Almodovar celebrates variety of women> `All About My Mother’ buoyed by wit, fine acting; `Dogma’ sinks to the bottom

In theaters

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER. Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, 101 minutes; R; in Spanish with English subtitles.

Midway through Pedro Almodovar’s excellent, Academy Award-winning film, “All About My Mother,” a transvestite named Agrado (Antonia San Juan) stands before a crowd and addresses the countless surgeries she’s undergone to become an “authentic woman.”

Lively and funny, her pain concealed with humor’s sharp guard, Agrado pauses to deliver one of the film’s several themes. “A woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself,” she says. And then, pointedly: “It costs me a lot to be authentic.”

Almodovar knows it can take great courage to realize one’s true individualism; he knows that finding the strength to be different can lead to happiness, but often not without first going through an onslaught of pain.

The characters he presents time and again on screen may come from society’s fringe, but the director’s great triumph is in how he blurs the line between his colorful characters and those considered to be conventionally “normal.” Indeed, Almodovar knows there’s a middle ground where all walks of life unite: the universal search for love and individual truth.

“All About My Mother” is about that search, but it’s just as interested in its infinite variety of women — nuns, prostitutes, flamboyant actresses, deeply devoted mothers, drugged-up divas, emotionally damaged drag queens.

Three classic films influence it: Jean Negulesco’s “How to Marry a Millionaire,” Elia Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Joseph Mankiewitcz’s “All About Eve,” scenes from which are glimpsed early on with Bette Davis blowing smoke at the screen and speaking Spanish. (Hearing Davis, of all people, shout “Que pasa!” at the screen is a moment that’s so beautifully bizarre, it easily could have been directed by Fellini.)

Since the film hinges on a surprise Almodovar literally hurls at the screen, those who prefer not to know shouldn’t read further.

The film opens in Madrid with Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her beloved son Esteban (Eloy Azarin) celebrating his 17th birthday with a trip to the theater to see a performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” After the show, they wait outside to get the autograph of the show’s fiery star, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). It’s a scene that ends in tragedy with Esteban being struck down and killed by a car.

The film then becomes Manuela’s journey to find Esteban’s father, a transvestite living in Barcelona, and, of course, the journey to find herself in the absence of her son.

Marked by its outstanding performances, its wit, its big heart and Almodovar’s clear love and admiration of strong women, “All About My Mother” is the director’s best, most assured work. Don’t miss it.

Grade: A

On video

DOGMA. Written and directed by Kevin Smith, 125 minutes, R.

Kevin Smith begins his latest foray into suburban absurdity with a disclaimer that asks audiences — and film critics — not to be offended by his film, or to take it seriously.

He’s just having fun, after all, and doesn’t mean to anger anyone — certainly not Catholics, whose religion he crucifies and drags through the mud for 125 never ending minutes — all in the name of a good time, of course.

Maybe it was the devil that made Smith lose his nerve and add that disclaimer. Or maybe he did it for his mother. But if he did it because of pressure from angry Catholic groups who denounced “Dogma” as spurious trash worthy of excommunication, then he’s a fool who undermined his film and his reputation as a director who once had something to say.

Not that he has anything of interest to say here. One could pray all day for “Dogma,” spritz its script with Holy Water and genuflect to the high heavens before viewing it, and still it would be doggerel, a crude, vacuous, unfunny bit of misogyny that wants audiences to gasp at its naughty ideas, all of which lack substance and bite.

It’s true — if you don’t count how bad “Dogma” is, nothing about it shocks; it is, in fact, a rather half-hearted attempt to reach out and pull Catholicism’s pigtails, which could have been interesting had Smith fully understood and explored the hypocrisies he senses within Catholicism and then satirized them with a clear measure of wit.

He doesn’t. His film, which is about two fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) who have found a loophole to get back into heaven, makes the dull, timeworn mistake of mining its humor from the gutter before wrapping it around reams of mind-numbing theology. That’s one of the reasons the film fails so spectacularly — Smith’s dialogue, so sharp in his previous films, is now too dense to pack a punch.

In the end, “Dogma” can best be defined by one of its scenes. When a giant walking pile of feces bubbles up from a toilet and starts killing people in a bar, three things become resoundingly clear: The film’s creative think tank is woefully low, the director is desperate for a laugh, and clearly he will do anything to get that laugh. At my screening last October, audiences were silent throughout that scene — and throughout much of the movie — suggesting that Smith should have flushed his script and started anew.

Grade: F

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”