Diminishing Dorothy Day: 'Entertaining Angels'.

Whether she was in jail, simply walking in the street, buying groceries, asking directions, browsing in a bookstore, or waiting in line to enter a theater or a museum, Dorothy Day was constantly noticing people, constantly ready to engage with them and let them become, even for a few moments, part of her life.

How I wish that sentence, from Robert Coles's Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Addison-Wesley), had been recorded, then transmitted on headphones, as subliminal brainwashing during slumber, into the ears of writer John Wells and director Michael Rhodes before they made Entertaining Angels, the new motion picture about the woman who co-founded the Catholic Worker and the Catholic Worker Movement. For, thanks to the performance of Moira Kelly, Dorothy exists on screen but nobody in her life does. A woman who drove herself to live for others ends up as a magnetic movie heroine surrounded by posturing stereotypes. And, of course, when you diminish Dorothy Day's world, you diminish Dorothy Day.

Let our heroine, during her Greenwich Village Bohemian days, enter a smoky tavern and there they all are, the legendary radicals of the twenties and thirties. The camera seems to crash around just behind these young actors wearing period clothes, and they themselves crash around, banging tables, chairs, and beer mugs and announcing one another's names at full volume Mike Gold! Floyd Dell! Are these stentorian introductions meant to penetrate the ignorance of the uninitiated, who won't know or care that these are two of the editors of the Socialist paper, The Masses? Surely most literate people will recognize the name Eugene O'Neill, but he gets an introduction anyway when the camera swings over to a dark Irishman glowering Byronically behind a black moustache, and an off-screen voice (Dell's? Gold's?) announces, "Eugene O'Neill! America's most infamous playwright!" It's a bit like the "Ed Sullivan Show" whenever the host introduced celebrities sitting in the audience. Let's really hear it, folks, for America's Most Infamous Playwright!

We also get to meet Day's lovers: Lionel Moise, who's supposed to be a hard guy but here comes across as just another Hollywood pretty boy; and Forster Batterham as depicted by Lenny Von Dohlen, who has a monotonous voice and a spacey gaze but not a scintilla of the smouldering rage shading into nihilism that probably both attracted and repelled Day.

And then there are the spiritual influences on Day's life: Peter Maurin, a French peasant and autodidact of Whitmanesque proportions but here played by Martin Sheen with such cutsey owlishness (and an accent straight from the land of Maurice Chevalier impersonators) that I couldn't decide if a Stalinist ice pick or a fascist firing squad should be the proper reward for such a performance; and the usually engaging Melinda Dillon makes a spunky nun who ignites Day's interest in the homeless just as obnoxious as show-biz spunky nuns usually are. Only the superb veteran actor Brian Keith, in the stooge role of a recalcitrant bishop ("What do you say we remove the Catholic from Catholic Worker, Dorothy?"), endows his character with a sense of reality, with the texture of a life lived.

Worst of all, the poor are stereotyped. Dorothy Day had no use for "the faceless masses"; she tried to help one individual after another and delighted in idiosyncrasy. But all this movie can do with the needy is to put actors in dirty clothes and have them gesticulate pathetically, wag their heads humbly, and stop just short of pulling their forelocks. In fact, all the supporting parts in this movie are cardboard figures, mere feeders of cues to the lead actress, Moira Kelly.

To be sure, Ms. Kelly delivers. Her characterization is a blend of Celtic charm, transfixing gravity, justified rage, pathetic neediness, and inexhaustible compassion. Her voice needs development and, in the framing scenes set in the 1960s, she is nothing but a young actress with a white wig on her head. But for the most part Kelly supplies all the emotions the script demands of her even when the script itself is inept. Her performance reaches its peak in the scene in which Day, her charitable work apparently capsized, wends her way back to Mike Gold at his editorial office and tries to convince him and herself that she's ready to return to professional journalism. In one lengthy close-up, Kelly suggests that the near-despair she feels is like a boulder crushing the life out of her. But then, midway through the close-up, Kelly seems to stare into her despair; not able yet to push it away, she's content to watch it and live with it, as if it were a boresome guest who mustn't be shown the door. It's a remarkable moment in a remarkable performance.

The script by John Wells is second-rate TV writing. It repeatedly "cuts to the chase" with no interesting detours for the sake of characterization, texture, or ideas. It's packed with all the incidents that you expect to find in any movie about young radicals: soup lines, marches, riots, free love, truncheon-wielding cops, et al. But consider the following episode from Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness: "We rented it [a horse] from a German Nazi on East Sixteenth Street, and sometimes when we had no money he let us have the use of it free for a few hours. It rejoiced our hearts to move a Jewish family into their new quarters with his equipment."

How true to life that passage is in its sense of the goodness that can survive an otherwise twisted nature, and in its sense of the overall complexity and absurdity that occur when ideologies encounter reality. And this is precisely the sort of incident for which Wells's script has no use.

The direction by Michael Rhodes also smacks of television: all functionalism, no savoring of life, no sense of beauty, no ambition to jolt the viewer with an unexpected viewpoint or perspective. For instance, when Dorothy seeks out Maurin, reduced to aphasic wandering by a stroke, she searches an alleyway in a slum. She starts in the upper left of the screen and proceeds in a diagonal down to the bottom right. And guess where Maurin is lying. James Agee wrote of John Huston's movies that "they open the eye and require it to work vigorously; and through the eye they awaken curiosity and intelligence." The direction of this film never opens the eye and therefore puts the mind to sleep.

May I press some unsolicited (and probably unwanted) advice on Paulist Pictures, the backer of this project? If you really want to make a good Catholic movie, forget about Catholic subjects or Catholic "properties." Find some gifted young Catholic writer-director who is God-obsessed. Ask him or her to deliver a script. If you approve of the result, turn him loose to direct it. The only great recent Catholic film I know is Black Robe and it was directed by the same man who made the only great recent Protestant movie, Tender Mercies. I don't know if Bruce Beresford is at all religious but he found great scripts by two men who have devout natures, Horton Foote (Mercies) and Brian Moore (Black Robe), and he perfectly expressed their highly idiosyncratic visions of the life of the soul. Paulist Pictures might well take some inspiration from Beresford's example.

In other words, do with film what Dorothy Day did with the necessities. Help the individual.

The face of Dorothy Day appearing on our cover is the work of Charles Wells. The sculpture, carved in oak, was dedicated on October 12, 1996 at the La Salle University Art Gallery in Philadelphia. It is the gift of Judith and Dennis O'Brien in honor of Brother Daniel Burke, former president of the university.