Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story.

Pyrotechnics, winged horses, and angels once played a major role in films about saints. For modern filmmakers the challenge is to portray what is sacred and holy in a way that audiences will take seriously.

Watching Father Ellwood Kieser's new movie "Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story" (Paulist Pictures), it occurred to me that actually becoming a saint might be the only thing tougher than making an excellent film about one. After all, how many great films about saints are there? Back in the '40s, award-winning movies like "The Song of Bernadette," "Joan of Arc," and "Monsieur Vincent" told the stories of the miracle of Lourdes, the Maid of Orleans, and Vincent de Paul, often to critical acclaim or terrific box-office revenues.

But since then, the release of such saintly biopics has become a relatively rare event, and with the exception of Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" (1982), and Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" (1992), the only recent cinematic stories about religious heroes that I could think of were last year's "Dead Man Walking" and Kieser's own production of "Romero" (1989), a good film about the politicized Archbishop of El Salvador who was martyred for his struggles on behalf of that nation's poor and oppressed.

It also occurred to me that of all the possible candidates for sainthood, Dorothy Day, ironically enough, should have been the one with the most sympathy for anyone taking on such a daunting task. Day, who in 1924 managed to sell the movie rights to her own (admittedly modest) autobiographical novel The Eleventh Virgin, later tried her hand at Hollywood scriptwriting and found the experience devastating. The truth is, however, that the blunt and feisty cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement (a lay apostolate that promotes pacifism, personalism, and voluntary poverty) who strongly disliked being called a saint and was more than a little cool to some of her biographers - would probably have preferred that Kieser and Paulist Pictures can the project and spend their money and efforts feeding and clothing the poor. So much for a grateful patron.

It seems to me that the first hurdle in making a good movie about a saint is figuring out how to cast God - that is, working out how to get some handle on the holy and thus give the audience an experience of the sacred that they'll take seriously. Saints are, after all, people who've encountered the divine and have usually had their lives blown apart by its passing wake; so any movie made about a saint will have to find a way to portray God. But just how is a modern filmmaker supposed to do that? If one turns to the sort of gauze shots and angelic choirs that worked in the past, contemporary audiences will almost certainly see the film as maudlin, sentimental tripe. And if you try taking the Cecil B. Demille route, using pyrotechnics and special effects to create a burning bush theophany, modern audiences are likely to think they're in a sci-fi film and that God is just another alien.

Wisely enough, "Entertaining Angels" decides to deal with the "God problem" by letting the audience experience the sacred in pretty much the same fashion Day does. In Kieser's film God never appears as a separate actor, but rather haunts and permeates the course of Day's life, tantalizing, nurturing, and transforming her. The sacred shows up in her passionate and often confused hunger for the transcendent, in those serendipitous moments of grace and love when she experiences the support and compassion of others, in the rich and frail tapestry of the church's sacraments and symbols, and, most of all, in the faces of the poor.

In the film and in real life Day was, above all, a woman on fire. Moira Kelly portrays the young Day as an impassioned suffragette, anarchist, pacifist, and champion of the underdog. We see her as a journalist writing for radical and socialist papers like The Call and Max Eastman's Masses, a zealot demonstrating against war and social injustice, and a rebel incarcerated again and again for acting on her beliefs. But Day's passions are not limited to politics. In her personal life she was a woman overflowing with deep and often disorderly passions, a wild, unruly activist and an often reckless lover, searching for someone or something capable of bearing the full weight of her love.

For Day, that love was a hunger that haunted and seduced her, drawing her first into, and then beyond, a series of failed relationships and bringing her to an experience of motherhood that gave her boundless joy and ultimately revealed itself as a sacred mystery that would nurture and challenge her for the rest of her life. Her hunger for love was the shadow God cast across her soul, and it is hard to watch "Entertaining Angels" and not wonder where the divine is pulling at one's own heart.

As "Entertaining Angels" makes clear, it was as much through the witness and instruction of people like Sister Aloysius and, of course, the indispensable Peter Maurin that Day came to believe that the church was, for all its faults, the right place for her. As she later wrote in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (HarperSan Francisco, 1981), "My very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate myself with others, with the masses, in loving and praising God. Without even looking into the claims of the Catholic Church, I was willing to admit that for me she was the one true Church."

All the same, Day's pilgrim heart would find its ultimate encounter with God in the poor, and if the church's doctrine and sacraments had helped Day to find a name for the passion that haunted her, if she was touched and supported by the example and companionship of others, it was in the sick, homeless, and hungry that she would find the face of God.

The Jesus she loved, prayed to, and leaned on was the one who reminded her in Matthew 25 that he was to be found and loved in the least of these brothers and sisters. And so her "chapel" would always include the streets, alleys, and shelters where Christ was being crucified afresh every day, her communion lines would inevitably lead up to a soup tureen, and her monstrance would radiate with the faces of the poor men and women whom no one else could love. Again and again in Kieser's film we are reminded that for Day (and for Jesus), God is not to be found by looking in high places or listening for angelic voices but by sharing our bread with the hungry.

There is, however, a second and even larger hurdle in making a great movie about a saint, and that is resisting the temptation to cast that person as an angel, or even worse, some sort of Hollywood hero who rides in on a winged Pegasus and saves us from all our troubles.

A well-crafted story about a saint, like a good parable, isn't supposed to make us feel good about where we are and what we are doing; it's supposed to make us feel distinctly uncomfortable. In such tales saints aren't offered to us as angels or extraterrestrials whose ability to leap tall buildings lets the rest of us mere mortals off the hook. Rather, the lives and examples of these very human beings haunt and challenge us to examine our own consciences, to ask just what we are being called to do. In a scene in "Entertaining Angels," the cardinal of New York (played by Brian Keith) tells Day that she is making people uncomfortable, that her way of life is saying hard things to people and making them in at ease. She responds by noting that it's not her job to tell other people how to lead their lives. But in a sense that is exactly what a saint does - he or she lives in such a way as to put all of our lives in question, and that is a hard thing for us to bear.

Day would rail whenever somebody called her a saint. "That's the way people try to dismiss you," she would argue - and she did not like being dismissed. Jesus made a similar point when he noted that the same folks who were always killing prophets were usually the first ones to erect a statue once the uncomfortable voices had been silenced. Everybody wants to admire a saint, but hardly anyone wants to be challenged by one. All too often we try rewriting their stories, turning them into angels and heroes so we can ignore and sidestep their message.

"Entertaining Angels" gets mixed marks for avoiding the angel trap. In many ways Kieser's movie and Kelly's portrayal succeed in presenting Day as a real human being and gives us not only a taste of the personal and sexual tumult of her early adulthood, but also a sense of the enduring struggles of a life trying to balance motherhood and service of the poor. A visionary with more than a little ego and impatience, Kelly's Day is clearly not a saint without warts, but a tough-minded person whose life and message demands attention. Even more, Kieser's film acknowledges that the Catholic Worker movement did not become the success story that Hollywood would have made it out to be. Being a saint doesn't mean you get to win the big game, it only means you get to be faithful.

Still, there is a gritty maturity and no-nonsense quality about the real Dorothy Day that "Entertaining Angels" only manages to capture once, in the opening jail scene where a 60-something Dorothy comforts a young drug addict. And though I understood Kieser's decision to focus on Day's religious conversion and founding of the Catholic Worker, throughout the film I found myself hoping we would get back to this adult woman who had somehow managed to find the tenacity and passion to love and serve the poor long after youthful idealism and ardor should have failed her. In many ways Kelly's Day is quite impressive, but she's a youngster next to the real thing.

More than anything, however, I kept hoping we'd see more of the radical whose Catholicism challenged and unsettled so many good Catholics, so I was deeply disappointed by a scene where Day has a chance to address a middle-class Catholic audience, and Kieser decides to show us only the crowd's applause. Like the parish-hall audience she would have spoken to in that scene, much of today's American Catholic Church has become middle or upper class. In a time when the condition of the poor grows more desperate and the faces of the poor grow ever more distant, it would be hard to think of a saint whose message we need to hear more than Dorothy Day's, even if it is a tonic that might well remind us of castor oil. Day is definitely a person we would be better off imitating than building statues to.

Overall, however, I liked "Entertaining Angels," in part because it sought to honor a woman whose life gave honor to the gospel and the church and because it argued so fiercely that a Christian spirituality must always seek God in the face of the poor. But most of all I liked it because it made me hungry to learn more about this uniquely modern and American "saint" (canonized or not), even though I'm aware that this learning will prove unsettling and decidedly uncomfortable. And maybe that's not the worst thing you can say about a film - that it left you hungry for a sequel.