Garth Davis (2018)
Garth Davis is named as director but Mary Magdalene comes across like the work of a committee, set up to ensure the film doesn’t offend anyone – Christian or non-Christian. Such a cautious approach is doomed to failure. The movie, trying to avoid controversy, mostly steers clear too of both entertainment and theological interest. Besides, there are those who’ll go to contortionist lengths to be outraged – as Katie Edwards, Director of the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, demonstrates in an article on the website ‘The Conversation’[1]. Not content with complaining that the film’s main parts are played by white actors – Rooney Mara is Mary Magdalene, Joaquin Phoenix is Jesus – Edwards is so determined to find fault that she also deplores the casting and ‘African’ accent of Chiwetel Ejiofor as the apostle Peter. Because he shows some opposition to Mary, Peter ‘is in danger of portraying black African men as regressive, misogynistic and self-serving’. Even without Ejiofor’s admittedly incongruous accent (no one else in the cast tries to sound ‘foreign’), his blackness, in what Edwards sees as a baddie role, would still be problematic. The film’s third largest part of Peter, is, obviously, one in which Garth Davis should have cast a white actor[2].
Mary Magdalene begins with a voiceover from the title character: ‘I asked Him what the kingdom of heaven would be like … ‘ The words that follow are Jesus’s parable of the mustard seed but the image accompanying them shows a body floating in blue water – vast, depthless, mystically lit. It’s an immediate reminder that film special effects have been preempting our visual imagination of a world hereafter for a long time now. Cinematic convention also comes in handy at the climax to the story. We’re so used to dream and fantasy sequences on screen that we don’t have to infer from Mary’s post-crucifixion encounters with the living Jesus that Garth Davis is saying Christ rose from the dead: she may be seeing things and we, like the disciples with whom she discusses what she’s seen, can make of it what we will. The same goes for the miracles included in the narrative, although Davis has to be a bit smarter with these. A blind girl has barely a moment to react to the gift of sight before an hysterical crowd presses in and obscures her from view. Lazarus is restored to life but was he really dead anyway? He is lying apparently lifeless but not in the tomb, when Jesus appears on the scene. (There’s nothing in the script that corresponds to the uncompromising words of the New Testament: ‘Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days’.)
Screen Daily describes Mary Magdalene as ‘a humanist, feminist take on the New Testament’ and quotes Philippa Goslett, who co-wrote the screenplay with Helen Edmundson, as follows: ‘What happened to Mary Magdalene and her identity over the centuries was a travesty. Here was an opportunity to give a voice for [sic] someone who had been silenced for so long’. Goslett’s words announce the film as resonantly on-trend (though production wrapped in the Before Weinstein epoch). A legend on the screen ahead of the closing credits makes clear the travesty was thanks to patriarchy: in the late sixth century, Pope Gregory demoted Mary from the status of apostle to that of harlot. But another closing legend imparts Catholic Church-friendly information. It’s the current Pope who has called Time’s Up on his predecessor: in 2016 Pope Francis (in elevating her annual Memorial Day to a feast in the Church’s liturgical calendar) named Mary Magdalene ‘Apostle of Apostles’.
The film’s calculated modernity comes through in several ways. It’s good to see that Jesus was ahead of the historical game in workforce diversity and equal opportunity matters. The apostles are a multi-racial group; Mary Magdalene is authorised to do baptisms along with the men. At one point, Peter stresses the need for the team to develop a ‘strategy’ (why not a mission statement?) The implication that the first Christians were so enlightened is – like the premise of Noah (2014) that the eponymous hero was an eco-warrior ahead of his time – both preposterous and distinctive. But as you watch Mary Magdalene and hear a version of the Lord’s Prayer shorn of some of the trickier phrases, you do wonder about the film’s target audience. In particular, who exactly needs Mary to be ‘rehabilitated’? For biblical fundamentalists, she is, presumably, whatever the gospels say she is. Those more loosely sympathetic to the Christian story can see Jesus’s association with her as an expression of his notorious social broad-mindedness (‘he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners’). Could modern secular audiences, for the most part, care less? A small minority may even object to denying Mary her Gregorian status on the grounds that doing so unfairly stigmatises sex workers.
The film is so focused on presenting Mary Magdalene as not a scarlet woman that it fails to make her much else instead. Except for Peter, the disciples accept her joining their number. Until the aftermath of Jesus’s death, she is, in effect, a supporting character – overshadowed by Joaquin Phoenix’s Jesus in terms of screen time and screen presence. Rooney Mara’s usual lack of dynamism, combined with a beauty more expressive in single shots than in movement, reinforces this effect, though she plays the part intelligently and does connect emotionally with Phoenix. That’s important: we’re clearly meant to infer that Mary ‘sees’ Jesus, in life and therefore after death, as none of the male apostles does. Pace Katie Edwards, the disagreements between Mary and Peter not only bring a bit of much-needed tension to proceedings but also do more than anything else to give Mary individual substance and feminist meaning. Her argument with Peter in the closing stages anticipates – in effect if not intention – the long-running theological debate as to what it means to say that Jesus ‘overcame death’ and the difference of opinion is plausibly gendered here. Go-getting Peter is frustrated by the elusiveness of what Mary says about the kingdom of heaven being ‘now’ and ‘within’. He has no time to waste: there’s a Church of Rome to found.
Fears that Jesus would be just the latest of Joaquin Phoenix’s worrying wild men prove largely unwarranted – at least, Phoenix’s unstable quality seems to increase Jesus’s mystery rather than reduce him to a Messiah complex case study. Mary Magdalene is a pretty traditional biblical film in that, among the male disciples, Peter and Judas (Tahar Rahim) are just about the only ones with more than a couple of lines of dialogue. (In the film’s smaller parts, it’s the Israeli actress Irit Sheleg, as Jesus’s mother, who makes the strongest impression.) Judas looks to Jesus to bring about social and political revolution and betrays him because these hopes are disappointed. It’s hardly an original idea but, with Tahar Rahim in the role, it’s a reasonably effective one: Rahim’s passion and desperate, still youthful enthusiasm give an occasional jolt of energy to the even-paced, often dull narrative. The Judas kiss in the Garden of Gethsemane is a puzzle, though: those who arrive (on horseback) to arrest Jesus are too far away at the time to see the embrace.
In Lion (2016), Garth Davis and his cinematographer Greig Fraser eschewed obvious colourfulness to present India in, for the most part, neutral tones. The parched, bleached look they give the Holy Land (actually southern Italy) in Mary Magdalene may be less striking but the occasional flashes of intense colour have a bracing impact. This is a handsome film to look at, with some impressive overhead and panoramic shots (also used sparingly). With the score, however, we’re back to the balancing-act committee. The music, by Hildur Guðnadóttir and (the late, sad to say) Jóhann Jóhannsson, can be read as solemnly reverent/quietly inspirational if so desired. But the sound of it is familiar from films with secular subjects. That makes it unexceptionable, as well as unexceptional.
20 March 2018
[1] https://theconversation.com/mary-magdalene-is-yet-another-example-of-hollywood-whitewashing-94134
[2] In what amounts to a comical error in a piece headlined ‘Mary Magdalene is yet another example of Hollywood whitewashing’, Katie Edwards notes that Chiwetel Ejiofor won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave. The Best Actor award that year went to Matthew McConaughey.
