Film Review: 'Religulous' - Comic on a Crusade

Film review: 'Religulous' - comic on a crusade http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/03/DDE81391...

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Film review: 'Religulous' - comic on a crusade Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic Friday, October 3, 2008

Religulous: Documentary. With Bill Maher. Directed by Larry Charles. (Rated R. 101 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Bill Maher does something amazing in "Religulous." He makes Michael Moore look incredibly likable in comparison.

In the film, in which he travels around meeting religious people and making fun of them, Maher becomes the incarnation of what the most paranoid red-state Americans picture when they imagine people who live on the two coasts: He's smug. He's arrogant. He doesn't listen. He's full of wisecracks, rides around in a nice car and acts as if everybody he meets is a complete idiot.

Give him credit for one thing: He has nerve. It's one thing for Maher to crack wise on his HBO show, "Real Time." It's another to go into a small church with a bunch of huge guys and make fun of their religion. It takes a whole other order of nerve to tell a self-proclaimed former homosexual that, if he saw him at the end of the bar, "I'd say you were a gay."

Of course, to see such moments is to laugh. The caustic humor that makes Maher's show such a delight is also present in the film, and so the movie is enjoyable - at least to an extent. But on "Real Time," Maher is going up against the powerful, either politicians or celebrities who are his equals in terms of fame and media savvy. In "Religulous," Maher is talking to regular people, and it's difficult to watch the film without feeling for these poor individuals who just happened to have stumbled in front of the camera.

It's not just that Maher heckles and scoffs and chortles and snorts through his interviews with them. That would be bad enough. But director Larry Charles edits conversations in ways designed to make everyone but Maher look bad. People's comments are intercut with absurd stock footage from movies. Sometimes titles are superimposed onto the screen to dispute what an interviewee is saying. Often, Charles will cut from the interview to Maher, in his car, talking and making jokes about the interview he's just completed. I've always liked Maher, but you have to absolutely love him not to start recoiling from him 30 minutes into the movie.

At one point, he interviews a scientist who believes in God and sees nothing inconsistent with science and religious faith. This man is no hick, and it would have been nice to hear what he had to say. But Maher doesn't give him a chance to talk. Maher's not interested in talking.

In the end, Maher reveals his serious intent, to put forth the idea that not just fundamentalism but

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religion in all forms is a danger to the survival of civilization. Agree or not, that's a serious idea, but the obnoxious interviews and the zany treatment undercut it. Certainly, if his intent was to persuade anyone of his view, well, fat chance of that. (If anything, Maher is obnoxious enough to make people want to get religion.) In the moment, the message of "Religulous" is that everybody who believes in God is stupid, cowardly or intellectually dishonest. That's a sentiment better expressed in a single wisecrack, not a feature-length documentary.

-- Advisory: This film contains strong language and jokes that might offend devoutly religious people.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at [email protected].

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This article appeared on page E - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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