NORTH AMERICAN SCENE
Cinema: Dorothy Has Her Day on Film
-by Doug LeBlanc

The executive producer of Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story hopes the film will find its audience after opening in nearly 20 cities last month.

Entertaining Angels, released by Paulist Pictures, tells the story of the one-time suffragette, socialist, and newspaper reporter who became a Roman Catholic in 1927 and devoted the rest of her life to serving the poor through the Catholic Worker movement, which she cofounded with Peter Maurin in 1931. Day died in 1980.

Reviews of the hagiopic have been mixed. The film "imagines her life as a series of crises that the screenplay (by John Wells) reduces into neatly circumscribed, carefully rigged little confrontations," critic Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times.

"This is a film one would love to love, but the result is disappointing," wrote Jim Forest, editor of In Communion, official publication of Orthodox Peace Fellowship. Forest worked with Day for several years.

Ted Baehr of MovieGuide, which critiques films from a conservative Christian perspective, gave Entertaining Angels an enthusiastic review: "I loved the movie, and I wept. I thought it was a great character study." The film is rated PG-13.

Ellwood Kieser, a priest who served as executive producer, says some of the early audiences also identified with the film. At a convention of Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement, 450 people joined Moira Kelly, the actress who portrays Day, as she sang "Amazing Grace" over the final credits.

No matter how the film performs at box offices, Kieser is satisfied. "I got the picture that I wanted. I knew Dorothy Day, and I hope to spend eternity with her.

The movie was written by John Wells ("ER"), directed by Mike Rhodes ("Christy") and features Moira Kelly ("Chaplin," "Cutting Edge") as Dorothy Day and Martin Sheen ("Apocalypse Now," "American President") as her mentor, Peter Maurin.

"Dorothy Day was a prophetic figure," says Ellwood Kieser, C.S.P., the movie's producer ("Insight," "Romero") who was befriended by Dorothy at the Vatican Council in 1965. "In an affluent society, she chose to live with the poor. In a narcissistic culture, she transcended her ego and gave herself to the poorest and most rejected members of American society. Before World War II, she had espoused non-violence. Before Hiroshima she was a total pacifist. Before Vatican II, she was carrying unselfish love to the secular world. Before Medellin, she had opted for the poor."

But she was not always a committed disciple of Jesus Christ. As a young woman living in Greenwich Village just before the First World War, she was stung by the poverty and injustice around her, became a radical socialist and wrote for "The Masses." She became romantically involved with Mike Gold who would later edit the Communist "Daily Worker." For a time, she was the woman in Eugene O'Neil's life. She had more than one lover. She also had an abortion.

But she was haunted by God and finally, after hitting bottom amid much pain and guilt, confusion and turmoil, she surrendered her life to Jesus Christ. Mentored by Peter Maurin, the eccentric French personalist, she then sought to combine her radical love for the poor with her new found faith in God.

The result was the Catholic Worker movement, which, since the thirties, has ministered to the hungry and the homeless on the skid rows of the nations larger cities and has impacted the American mainstream through people like Michael Harrington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Berrigans and the Kennedys.

This picture spans the period from 1917 to 1937. It begins with Dorothy's bohemian life in New York's Greenwich Village, moves on to her discovery of God and entrance into the Church and culminates in her successful struggle to commit herself totally to a life time of peace making and hands on, person to person, service of the poor.

What does Dorothy Day's story have to say to contemporary Americans. "Plenty," says Ellwood Kieser. "She confronted and successfully overcame a constellation of dilemmas that reads like a compendium of the live nerves of the contemporary American psyche: tension between sexuality and commitment, between child and career, between taking care of one's own and taking care of the poor and homeless; the hunger for transcendent meaning and connectedness, for a personal center and ground, for God and personal fulfillment; the scars left by an alcoholic parent; the shortcomings of the institutional church; what to doabout the arms race, societal injustice and the violence that flows from it, plus feminism, abortion and single motherhood."

The budget for the picture was provided by Catholic Communication Campaign, a coalition of foundations and many generous individuals who wanted Dorothy's story - and the Gospel which propelled it - carried to the mass viewing public.