Religious faith and sexual love--these warring siblings, the stuff of powerful drama, hardly ever show up together in modern films. Yet here are two on that subject, both set in bleak fundamentalist communities, both with sturdy pedigrees and eyes for Oscar. The Crucible, from Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, has the year's classiest cast, led by Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield and Joan Allen. Breaking the Waves, Danish director Lars Von Trier's English-language fable on the miracle of love, had critics weeping at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. The Crucible offers solid workmanship and familiar epiphanies; Breaking the Waves is ecstasy seen from inside its heroine's great, wounded heart.
In Massachusetts in 1692 a coven of teenagers gather in a glade to invoke Satan's wrath. Though they romp in the style of sorority girls behaving like frat boys, they are witches, or at least witch wanna-bes. Their leader, Abigail (Ryder), is still steamed that her fling with John Proctor (Day-Lewis) has ended and is bent on ruining him and his saintly wife Elizabeth (Allen) by tarring them in the witch-hunt court of steely Judge Danforth (Scofield).
Outraged justice can make for pat dramatics--after all, not even Bob Dornan would sanction the public hanging of people being true to their conscience. So The Crucible has to work as glamorous set pieces for good actors. Under Nicholas Hytner's tense, suave direction, it does that, especially when the women seize center-screen: Allen's spindly radiance vs. Ryder's blood-slurping hysteria. Her cheeks flush, her winsome beauty seared with erotic rage, Ryder exposes the real roots of the piece. Forget McCarthyism; The Crucible is a colonial Fatal Attraction.
In Breaking the Waves, Bess (Emily Watson) is as driven as Abigail, as beatific as Elizabeth. This simple Scottish lass marries Jan (Stellan Skarsgard), a Scandinavian worker on an oil rig just offshore of Bess's tiny, benighted Scottish town. The church that Bess helps clean is so severe that it has no bells to ring out its worship. The frosty elders would not be pleased to know that their gentle, virginal Bess, who speaks to God and hears back from him, has been awakened, with one swift priapic thrust, to the joys of marital love. Bess responds like a child to the brand-new secrets of sex; she transforms her religious intensity into the grandeur of romantic obsession.
When Jan is injured on the job--paralyzed from the neck down and given scant chance of survival--Bess is desperate, guilt-ridden, still determined to please him. What he wants is for her to have sex with other men and tell him her adventures in baroque detail. That she has no natural taste for the job makes her mission sacred, a Calvary of carnality, and she takes to it dutifully. "I don't make love to them," she says of her conquests. "I make love to Jan, and I keep him from dying." The town thinks Bess is a witch; but she's really a saint, in martyrdom for love.