I was on Twitter pontificating about Joaquin Phoenix's probable Oscar win tonight for his performance as Joker. I argued that the actor's best performance last year was as Jesus in Garth Davis's MARY MAGDALENE. (The film was released first overseas in 2018 and then had a brief limited run in the US last year.) Someone asked me if the movie itself was any good. In trying to answer that question, I started to reflect on the genre it belongs to, that subgenre of the biblical epic, the Jesus movie.
MARY MAGDALENE is an interesting addition to the corpus of Jesus movies. All Jesus movies have a different theological focus. This reflects (probably unintentionally) the way we receive the original story of Christ in the New Testament.
A digression: If you read the Christian Bible as a unified work, the break between the old and new testaments is a shocking transition. After the OT collection of myth, poetry, law, and history, we suddenly transition into four different takes on one story--a multi-fractured narrative biography of Christ. Why the different perspectives? Even among the three synoptic Gospels there's a striking difference in style (the critic Harold Bloom once said that with its emphasis on demonic possession and dark forebodings the Gospel of Mark read like something written by Edgar Allan Poe), and that's before you even get to the epic Gospel of John, which takes things in radically different cosmological and Christological directions.
All of which is a way of saying that the story of Jesus has been open to varied interpretation from the beginning. On film, his story has been told regularly since the earliest days of silent movies, starting with George Melies's short CHRIST WALKING ON WATER in 1899. In fact, the first MARY MAGDALENE film (at least I think it was the first) was released as far back as 1914.
Making a film about Christ isn't simply a matter of assembling a collection of his greatest hits (of both the rhetorical and miraculous variety) and topping it off with the death and resurrection. A film about Christ has to stake out its own distinct theological point of view. What is the story this particular filmmaker wants to tell about Jesus? What's important about this story? What's less important? What's the final message of this story?
Something like Mel Gibson's PASSION OF THE CHRIST is a good example of what I mean. Gibson made the first fundamentalist Christian movie about Christ. He stripped the story down to one message: Christ took our much deserved punishment upon himself. Gibson hammers this message relentlessly for two hours. Christ suffered and died for us, and that is why we owe him our allegiance. Nothing else he said or did--the other 90% of the story of the Gospels--is important. And this message perfectly captures a fundamentalist understanding of the story of Christ. As a Southern Baptist, I heard this message preached three times a week every week, 52 weeks a year.
There are other good examples of what I mean. Pier Pasolini's THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW casts Jesus as proto-Marxist, focusing on the way his message is directed toward the poor and downtrodden living under imperial rule. Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST uses the Gospel story as a meditation on the struggle between the spirit and the flesh. Because it gives itself wide leeway in telling this story, the result is probably the most psychologically dense Jesus movie ever made.
MARY MAGDALENE is unique in that it focuses on Christ's relationship with Mary Magdalene. It decenters the story, making Jesus the object rather than the subject of the film. This decentering has been done before, of course, most famously in BEN-HUR, where Jesus isn't much more than a Very Special Guest Star. (The Coen brothers' brilliant and generally underrated HAIL CESAR! has a lot of fun lampooning BEN-HUR'S hamfisted attempts at big budget piety.) What makes MARY MAGDALENE unique is the way it shifts the focus to Mary Magdalene, arguing that she was Christ's primary disciple, the holy woman to his holy man, and that their message was rooted in a sense of liberation that might best be described as feminist.
There are so many ways this could go wrong, and doubtless some viewers will reject the film outright just on the basis of that description, just on the basis of the word feminist itself. And yet, it must be said that the film's primary strength is that it is a serious, even pious work, one that actually tries to wrestle with the notion that the core of Christ's message was a shattering of traditional hierarchies. It deals with one element that every serious consideration of Christ must deal with, the fact that his message was never fully understood by his disciples and followers, and that according to the Gospels themselves, this was by design, that Christ kept his own counsel. In this film, Mary is the one who wrestles with it the most, the one who comes to the best understanding of Christ's earthly mission.
As Mary, Rooney Mara is quite good, emotional but contained. She anchors the movie. But every Jesus movie, even the ones that decenter him, are about their Jesus, which brings us back around to Joaquin Phoenix.
I didn't love or hate JOKER. I thought it was okay. I thought Phoenix, fearless performer that he is, did what he had to do, but I also don't think there was anything terribly surprising about his performance. To hear that Joaquin Phoenix is playing a guy with mental health issues who descends into madness and becomes the Joker is to pretty much have already seen his performance. He plays crazy. He plays it with absolute commitment, but he's kind of just playing crazy.*
As Jesus, however, Phoenix is offbeat and unpredictable. He plays Christ as a mystic, not as tortured as Willem Defoe in LAST TEMPTATION but similarly haunted and unsure of himself. He's not the smug know-it-all that we sometimes get from the onscreen Jesus, the guy who already knows the answer and is just making the rest of us guess. Phoenix's Christ is a man coming to the dawning realization that he is also god, that he is communing with the spirit world in a way that no one else ever has. His relationship with Mara's Mary is chaste in large part because they've both transcended the body, with him showing her the way to a larger understanding of human existence and with her taking that message and trying to apply it to the real world.
If Phoenix wins the Oscar tonight, good for him. He's one of the best actors we have, so I'll be happy for him. But his best performance last year wasn't as the Clown Prince of Crime but as the King of Kings.
*I can't remember the episode but the podcast Keep It recently did a good job articulating this same idea about Phoenix's performance in JOKER.
Reading about the recent dust up between Martin Scorsese and Marvel fans, I couldn't help but think of Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. It's a film that Scorsese admires and that he showcased in his documentary A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN FILM (1995). It's a finely crafted big budget spectacular. It's also a pretty bad film. What I mean is, no one watches THE TEN COMMANDMENTS today and thinks of it in anything other than genre terms. It's not a serious statement of religious conviction, it's not psychologically rich, and it's not a great work of cinema. Instead, it's the biggest of the biblical epics, the popular movie genre that dominated big screens in the 1950s. And biblical epics were, basically, proto-superhero movies. They have most of the qualities that we associate with superhero movies: square-jawed heroes with fantastic abilities, impressive special effects, romantic subplots, broad action and drama, and characters that fall pretty easily into the categories of good and bad. (About the only thing from the standard superhero tool kit that THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is missing is comedy, because DeMille didn't have a sense of humor.) I suspect Scorsese is probably making allowances for Moses that he won't make for Iron Man because he formed an attachment to the biblical epics as a kid. As a child, he looked past their goofiness and their shallowness because all he saw was their size and spectacle. The symbolism of the Bible writ large on the big screen fired his imagination, and that initial awe and wonder has stayed with him. The same is undoubtedly true of people who love comic book movies. Where they would watch THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and might only see stodgy cheese, they look past many of those same qualities in their beloved comic book movies because they bonded with those stories and characters as children.
Something else that has inspired these reflections is that I rewatched Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST the other day. It's a fascinating film, and part of its fascination is that despite all of its controversy, in its heart it's kind of another cheesy biblical epic. It's dealing with deadly serious theological issues, but, I don't know, every time Harvey Keitel opens his mouth to debate Jewish law, I laugh. When the snake tempts Jesus in the desert with "Look at my breasts. Ooh Jesuuus," I laugh. And pretty much every time Peter Gabriel's very '80s score kicks in, I laugh.
Something that THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and a movie like AVENGERS: ENDGAME have in common is that they both essentially exist to do fan service. (THE TEN COMMANDMENTS was the only movie my fundamentalist grandfather liked, probably because it was designed to give him exactly the version of Moses he expected to see. Most comic book fans love ENDGAME for the same reason.) In this crucial respect, though, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is different. Scorsese made a film that appealed to a very narrow sliver of the moviegoing public. He made a biblical epic that would antagonize the kind of people who usually like biblical epics, without necessarily attracting many people who don't like biblical epics. Along with Kevin Smith's DOGMA, it belongs in a tiny subgenre we might call Subversive-Catholic fanfic cinema. These are works of supremely idiosyncratic theological obsession.
I don't know if the superhero movie could really lend itself to this kind of treatment. Something like UNBREAKABLE is certainly a rethinking of the superhero movie, but it's not working from well known pre-existing characters. And, no, JOKER doesn't count, either. JOKER is a massive testament to fan service. It gives fans of the character exactly what they want to see (to the tune of about 745 million dollars and counting). Perhaps one day when Iron Man and Joker and all the rest of their superhero/villain brethren slip into the public domain alongside Jesus and Moses, we'll see if something truly challenging could be done with them. That should be interesting.
For now, we're stuck with the world as it is, a world dominated by superhero movies. In a way, I'm okay with that. I like many of these movies, and I suppose that whether they wear capes or togas, superheroes have pretty much always dominated movie screens. Having said that, it's also true that most great cinema addresses itself to the rest of us mere mortals, living our little lives down here below without the benefit of either infinity stones or parting seas.
Few films have influenced my own writing as much as Paul Schrader's 1979 thriller HARDCORE. It stars George C. Scott as Jake Van Dorn, a Grand Rapids businessman and faithful Calvinist, who, as the story begins, sends his only daughter, Kristen (Ilah Davis) off on a church youth trip to California. Van Dorn is a single father and he loves Kristen, but the film doesn't go out of its way to convince us of this fact. There are no big scenes between father and daughter in the first fifteen minutes of the film. This omission is important because of what happens next. Van Dorn gets a call from the the youth group in California telling him that Kristen has gone missing.
The rest of the film follows Jake's attempt to find his daughter. He hires a sleazy detective named Mast (played by the 1970s' most important character actor, Peter Boyle), and within a few months the detective comes back with horrific news. He has found Kristen, on film in a cheap 16mm underground porn film. In perhaps the film's most famous scene, he leads Van Dorn to a porn theater and shows him the movie to make sure that the girl in the film is his daughter. Van Dorn watches the film like he's being tortured, which, indeed, he is. In tears, he demands that detective shut off the projector. It's her.
When Mast fails to find Kristen after this initial revelation, Van Dorn plunges into the squalid underworld of sex and vice himself.
He haunts porn stores and brothels and massage parlors. He's berated by hookers and beat up by bouncers. The cops are of no use to him. Finally, he decides to pass himself off as a fledgling film producer. He meets a millionaire porn king (Leonard Gaines) and hangs out on the set of a porno. Eventually he finds a prostitute named Nikki (Season Hubley) who says she can lead him to his daughter.
The heart of the film is the relationship that develops between the middle-aged Calvinist from the Midwest and the LA sex worker. What's interesting about these scenes is that the film doesn't swerve into the kind of cliches that we might expect. The two don't fall in love or into a sexual relationship, nor does Van Dorn set out to save Nikki. She's along for this ride for the money, and he's using her to find his daughter. There's a kind of weary respect that grows between them as they accidentally fall into debates about religion, sex, and morality.
At one point, Nikki asks him, "How important do you think sex is?"
"Not very," he says.
"Well," she says, "then we're just alike. You think it's so unimportant that you don't even do it. And I think it's so unimportant that I don't care who I do it with."
HARDCORE is a spiritual brother to TAXI DRIVER, which Schrader also wrote, and both films owe something to the screenwriter's obsession with John Ford's THE SEARCHERS. All three films are about repressed men seeking to rescue young women locked in sexual slavery. Of the three films, HARDCORE is the one that is most interested in what the young woman has to say. Unlike the other two films, when HARDCORE reaches the end of its journey, the young woman in question gets to speak for herself. When Van Dorn finally smashes his way through the underworld and finds his daughter, she unleashes a torrent of abuse on him. In a way that the other two films never considered, HARDCORE at least ponders the possibility that the girl might not want to return to the world of decent people and mainstream society.
This is probably a good place to say that HARDCORE is a flawed film. Schrader is an idiosyncratic filmmaker, which is his greatest attribute (this film could not have come from anyone else), but it's often clunky in its execution. Stalwarts like Boyle and Gaines are terrific, but a lot of the supporting performances are stiff and little awkward. Some scenes go on too long, making and remaking a point that we've already gotten -- even the famous scene in the porn theater, for instance, goes on to such an extent that you're wondering why the hell Van Dorn doesn't just get up and leave. Likewise, the violent ending is overdone, with Scott rolling over the denizens of the underworld like a bulldozer. Is there really no professional criminal in California who can stand up to this potbellied businessman from Michigan?
Yet for fans of the flawed-but-kind-of-brilliant, HARDCORE is a great film. As I said at the start, I think this movie influenced me more than most of the films I've seen. It is both overtly religious and wildly seedy. You can practically feel the filmmaker torn between these two worlds. The thing that most people remember about HARDCORE, of course, is the descent into the world of sex-for-hire, but the scenes of a close knit religious community at the start of the film have a special kind of power for me. Schrader knows this world, comes from it himself, and his feel for it is deep. The scenes of Christmas dinner--with an elderly relative bemoaning the secularism of the television's holiday programming while a couple of guys debating at the kitchen table cite Bible verses at each other--as well as the brief scenes of the church youth group striking off for a Christian youth conference, all of this feels exactly right to me. It's different from what I grew up with among the Baptists in Arkansas, but it is familiar in the truest sense of the word, in the sense that there's a family resemblance between strict Protestant churches.
Although Schrader wrote TAXI DRIVER, that film is filtered through Scorsese's tortured Catholicism and his obsession with sacrament and penance. HARDCORE, on the other hand, is Schrader through and through. It is about frosty Protestant repression surviving a deep dive into the steamy muck of a world without rules. In TAXI DRIVER, De Niro's Travis Bickle is a man tormented by his desire for sex, which he finds filthy and corrupt. Scott's Jake Van Dorn, on the other hand, is not tormented in this same way because he's not tempted in the same way. He's horrified by the flesh markets, and although he is weary and battered, he remains as resolute as a knight on a quest. Thus, in its weird mix of seriousness and salaciousness, HARDCORE is something truly special, a dirty movie about the triumph of repression.
