Stone Cold Steve Austin). But it doesn't sit well with Weber's chief rival, Walter Ray Williams, a star in two off-the-radar sports, bowling and horseshoes. A top earner and sweet, somewhat retiring fellow, Williams now finds himself playing second fiddle to Weber, whose crowd-stoking antics are tailor made for highlight reels. Professionally speaking, Williams gets the last laugh, but the movie still depicts him as a relic of a long-gone era. Stylistically, Browne sides with Nike, scoring a climactic showdown to spaghetti western music and listing Weber ahead of Williams in the press kit, even though the latter has won more titles and earned more money.

Summer Dreaming

Funny thing about summer: No matter how many years I do this job, and no matter how cynical I sense myself becoming, the warm weather months still reawaken my inner nine-year-old, and I find myself getting excited by trailers for blockbusters that I know are likely to disappoint me.

The somewhat rote Revenge of the Sith trailer was a rare exception in that it lowered my already-low expectations. The movie itself is characteristically simplistic, at times flat-out stupidLucas' films are meant to be fully comprehensible to moviegoers ages nine and up, in any culture and any language, and correspondingly limited in their dramatic optionsbut it's also inventively designed, ecstatically composed and edited, and shot through with touches that would be more widely acknowledged as brilliant if they did not occur in a Star Wars movie.

The Batman Begins trailer doesn't excite me. The Caped Crusader pictures are Star Wars for the generation about 12 years younger than me; i.e., a kind of nostalgia trip that people who weren't kids when the films came out probably just won't get. But I was intrigued by the fact that it doesn't show a villain. Might this be the first Batman picture to give a hoot about its title character?

Then there's the trailer (two trailers, actually) for Spielberg's War of the Worlds, which looks like a black-hearted cousin of Close Encounters, or Independence Day played straight, with imagery informed by everything from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Jaws and Jurassic Park to 9/11 and the Shock and Awe bombing of Baghdad.

I happened across the first trailer while spelunking kids' websites with my seven-year-old daughter, and was about to open it when my wife cautioned me that it might scare the child. I said, "It's a trailer, how bad can it be?" and played it.

My daughter stared in awe as low-hanging storm clouds foreshadowed a sub-orbital bombing run that destroyed a suburb. The images were slightly coded and elliptical yet deeply menacing; classic Spielberg. Later that night, my daughter had trouble getting to sleep because those images were seared into her brain; she was afraid if she shut her eyes, she'd imagine herself in a movie she hadn't even seen yet (and would probably not be allowed to see).

I'm a bad dad. I'm also excited to see this movie. M.Z.S.