Maher 1, God 0
Bill Maher has balls. Serious balls. Whether or not you agree with what he has to say, whether you find him hilarious or utterly arrogant and annoying, you have to admit he must have quite the pair of big, brass balls. How else do you explain the comment he made just weeks after 9/11, pointing out the hypocrisy of calling the terrorists cowards when no one else dared question the patriotic party line. he was willing to lose his TV show for speaking his mind. You can’t help but admire the balls something like that requires.
Bill Maher’s balls
And that is why Maher is the perfect fit for a movie like Religulous, a tongue-in-cheek documentary examining the roots of people’s beliefs by sending Maher around the world to have conversations about faith with true believers of all stripes. Faith is a touchy subject. It’s also the source of much hatred and violence, and has been since mankind first looked to the stars and began dreaming up answers to life’s great questions. Many people will defend their beliefs to the death. Further still, some are more than willing to kill others just for having different beliefs. But that doesn’t seem to faze Maher, who is never afraid to take that extra step over the line to push the issue and force people to confront the contradictions of their faith, no matter how offensive they might find it. Maher pisses off more than a few people over the course of his Religulous journey, but he never loses his edge or backs down. He also never misses an opportunity for a good joke, taste and social etiquette be damned, which leads to more than a few cringe-worthy moments that had me laughing and tugging my collar at the same time.
One thing Religulous and Maher make perfectly clear over the course of the film is that their quarrel is not with personal faith, but rather with organized religion. Maher can’t understand why so many people follow institutions based entirely on unfounded claims and downright fabrications and focused solely on gaining power and wealth. His strongest criticism is of the contradictions in (and bastardizations of) the various holy texts. It’s both fascinating and funny watching people staunchly defend these books they believe in, even as it becomes painfully obvious Maher knows more about the texts than they do.
Maher’s two main targets are the patriotic evangelical movement in the U.S. and Muslim extremism. He does touch on the absurdities in Judaism, including an interview with an anti-Zionist Jew, but his focus is clearly elsewhere. At first glance this appears unbalanced, but the film explains this choice with a simple population statistic: Christians? more than 1 billion worldwide, Muslims? more than 1 billion, Jews? 14 million. Worldwide. In the Q&A following the film, director Larry Charles addressed this subject by pointing out that the only reason Judaism still plays a major role on the world religious stage is because of its connections with Christianity and Islam.
The documentary is expertly directed and pieced together by Charles, who was also the man behind the camera for Borat and is cementing himself as one of the premier guerrilla comedy directors of our time. Charles’ pacing is spot-on, which is crucial for a film like this, and he clearly understands that the way to best bring out the comedy in both Borat and Religulous is to display the candid nature of the ridiculous situations. In Religulous, he achieves this through the sporadic inclusion of B-roll footage and angles where other cameras and boom mics are clearly visible. There are also a couple of moments when he gets some help from his surroundings, but I won’t spoil those for you. You’ll know them when you see them, and trust me: you’ll laugh.
The crowning achievement of Religulous is its ability to generate laughs from almost every single moment and situation. Each interview is strip-mined for punchlines that Maher may have missed during the fact, which are then inserted in post-production using stock footage or subtitles. It becomes very clear very fast that Religulous is not about to hold anything back, but it’s hard not to at least appreciate the humour that the film finds in blind faith. I’ll admit that I’m approaching this film from an entirely secular perspective, and I’ve never felt the need to hold back in my own criticism of religion, but even believers should be able to laugh at the contradictions and absurdities Religulous unearths.
Religulous ends on a far more serious and bone-chilling note when Maher gets up on his soapbox and pleads with the world to abandon the superstitions and abuses of organized religion so we can move forward as a species before we destroy ourselves over imagined deities. It is a preachy ending, but Maher’s fear is real. Thanks to nuclear weapons, we now have the ability to wipe ourselves off the face of the planet and we have shown time and time again that we are willing to slaughter those different from us simply because we believe our view of the world is the only correct one. It is a sobering, somber reminder of the real threat irrationality without self-reflection (and without a sense of humour) poses to the world, and it makes you think twice about what some of the people Maher interviewed were really trying to say.
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