Are this summer's movies anti-Catholic?

This month I actually got twice to the movie theaters to see new releases, in fact, the first and only movies I've seen in 2008. The lucky productions getting my theater going dollars were The X Files: I Want to Believe and Brideshead Revisited. It just so happens that I am intimately acquainted with the stories behind both of these movie plots, so I can see more in the scripts than many people.

In retrospect, what particularly struck me was the viciously nasty anti-Catholic tone of both movies.

It seems an eternity since The X Files was on television every Sunday night. I watched it religiously, even in its very first season. As the characters developed over the years, we knew that Agent Mulder was an agnostic Protestant and Agent Scully was a devout Catholic. Then we get to this movie, where we find neither as agents anymore, with Mulder in hiding and Scully working as a physician in a Catholic charity hospital. The movie, much like the shows, had two simultaneous plots, both dealing with the Catholic Church.

The major plotline for the movie involves the kidnapping of an FBI agent and what turns out to be a series of murders. A defrocked pedophile Catholic priest claims to have visions regarding the investigation, and appears quite unsympathetically throughout the movie. Dialogue from multiple characters snipes not only at the former priest but also at the Church (are we tired of pedophile priest jokes yet?), and Scully is particularly disrespectful. The secondary plot line involves a child patient of Scully's with some rare, most likely fatal disease, with no known cure. The hospital's administration, led by a particularly sour priest, wants to shuffle the boy off to a hospice-type facility for palliative care, but Scully somehow chooses to defy them and treat the boy with some highly experimental stem cell therapy (stem cell therapy, since it deals with cells from unborn fetuses, is vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church). There are a lot of unlikely scenarios in the plot and it just doesn't quite work when viewed as a free-standing work apart from the culture and tradition of the series.

Then we get to Brideshead Revisited, based on the 1944 novel by former popular British writer Evelyn Waugh. This happens to be one of the very very few novels I've ever read twice, I have seen multiple times the faithful 1981 BBC/Granada six-episode, twelve-hour mini-series, and I worked with many of my students to analyze the work in their papers on early 20th century British novelists. So, being so familiar with the twelve-hour treatment of the novel, I found myself spinning trying to keep up with the instant two-hour long movie. The screenplay writers took so many liberties with the story line, I took the novel with me to brunch today to reread it so I could refresh my memory.

In the "new" version, the entire story has been rewritten to focus on the Catholic faith of the family, giving it sinister and evil overtones, and having it ruin the lives and happiness of its adherents. Meanwhile, Teresa Marchmain (played by Emma Thompson) has become a vindictive and overbearing matriarch in the name of Catholicity, which is totally different from her character in the novel, and the narrator of the story, Charles Ryder, has become a staunch atheist who actively works against the family's Catholic superstitions and practices, again contrary to his novel character (in the novel, there's even a line where someone refers to him as an atheist, and he corrects them, saying he's agnostic, plus, he would have been way too polite to have acted in such ways).

So, what's the deal with all the negative treatment of the Church?

Anyway, let me give a brief analysis of the movies.

The X Files was both satisfying and disappointing. It was little more than a two-part TV episode, and an episode with a weak plot line, at that. Because of the length of time since the television show was in original release, the writers seemed compelled to use a whole lot of expository dialogue to explain the backstory, some of which was rather annoying (like when Skinner made his first appearance on screen, Scully says, "It's Assistant Director of the FBI Walter Skinner!" as if Mulder didn't know who he was). The writing was poor and plot elements weren't connected. The overall series story arc really isn't going in a good direction. The editing felt choppy (and as if much of the important plot development was left on the cutting room floor). The cinematography at times lacked focus while at other times it moved in a way that gave me a headache. The musical score was pretty hideous. But, at the same time, it was The X Files and Mulder and Scully were back together again. With a better storyline and writing staff, I'd be willing to go see another movie. Recommendation? If you're an X Files fan, go see it, you'll enjoy it well enough. If you're not already an established fan, it's okay, and it's certainly better than a lot of the trash movies out this summer.

Meanwhile, Brideshead is a beautiful movie, reminiscent of the Merchant-Ivory type movies. I've heard Emma Thompson has gotten some supporting actress Oscar buzz.

In the past, my alma mater Oxford University (where much of the novel is set) did not allow film crews at the university, so "Oxbridge"-type movies set at Oxford (Chariots of Fire, Oxford Blues, the Brideshead mini-series, et al.) were actually filmed at rival newcomer Cambridge University. I was very pleased to see this movie was actually filmed on location in Oxford, as it brought back many memories. I also thought it highly interesting that they chose to go to Castle Howard as the location site for the scenes of the fictional "Brideshead Castle," the same location where they shot the mini-series. Consequently, all the sets (as well as costumes) were beautiful.

Naturally, adapting a full-length novel to a modern two-hour movie time frame requires a lot of cutting and rearrangement. I realize this. This version, though, I found to take a few too many liberties not only with the plot but with the characters. I've mentioned Lady Marchmain; Rex Mottram's character was so changed, his now-minor character was a particularly nasty cad and opportunist; Anthony Blanche has become a cameo role with biting lines not in the novel.

Casting was also a bit of a problem. The novel spans twenty years, from the time Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) meet as 19-year-old undergraduates at Oxford, to a point about ten or twelve years after that for Charles and Julia's affair, to Charles' time as a 39-year-old Army officer in World War II. The movie appears to have shortened the intervals so the actors ultimately end up playing their real-life ages. Because of how so much of the story was truncated and compressed, more than half of the movie is devoted to the time when Charles and Sebastian are 19, yet the actors were much too old to convincingly play teenagers, with Goode at 30 and Whishaw at 28. I think I would have found younger actors, especially since—Goode's intensely clear and bright blue eyes notwithstanding—neither of these actors gave particularly memorable performances.

I've been looking for an intelligent, literary person who's never read this novel or seen the mini-series so I can have him or her watch this movie and then tell me how it works for them. If this description fits any of you, go see it and then write a comment. Meanwhile, for Waugh or Brideshead fans, you'll want to go see this movie just because it's Waugh and Oxford and Castle Howard and your unrepentant anglophilia.