BEFORE: I made it to Easter Sunday, and an Easter-themed film, as planned. Rooney Mara carries over from "Ain't Them Bodies Saints". When I visited my parents a couple weeks ago, I brought this film along, and set up the DVD player so my Mom could watch it, which then gave me a couple hours to go out shopping - Mom and Dad still weren't quite ready to leave the house. I knew I would probably have this film coming up on my schedule, so there was no need to watch it with her, I didn't want any spoilers. JK.
I had a couple linking options here, like Ben Foster's also in this film called "Leave No Trace", and I really wanted to follow the Rami Malek path out of "Ain't Them Bodies Saints", because I really want to see "Bohemian Rhapsody" and the remake of "Papillon" that he's in, I'll just have to find another way to get there, preferably later this year.
I finished watching the third season of "American Gods" earlier this week, and it wrapped up with a bunch of crucifixion stuff - if you've read the Neil Gaiman book, you may know what I'm talking about, but the 3-season show on Starz finally reached the point where a major god character dies, and then another character spends 9 days hanging on the giant tree Yggdrasil, which is as close as you can get to a crucifixion theme without being blatantly obvious. The last two seasons of the show have been a real slog, because I could have re-read the book at least three times in the time it took for them to air the last 10 episodes. They didn't even GET to the end of the book before cancelling the series, but now there's talk of finishing the story in a made-for-cable movie or filming Season 4 for another channel or streaming service. I'll keep hate-watching it if they decide to finish the story - but if they'd just moved a little faster narratively, they could have been DONE by now.
Before I get bogged down in religious dogma, here's the TCM line-up for Monday, April 5, which is Day 5 of their "31 Days of Oscar":
6:00 am "Eskimo" (1933)
8:00 am "Executive Suite" (1954)
10:00 am "Experiment Perilous" (1944)
11:45 am "The Facts of Life" (1960)
1:30 pm "The Fallen Idol" (1948)
3:15 pm "Far From the Madding Crowd" (1967)
6:15 pm "A Farewell to Arms" (1932)
8:00 pm "Father of the Bride" (1950) - SEEN IT
8:00 pm "Father of the Bride" (1950) - SEEN IT
10:00 pm "Five Easy Pieces" (1970) - SEEN IT
12:00 am "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" (1953)
1:45 am "Flower Drum Song" (1961)
4:15 am "Flying Down to Rio" (1933) - SEEN IT
Damn, here's where my stats are going to start taking a dive - I've only seen 3 out of 12, and a few of these films, I've never even HEARD of them before! This puts me at 31 out of 58, or 53.4%, and again I'm scratching my head over why the schedule was put together like this - maybe to get the famous Nicholson film, and two of the most popular films beginning with "F" into prime time? But why push the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film into the wee hours, when nobody is watching? I guess I need to look at the big picture here, and figure out which films are bricks and which are mortar, according to this system, so they get through the alphabet at exactly the right rate.
THE PLOT: Astonished by the charisma, personality and words of Jesus, Mary decides to follow him despite strong opposition from her family.
AFTER: It's been over 30 years since I split from the Catholic Church, when I decided that I much preferred sleeping in on Sunday mornings then going to mass and being made to feel like I was less than if I didn't follow a bunch of rules that were set up five hundred years ago, while being read stories written a thousand years ago about events that supposedly happened a thousand years before that. And the whole rituals about holy water, bread and wine turning into flesh and blood, holy relics, give me a break. Church felt to me like a theater production filled with all the trappings of magic tricks, only there were no payoffs, because the tricks only worked if you believed that they did, to me there was zero evidence that anything magical or holy was even taking place. You're free to disagree, of course, but then I'd call upon you to prove the magic, and you just can't.
But the beliefs and the dogma got planted deep inside me, despite all the questions I would ask the priests and nuns about all the contradictions in the faith, and the parts of the Bible that didn't make any sense, and decades later, I'm still sorting through it all, trying to decide if any of it is worth keeping - the moral principles, sure, like "Love thy Neighbor" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill" are pretty helpful, but I can follow those without going to church or giving the diocese any money. That last part always makes organized religion look like a big pyramid scheme, if you ask me. But I digress.
I'll admit that the church teachings have changed somewhat since I was a kid, but how much, exactly? The bigger changes that I've seen have been reflected in the movies about Jesus & Co., because if you were to watch, say, "The Greatest Story Ever Told", followed by "Jesus Christ Superstar", followed by "The Last Temptation of Christ", followed by "The Passion of the Christ", those are all vastly different films. The only thing I can compare it to is the way they keep re-booting Spider-Man or Batman every few years - I don't think this counts as heresy, because what are the superheroes, if not men with godly powers, or gods that walk among men? Every few years the writers (of both comic-books and movies) feel the need to revamp the heroes, put a slightly different spin on the same stories, and hope that this, combined with the presence of a dynamic new actor, will make the stories more appealing to the next bunch of fans. The Jesus character is really no different.
They even got the actor from the latest Joker reboot to play Jesus here - even though this was released before "Joker", the point is still valid. Joaquin Phoenix plays Jesus as a troubled man here, someone who heals the sick and raises the dead, but these tasks sure seem to take a lot of the energy out of him, and he has to meditate alone to recover. And his other super-power appears to be charisma, the type of man who could get 12 other men (and one woman) to follow him around, eventually spreading his messages to hundreds, then thousands. I always felt that this was somehow a greater power than performing the miracles, the fact that Jesus and the apostles went on tour like a modern rock band would, and got so many followers, eventually and perhaps a little too late.
The other connection that my brain wants to make, though, is likening the band of apostles and the way that Jesus wanted to tear down the temple in Jerusalem to the misguided numbnuts who stormed the Capitol this January. Now, hold on, stay with me, this analogy is certain to anger people on both sides of the political spectrum, but I'm not saying that the Proud Boys and the Q-Anoners were right to do what they did, because they were almost certainly in the wrong, being on the side of chaos and political upheaval, which is all technically illegal and unconstitutional. I'm just saying that their GOALS seemed to be similar, which was to point out what they felt was wrong about the system, and take up arms to try to correct that. The Bible says that Jesus didn't like the animal sacrifices being made at the temple, and the way that the rich people could buy a dove or a lamb to be slain, in order to have their sins forgiven, instead of doing the repentance themselves, and trying to change their ways. Meanwhile, the temple priests would be dining on squab and roast lamb that night. There's a very different long-term intent, however, Jesus tried to tear down the temple for the benefit of all, to make a better system, to force people to change internally rather than buy indulgences, while the rednecks who stormed the Capitol tried to change the system just to keep THEIR favorite guy in office, keep their taxes low and, long-term, make sure that white people could be more successful than dark-skinned people. So, similar approach but not similar intent.
The bigger change here is the reboot of Mary Magdalene's story, as this film is mainly told from her point of view, so here she's no longer a reformed prostitute, but instead they've given her a backstory where she was the weird woman who wanted to pray like the men did, not in temple sitting with the other women in the back, not in private, but at home, out loud, like a Hebrew man. Then she found that she couldn't just go along with the marriage that was arranged for her, she had a feeling that this wasn't the life for her, she wanted to choose her own path in life. Crazy, right? But conveniently very in line with modern sensibilities - and oddly, this also jibes with current Catholic dogma, because in 2016 the church also rebuked the prostitute origin story, which had only been around since 1591, when Pope Gregory XIV apparently combined her story with that of Mary of Bethany, the "sinful woman" who anointed Jesus' feet in a different chapter of Luke. Well, OK, there sure were a bunch of Mary's back then, who can keep them all straight?
I guess every single village had a Mary or two, because (and this is perhaps why they invented last names) they resorted to everybody having to say where they were FROM as part of their name. This Mary was from the village of Magdala, so now it's all starting to make sense. There just weren't as many PEOPLE around back then, so hence there was "Jesus of Nazareth" so he wouldn't be confused with "Jesus of Corinth" or "Jesus of Capernaum", it was all very confusing, I bet. Now there are billions of people in the world, and just look at how many people on Facebook have the same names - we should probably go back to this system, and people should list themselves as "Frank Smith of Hackensack" or "Martin Adams of Spokane". Just a thought.
Mary of Magdala is now considered a saint, according to the church, and Pope Francis raised her to the status of "Apostle of the apostles" back in 2016. But let's get real, nobody really knows what went down back in 30 C.E., we're just relying on stories that were written hundreds of years after the fact, and have been filtered through re-telling after re-telling and reboot after reboot, people constantly re-adapting the stories for each age. We can accept that this Mary, and Jesus, were real historical figures, but then if Mary wasn't allowed to write anything down, or spread the word openly, then how much of her story can be confirmed, in any way? Was she possessed by a demon at some point, or did she have what we now call a mental disorder, and if so, what are the implications of that? And has her rise to prominence in theology been done to correct a major injustice, or just to get the Bible to appeal to more of today's women?
Then we get to the whole post-crucifixion stuff, which is another part of the story that sets off my B.S. meter, as you can imagine. Mary Magdalene here is portrayed as the first witness to the resurrected Jesus, but it's hard to tell if they implied that she saw him in the flesh, or just dreamed about him walking around outside the tomb, and that somehow counted. You can probably guess which interpretation I favor, but they chose to leave that very ambiguous. Then Mary goes to tell the apostles that "Jesus came to her", but what, exactly, does that mean? Then the apostles get all excited when Mary tells them that the kingdom they've been waiting for IS THERE, as long as they themselves believe it, that they should go ahead with their plan to keep spreading the word of Jesus, which seems like a "fake it 'til you make it" approach, and I can believe and get behind that. Peter takes Mary's words to heart, and says the word will be spread by "every man in this room", so once again, as a woman, Mary's not included.
There's another very relevant section of this film, where Peter and Mary M. are traveling, spreading the words of Jesus, and they encounter a village that's been ravaged by plague, and Peter just wants to move on, saying there's nothing they can do for the people there, their job is to find the healthier people who can help them by joining their cause. Mary stops, however, to bring water to the few villagers still alive, because she believes it's their moral responsibility to provide help, to do what they can, even if it conflicts with their long-term goals. This couldn't be more timely, we've seen both approaches to the COVID pandemic in the past year - do we let the virus spread, build up herd immunity despite the cost of millions of lives, or do we stop what we're doing, help who we can, do the hard work necessary to change our habits, develop and distribute a vaccine, while donating to food banks and other charities? Well, we tried the first approach, and it didn't work, so now we're working on the second - Mary Magdalene is clearly more right here, and Peter less so - he's focused on the big picture, but she's not willing to give up on saving the individuals.
The other character that gets a reboot here is Judas, one of the most complicated characters in the Bible, the apostle that turned Jesus in to the authorities for money, then gave the money away and hung himself. So many contradictions, and his motives aren't clear unless you really simplify things, which most people do. This film portrays him as a man whose wife and daughter died because of the Roman Empire, and he's following Jesus because he believes in Jesus's prophecies, especially the ones where the meek inherit the earth and the balance of power shifts, and the dead rise up from their graves. He just wants his wife and daughter to be alive again, and the other apostles don't seem to have the heart to tell him that this prophecy is just a metaphor, but he really seems to want zombies to rise up, because then at least he'll have his reunion. His motive for turning in Jesus, the one who caused all that trouble at the temple, was to force the issue, once Jesus was in prison, he'd be forced to act and make that big change, snap his fingers and overthrow Rome and raise all the dead at once. (OK, but how's he going to do that, without an Infinity Gauntlet?). Then Judas doesn't even stick around long enough to realize that the only dead person who'll be rising out of the grave is Jesus himself - which, if it did happen, is still a great magic trick, it's just not as good as the one that was advertised.
I maintain that it's impossible to tell a Biblical story that's also historically accurate - in the end, filmmakers have to choose one over the other - but we can learn something about our society NOW when we see elements of it reflected in a current film based on the Bible. Note that there are no "goofs" listed on the IMDB page - even though there were probably tons of super-religious people who disagreed with the way that certain things were portrayed. But what can they claim, "That's not the way it happened!"? Nobody, NOBODY really knows what happened back in 30 C.E., and anybody who says that they do is trying to sell you something.
Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Joker"), Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Tahar Rahim (last seen in "The Eagle"), Ariane Labed (last seen in "Before Midnight"), Denis Menochet (last seen in "Assassin's Creed"), Lubna Azabal (last seen in "Body of Lies"), Tcheky Karyo (last seen in "The Core"), Charles Babalola (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Tawfeek Barhom, Ryan Corr (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Uri Gavriel, Shira Haas (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Tsahi Halevi, Michael Moshonov, David Schofield (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Irit Sheleg, Jules Sitruk, Zohar Shtrauss, Lior Raz, Hadas Yaron, Roy Assaf, Valentina Camelutti, Jacopo Olmo Antinori, Theo Theodoridis, Sarah-Sofie Boussina
RATING: 5 out of 10 fishing nets
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