Some Christians prepare for Easter by taking on a special penance for Lent. Me, I’ve been watching Jesus movies for what seems forty days and forty nights.
Why are good Jesus movies so rare? With the exception of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, a quality drama that strikes a reasonable balance, gospel films have either been pious sword-and-sandal schlock or highly stylized revisionist narratives that interpret Jesus according to contemporary socio-political agendas. John Wayne playing a drawling Roman centurion in The Greatest Story Ever Told, or Willem Dafoe playing Jesus as a sex-haunted mama’s boy in The Last Temptation of Christ: Pick your poison, pilgrim.
Part of the problem lies in the story itself: The gospels are novelistic rather than cinematic. The more serious challenge, however, is that audiences know the Christ story too well. “How to tell this story?” a young actor-director asks in the opening lines of Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal. “The most famous of all, one we think we all know?”
Though D. W. Griffith included a truncated treatment in his landmark 1916 film Intolerance, it fell to Cecil B. DeMille to do the first full-length film. DeMille’s silent 1927 The King of Kings puts a tabloid spin on the biblical account, hiding some fairly lurid material behind a veil of mawkish piety — and setting a standard for Bible movies that would hold for almost a half century.
The film’s title card, which bears DeMille’s signature, tells us that the director intends The King of Kings to help fulfill the “Great Commission” Christ issues in Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations.” That settled, DeMille takes us into the lair of Mary Magdalene, a swank courtesan who entertains noble layabouts in her posh pleasure palace. The Herodian hottie sports nothing but rhinestones on an exposed gazonga, and pouts that some Nazarene carpenter has stolen the attentions of her lover Judas Iscariot. She summons her zebra-drawn chariot, and sallies forth to get back her man.
This must have made quite an impression on 1920s audiences. And lo, when the Magdalene does meet Jesus, he casts out her seven demons (giving DeMille an opportunity to wow the viewers with primitive special effects) and makes her a follower. DeMille ratchets up the spectacle by causing a cage of light to descend over a blind child healed by Jesus. This stern, pompadoured Christ (played by H. B. Warner) is so revered by the filmmaker that he has a permanent halo and always appears to be covered with a thin film of white dust.
The King of Kings was the last Hollywood film biography of Jesus for over thirty years. In the 1950s, the golden age of biblical epics, Jesus made only cameo appearances in a pair of Hollywood blockbusters. In The Robe (1953), Richard Burton portrays a centurion at Calvary who couldn’t shake the horror of what he had seen there. The William Wyler-directed Ben-Hur (1959) stars Charlton Heston as a hotheaded Judean prince transformed by two fleeting encounters with the faceless, merciful Christ.
Clearly inspired by Ben-Hur’s eleven Oscars, Hollywood resurrected the Jesus genre in 1961, releasing the gasbag epic King of Kings. Director Nicholas Ray sets the scene with a clash between Jewish guerrillas and Roman soldiers. What might have been a laudable attempt to place Jesus in a political context quickly proves to be an excuse to stage a sword fight — which, despite the film’s corny religiosity, remains pretty much what King of Kings is about. Ray apparently blew his budget on impressive sets; the no-name actors prove you get what you pay for. John the Baptist looks like Conway Twitty in caveman drag. Blandoid Jesus is as dull and unfocused as the story line, with its woebegone attempts to jazz up the gospel with Palestinian intrigue centering around a conflict between revolutionary Barabbas (“the Messiah of War”) and Jesus (“the Messiah of Peace”).
The Barnum-like title of The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) promises the same degree of panoramic grandiosity, with the gruesome added attraction of “an all-star cast.” We’re talking Shelley Winters as the Woman of No Name! Pat Boone as the Young Man at the Tomb! Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate, baby! Let joy be unconfined. But the movie is better than anything one has a right to expect. It’s not gaudy, it’s reasonably well acted, and director George Stevens has a fine pictorial eye. But the epic sinks under the weight of its own title. It’s a long slog from Bethlehem to Calvary, made so by the pervasive air of ponderous solemnity.
After such rich, empty-calorie fare, Italian neo-realist filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s stripped-down The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) hits you like a sharp shot of scalding espresso. Compared with the rococo pageantry of the Hollywood sagas, Pasolini’s film is a model of Carthusian austerity. Pasolini cast aside expensive costumes and elaborate sets, distracting fictional inventions and all-star casts. On the far side of DeMillenarianism, the movie could hardly be more simple. Filmed in southern Italy, using rough-hewn peasants for extras, its stark black-and-white images advance a literal retelling of the Book of Matthew. Every word in the script comes straight from the Bible. Jesus (Enrique Irazoqui) storms hither and yon, preaching parables and issuing condemnations of the priestly caste. This is a fighting Jesus, an angry Jesus, a spiritual leveler and scourge of the high and mighty.
It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that Pasolini was a devout Marxist who saw Christ as a sort of Palestinian Spartacus. While his bracing take is perhaps preferable to the more conventionally reverential Hollywood films, the lack of tenderness in Pasolini’s Jesus rings false. What’s more, the thin, somewhat effeminate Irazoqui is badly miscast. He’s a prisspot who rails at his followers like a tyrannical Broadway choreographer, and it’s difficult to imagine why anyone, least of all burly Galilean fishermen, would follow this scold. In any case, Pasolini’s picture is more likely to be admired by professors and critics than churchgoers. Its slavish fidelity highlights the Bible’s cinematic limitations. Is this pedantic dullardry really more vital than the lumbering Technicolor warhorses of Hollywood?
For all its would-be radicalism, The Gospel According to St. Matthew is antique compared with the next wave of Jesus movies. The rise of the counter-culture and the concomitant upheaval in religious thinking gave us two of the most embarrassing artifacts of the 1970s: Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. Both began as hit Broadway musicals, and found their way onto the big screen in 1973. Jesus Christ Superstar, a rock opera written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, is the more interesting of the two, in the same way that Wilma Flintstone is more intriguing than Betty Rubble. Jesus Christ Superstar interprets the life of Christ as celebrity culture. In the film’s view, Jesus (Ted Neeley) was the Judean equivalent of a gifted teacher whose fame got too big for him to handle. His antagonist is Judas Iscariot (Carl Anderson), a disciple who wants to believe Jesus is the Messiah, but cannot.
The musical makes no pretense of believing that Jesus is the Son of God. Rather, it offers a critique of the star-making phenomenon, examining why people need to believe in saviors and suggesting that one achieves immortality only through lasting fame. It’s a timely, if theologically unacceptable, observation. But you have to sit through the aural equivalent of a lashing at the pillar in Lloyd Webber’s dreadful electric-guitar melodies, which sound like cats being strangled between the strings of a Stratocaster.
Better that than the achingly win-some Godspell, the only Jesus movie that makes you think the Sanhedrin may have had a point. Set in contemporary New York City, Godspell gives us Jesus and the Apostles as a multicultural troupe of slap-happy ninnies who cavort around town in clown get-ups learning parables while they do shtick. Think “Teletubbies at prayer.” Behold, the ne plus ultra of hippy-dippy, the apotheosis of twee. John the Baptist looks like an undiscovered Bee Gee. Our Lord is a paleface dork with a beatific grin, an Art Garfunkel afro, and a greasepaint heart on his forehead. It’s downhill from there, into one of the most cringeworthy motion pictures ever made (though the Stephen Schwartz score is undeniably catchy). To endure this movie is to think in sorrow and pity of three decades of church youth groups forced to watch this thing on all-night retreats, silently resolving to join up with the heathens at the first opportunity.
Those ludicrous excesses aside, changing times made it possible for Franco Zeffirelli to focus on Jesus’ humanity within a generally orthodox theological context in his six-hour 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. This is a life of Jesus that’s scrupulously realistic and spiritually serious, yet presented on an intimate scale. Zeffirelli is not preoccupied with the showmanship of the sword-and-sandal era, and he’s helped by the medium of television, which is more amenable to deemphasizing the pictorial.
Zeffirelli pictures Jesus as the Palestinian Jew who taught in synagogues though he scandalized the priests at times. The film is particularly strong in developing the relation of Christ to his disciples, and includes absorbing theological debates among temple clerics over who Jesus really is. There’s enough fictional invention here to flesh out the gospel accounts and make them interesting, but the script never strays from the spirit of Scripture. Robert Powell’s tremendously astute portrayal of Jesus is the best ever filmed, but I’m afraid that’s faint praise. His charismatic Jesus projects a gentle but firm authority, though his Oxbridge accent can be off-putting. For all its dramaturgical success, though, Jesus of Nazareth drags, simply because it’s hard to sit through six hours when you know everything that’s going to happen next.
Jesus of Nazareth was the last major production that attempted a broadly accessible, reasonably orthodox telling of the life of Christ. The year 1979 saw an unholy row develop over Monty Python’s Life of Brian — a largely misunderstood religious satire by Britain’s irreverent comedy troupe, which poked fun at messianism in general and pop culture’s tacky treatment of serious religious themes. Public officials in Baton Rouge and similar locales tried to ban the film.
But the Life of Brian brouhaha, and a similar squabble over Jean-Luc Godard’s blasphemous Hail, Mary (1985) were skirmishes compared with the battle over Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Scorsese based his movie on the Nikos Kazantzakis novel, in which the Greek writer imagined a sinful Jesus wracked by nightmare visions, extreme doubt, and sexual agonies. The film comes with a disclaimer saying it is “not based upon the gospels,” but is instead a fictional exploration of the “eternal conflict” between spirit and flesh.
Well. Willem Dafoe plays Jesus as a carpenter who builds crosses for the Romans and is a neurotic weakling, liar, and coward: “I’m afraid of everything. I never tell the truth. I don’t have the courage.” He’s a peripatetic fruitcake who “finds” himself in the course of his journeys — a New Age goonybird more suited for Malibu than Nazareth. Ironically, what seemed to upset most protesters was the scene in which the crucified Jesus hallucinates the normal life he would have if he came down from the Cross — a life that includes sex with Mary Magdalene, kids, and a mortgage. There is nothing particularly heterodox about this; orthodox Christian theology holds that Jesus was tempted by all things, but rejected them, as he does this final temptation.
Still, there’s no gainsaying the film’s offensiveness. And The Last Temptation of Christ fails miserably as storytelling. It reveals how little room there is for artistic improvisation on the gospel story. It’s a futile exercise in psychobiography and historical revisionism.
Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand’s French-language Jesus of Montreal (1989) questions the whole enterprise of telling Jesus’ story. The film’s hero, Daniel Coulombe (Lothaire Bluteau), is a little-known actor commissioned to update a local Passion Play that has gotten stodgy.
Daniel brings together a band of nobodies, and they rewrite the story of Christ’s suffering and death to make it relevant for modern audiences. The revisionist version claims Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. He denies his status as the Messiah and urges his followers to “seek salvation within yourself.” It also portrays the Resurrection as a psychological event.
This being a left-wing secularist allegory, the corrupt religious establishment tries to shut down the brave young truth-tellers, and the Satan figure appears as a slick Montreal lawyer who tempts Daniel to capitalize on his growing fame. When the hero dies tragically, the movie ends with spurious heroic legends spreading about Daniel’s life and his followers making a deal with the devil to build a theater (read: a church) in his memory.
Arcand’s boilerplate skepticism about Christianity is less interesting than what his movie says about the knowability of Jesus through art and religion. The Passion Play within the movie is conditioned by the prejudices and predilections of its authors and its audience. The real story is what happens to Daniel away from the outdoor stage. He begins living the gospel, standing up for the exploited and resisting offers to sell out for worldly gain or compromise his message to protect his hide.
Though its humanistic theology is skewed and unreliable, Jesus of Montreal suggests that in the end, the only sure way to understand Jesus is not through fictional representations of his life, but in living by his teachings. Considering the dispiriting history of Jesus in film, that’s sage advice. As Samuel Johnson put it, when he complained about religious poetry, “The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestic for ornament.” And too complex and difficult for the movies.
Rod Dreher is a columnist at the New York Post.
