‘Dogma’ Was the Last Time People Took Kevin Smith Seriously

Recently Kevin Smith, who turns 55 later this summer, was reflecting on one of his greatest filmmaking challenges.

“I’ve been doing this 31 years now,” he said, “and the culture should have been done with me a long time ago. But I’m not done with it, and so I keep, you know, foisting myself on the culture over and over again. So, it’s always this battle for relevancy that you’re always kind of hoping is on your side. But you know the longer you’ve been around, the longer in the tooth you get, and it gets harder and harder to find that relevancy.”

The reason for the interview was the theatrical re-release of Cannes, which is where it debuted 26 years ago. “I have been to Cannes three times,” he told a journalist at the festival a few weeks ago, “but let’s be honest, I haven’t made a Cannes-worthy film in years, so I didn’t think I would ever return.”

Smith has been incredibly prolific since Dogma hit multiplexes in November 1999, the film leaving in its wake a stream of controversy and plenty of death threats. Subsequently, he’s directed 12 movies, produced four television shows, done a bunch of comic books and co-hosted multiple podcasts. But Dogma, his fourth feature, was the last time he was the center of popular culture — the last time he made a film that felt this risky and vital. It’s not a great movie — far from it — but never again would Smith swing for the fences with such gusto. It was the last time the world took this comic filmmaker seriously.

In hindsight, maybe no director epitomized the 1990s American indie scene better than Smith. Becoming an overnight sensation thanks to his 1994 microbudget debut Star Wars sequels and making sex jokes, Clerks celebrated the Gen-X mindset of not caring about anything. In its modest, big-shrug way, the movie felt revolutionary.

Hailed as an exciting new voice, Smith followed up his breakthrough with a bust. Ben Affleck) who falls for a queer woman (Joey Lauren Adams), Smith worried his career might be over if he delivered another dud. But Chasing Amy got great reviews and became his biggest hit to that point, with critics noting that it showcased a sweeter, more mature side to the proudly puerile filmmaker. Now safe from being thrown into movie jail, Smith felt emboldened to revisit a script he’d actually written before Clerks — an ambitious project he’d initially called God.   

“It was 90 pages at best,” Smith Pulp Fiction, before it ever debuts. At that screening, I was like, ‘Oh my god. That’s totally possible. You can go from very funny to very dramatic to very violent. I want to do another on God.’ That’s when it became Dogma.”

A loyal Catholic, Smith wanted to ask big questions about faith in a film that mixed genres far more aggressively than anything he’d attempted before. Dogma has several story strands. In one, Bartleby and Loki (Ben Affleck and Jason Lee plays the demon Azrael, who has his own reasons for wanting Bartleby and Loki to complete their quest.

With Chasing Amy, Smith allowed himself to be more overtly heartfelt than in his previous two pictures, still making plenty of off-color jokes but also examining the insecurities of straight men who feel intimidated by getting involved with women who have dated women. That film Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ about a decade earlier had a mainstream Hollywood courted accusations of blasphemy from a film made by a true believer. “I’m not saying the (C)hurch is bad,” Smith told the Los Angeles Times in 1999, “just that God is better.”

Indicative of Chasing Amy’s commercial and critical success, Smith had a much starrier cast than ever before for Dogma. Affleck had been the lead in Chasing Amy, but he and his childhood buddy Damon were now Oscar winners thanks to 1997’s Chris Rock, playing Jesus’ forgotten 13th apostle, was well on his way to becoming Stand-up Legend Chris Rock™. And multi-platinum musician Alanis Morissette was cast to play God. In the late 1990s, being in a potentially controversial Kevin Smith film was a cool career move.

Like all Smith’s movies, Dogma is a mixed bag of hilarious and strained — an uneven collection of brutally unfunny sequences and terrific bits. (My favorite throwaway gag: how miffed Damon’s angel silently gets after he sneezes and none of the humans around him says, “God bless you.”) Much like Tarantino, Smith loves his dialogue, letting his characters go on (and on and on) about whatever’s on their mind. But while pop-culture references still dominate, Dogma’s conversations are often about religion — and they’re only occasionally concerned with making you laugh. 

Rather than arguing about meaningless minutiae, like Clerks’ debate over why The Empire Strikes Back, Bartleby goes on a rant against God, who values humans more than angels, even though humans have destroyed every nice thing He ever gave them — whether it’s the Garden of Eden or Earth itself. Bethany, who works at an abortion clinic, still goes to church every Sunday, even though she feels nothing. Loki, the former Angel of Death, takes out a bunch of unscrupulous business executives because of their sins, including pedophilia, disgusted by how they conduct themselves. On a fairly frequent basis, Smith will stop the action just so that his characters can espouse differing viewpoints about Catholicism and those who misinterpret the Bible for their own purposes. All these years later, it’s fascinating to see such unalloyed discussion about religion in what is ostensibly a comedy — especially one that also features a “shit demon” that crawls out of the toilet and terrorizes our heroes. Indeed, Kevin Smith contains multitudes.

But it wasn’t just the blatant faith talk that distinguished this film from his previous work. Dogma had action sequences. And death scenes. And special effects. (Twenty-six years later, they actually don’t look too terrible.) And a legitimately great cinematographer, frequent Wes Anderson collaborator Robert Yeoman. And a halfway-decent budget at a reported $10 million. Of all of Smith’s 1990s films, this was the most polished, although it was always part of their charm that they nevertheless felt somewhat amateurish. (Mewes and Smith walking around as the sophomoric buddies Jay and Silent Bob practically ensured there would be an unmistakable not-ready-for-prime-time vibe to the proceedings.) 

Still, Dogma felt (and looked) positively epic by Smith’s lo-fi standards, and that was before conservative watchdogs attacked the film for its more outrageous moments. (It feels silly to worry about spoilers for a movie this old, but I’ll just say that it turns out there’s a scandalous reason why Bethany has been chosen to prevent the end of the world.) Smith received death threats, and Dogma’s original distributor, the family-friendly Disney, balked at releasing the movie. So Harvey and Bob Weinstein, longtime champions of Smith who, back then, were seen as defenders of independent filmmakers, bought the film from the studio, eventually selling the U.S. rights to Lionsgate, while the Weinsteins handled the movie overseas. 

“Films that are good enough to withstand the controversy and scrutiny can often benefit,” Lionsgate executive Mark Urman told Variety before Dogma’s release. “Controversy equals visibility.” The brouhaha got so ridiculous that Smith decided at one point to attend a Dogma protest, tricking a local TV crew into thinking he wasn’t the guy who’d made the movie. He even ended up in that night’s news segment about the protests.

The film wasn’t a box-office juggernaut, but at $44 million, it remains Smith’s second-highest-grossing movie worldwide. (It would eventually be topped by 2010’s Cop Out, which pulled in $56 million.) Dogma got respectable reviews, with most recognizing the sometimes ungainly mixture of earnestness and R-rated humor. As to those who accused him of trying to offend the religious, Smith said, “Dogma was from first to last always intended as a love letter to both faith and God almighty.”

Each film Smith made after Clerks, he tried to push himself, whether it was going more mainstream (Mallrats), attempting a sensitive romantic comedy (Chasing Amy) or delivering a treatise on faith inside an action-comedy-road movie. But while it would be unfair to suggest that Smith started coasting after Dogma, the movies he made afterward seemed like creative retreats. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was conceived as a conclusion to those and other Smith characters, but it wasn’t long before he returned to that well for Clerks sequels and 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (not to mention TV shows and other projects). Jersey Girl was an attempt at making something more emotional, drawing on his own feelings about fatherhood, but failed to move audiences or critics. He unsuccessfully worked on a Superman reboot and a big-screen adaptation of The Green Hornet. Later, he branched out into horror (and horror-comedy), with very mixed results. Dogma may not have all worked, but it’s far more interesting, gutsy and entertaining than just about anything he’s made since.

For years, Smith didn’t own the rights to Dogma, having to wrest control from now-disgraced Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein, who sold the rights to a separate company, which sold them back to Smith last year. (As Smith making a sequel, although that all sounds pretty preliminary at this point. 

On Instagram, he has called Dogma his “perhaps best” film. I’d still go with Clerks, but I can understand why he might lean toward this movie. Watching it now, it definitely feels like the end of a phase of Smith’s career — and, by extension, the end of 1990s American indie cinema. By the turn of the 21st century, peers like Linklater and Tarantino were being more fully embraced by the mainstream, and while Sundance remained a viable launching pad for new voices, the specialness of the pre-millenium years was mostly gone. Dogma embodies the excitement and freedom of the period, as well as the limitations of Smith’s skills as a storyteller and visual stylist.

At his core, he’s always made hangout movies, and in Dogma the characters crack wise while rubbing elbows with demons, angels, muses and the almighty. It was a film that expressed Smith’s religious faith, although he isn’t that person anymore.

“That kid believed in everything he showed onscreen,” he said at Cannes last month, referring to his younger self. “Dogma was his religion, a child’s prayer. I how he felt, how he wanted to express how he felt about his faith. He wanted to make his own version of church. That’s what Dogma is: my idea of Sunday service… with anal jokes in it. When I watch it today, I fully recognize it. I also fully recognize I could never make (this film) again, as I don’t believe in those things anymore.”

It wasn’t just Smith’s faith in God on display in Dogma. It’s also his faith that his observations about the world needed to be shared — the same faith shared by so many independent filmmakers trying to navigate a movie industry increasingly disinclined to take chances on original ideas. Dogma is an absolute mess, but it feels like the work of a true believer. Smith would never be so divinely inspired again.