Religulous starts well enough.
Stand-up-turned-pundit Bill Maher recalls his confused religious upbringing
then establishes himself as a voice for doubt in a marketplace of ideas too
crowded with pious certainty. He then sets about talking to the faithful about
why he feels the world would be better if they didn't believe. First stop: A
chapel for truckers housed in the back of a semi-trailer that becomes the
unlikely site of a lively and earnest (if occasionally odd) exchange of ideas.
It's pretty
much the last such moment in the film. From there, Maher sets off on a
globetrotting journey that stops most frequently wherever the outliers of the
world's faiths call home. The pattern is simple: Maher challenges, say, a guy
playing Jesus at a religious theme park or an Orthodox Jew who attended Iran's
conference on Holocaust denial. He asks provocative questions that the film
chops up with the attention deficit disorder approach of an E! True
Hollywood Story and
accentuates with quick cuts to camp footage from old religious epics or cheap
Mormon cartoons. Then it's on to the next target, for yet another variation on,
"Would you get a load of this guy?"
Maher makes
sure not to miss a major Western religion (or too many minor ones). It's easy
to appreciate his punkish commitment to absolute skepticism and hard to swallow
the intellectual bankruptcy of the approach. There's probably a better movie in
the raw footage of these conversations than in the flatteringly edited final
product, which also commits the unpardonable sin of not being especially funny.
That Maher often seems as self-righteous as his foils and director Larry
Charles (Borat)
gooses the gags with lame sound effects doesn't help.
There's a
legitimate point buried here: Maher seems genuinely concerned with getting the
message out that nothing good comes from the illogic of faith entering into the
ought-to-be-rational world of politics. But by the time he gets explicit about
this in a final monologue, he's failed to make his case. It's a valid, if
shrilly delivered, message that has little to do with the selectively
orchestrated freak show preceding it. Maher's too smart to make a movie this
dumb.