Comedian and professional provocateur Bill Maher has carved out a career by telling it like it is. He pricks the national conscience weekly with his HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher, and you might recall he paid a heavy price for being the only dissenting voice in a rare moment of bi-partisan unity, in the week after the Twin Towers fell.
Much like his mentor George Carlin before him, Maher worships at the altar of agnosticism, his mission being to challenge the concept of absolute faith in anything or anyone, much less in a deity no living person has actually met. He considers organised religion a 'neurological disorder’ and this conviction has informed all aspects of his career, including his early stand-up routines. His beef isn’t with God/Allah/Jehovah/Xenu per se, but with the false prophets and religious zealots who wage war and justify violence in His name (and it's always a He).
With Religulous, he bands together with Larry Charles (director of Borat) as his fellow dissenting disciple, and the two embark on a road trip that takes in the Wailing Wall, Vatican, Mormon Tabernacle and a truck-stop chapel, to challenge the world’s faithful on their holy home soil.
Inevitably, polemical filmmakers draw criticism for taking cheap shots at easy targets and to be sure, Religulous contains the now-familiar technique of undercutting interview subjects with snarky subtitles and nonsensical cutaways (albeit hilariously) that do nothing to dispel stereotypes about the Bible belt. But in truth, the worst scorn is heaped on those who set themselves up as authorities, such as an evangelist who would have more luck peddling the oily derivative of his snakeskin shoes than he does in convincing Maher that he’s the Second Incarnation of Christ.
Unlike that other professional agitator Michael Moore, whose M.O. is to deny dissenting voices in his films, Maher opens a dialogue with true believers to interrogate their belief structures. To that end, the film’s most interesting moments arise when the comic is disarmed by the thoughtful responses of religious truckers, and by the candour of the Vatican’s in-house astrologist.
No investigation of individual beliefs would be complete without the protagonist’s own contribution, and Maher duly explores his own stunted religious roots, with the aid of his mother and sister (we learn that little Bill was raised a Catholic by his hybrid Jewish/Catholic parents, until they got fed up with feeling guilty about using contraception).
Eastern religions are conspicuously absent from Maher’s investigation but then, Buddhists aren’t exactly a war-mongering lot. The others? Well, at least Maher’s consistently intolerant of all creeds: Jews get as much negative airtime as Muslims, and the Catholics are all-but accused of plagiarism – he posits that they nicked the entire story of Jesus from the Egyptians, in a musical montage scored by The Bangles (natch). Mormons and Scientologists get skewered too, though to no greater degree than the Big Three. Why, he reasons, should talking snakes and Jonah’s whale-house be any more credible than L. Ron Hubbard’s alien volcanoes?
Much like his 'all kidding aside’ Real Time monologues, Maher launches into a fire and brimstone rant in Religulous’ closing moments, which sucks the fun out of the film but underscores Maher’s views that belief in Armageddon is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The gearshift is a little clumsy, but the provocative argument against the encroachment of Church into State matters, leaves a lasting impression. He reasons that we ought to be wary of our elected leaders’ willingness to stave off catastrophe when they subscribe to a belief system that welcomes The Rapture. He’s talking about the God-fearing rhetoric of the Bush Administration, of course, and it’s in these sequences that the lengthy lag between the film’s completion and its Australian release is exposed. Nonetheless, the central thrust of his argument isn’t diluted just because there’s now a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House.
You’ll laugh, you’ll groan and you might even reach for the worry beads, but as big-screen blasphemy goes, it’s a winner.
