Davis’ new film resurrects the genre of Biblical epics
here are no demons here,” Joaquin Phoenix’s Jesus mildly tells Rooney Mara’s Mary Magdalene. Her possession is all the New Testament tells us of its most infamous woman’s early life. The Christ of director Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene doesn’t exorcise her affliction, but lifts it like a loving psychiatrist. He sees no devils, only a woman misunderstood by her family. This feminist revision of Christianity’s whore figure typifies one of the Christian story’s most thoughtful tellings. The non-Christian filmmakers discern the radical love at its heart with outsiders’ clarity. “Rooney and I are not necessarily religious in any way,” Davis confirms. “But what we connected to was the spiritual message...[of Jesus] that’s been lost.” Davis didn’t intend a film only for Christians. “We want to bring this incredible story to everyone.”
This film joins a surge of wildly diverse Christianinspired cinema, from the blasphemy- baiting, velvet- black tragicomedy of Paolo Sorrentino’s TV masterpiece The Young Pope, to Martin Scorsese’s best work in a quarter-century with Silence’sexcoriating examination of doubt and denial in 17th century Japan, to Kevin Reynolds’ recasting of the resurrection’s aftermath as a Roman police procedural in Risen, to the fearsome piety of War Room, a shock US box office no. 1 made by evangelical pastors Alex and Stephen Kendrick. Auteurs’ personal ambiguity can conflict with the zealous certainty of America’s conservative Christians. But both draw from the same deep well.
When Joseph Fiennes’ centurion asks his troops in Risen, “Who among you knows the woman Mary Magdalene?”, half the barracks sheepishly put up their hands. Funny as it is, the scene continues the common misconception of Mary as the “fallen” woman who washed Jesus’s feet. So does Monica Belluci’s sultry version in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and Barbara Shelley’s titular, Messiah-attracting Last Temptation of Christ for Scorsese. All are based on a confusion which infuriates Mary Magdalene co-writer Helen Edmundson.
“There are lots of Marys in the Bible,” she explains, “and they’ve become conflated. The big blow was Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century, who wrote quite extensively that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. What grates is the way the Catholic Church in particular felt it necessary to create these polar opposite models of women: they had the Virgin Mary, and therefore by necessity they needed the opposite. It’s permeated and been problematic for centuries.”
“What I find really interesting,” says Edmundson’s co-writer Philippa Goslett, “is that since 1969, when the Catholic church formally separates these women out, the idea of Jesus’ bloodline has been prevalent. If Mary Magdalene’s not a prostitute, she must have been his lover. I hope that this film goes some way to restoring her spiritual authority, which is there within the Gospels, and has been so denigrated over the centuries.”
“Everything else is conjecture,” says Edmundson, who also consulted the non-biblical, Gnostic Gospel of Mary to write a woman who’s more than an observer. “We felt that if this Mary was strong enough to leave her home and everything she’d ever known with no going back, to join this group of men who had no idea of what their fate was going to be, then we could make her strong enough to point out to Jesus that if only men can be preached to and baptised, then that’s cutting out half the population. And to be a Mary who can actively baptise and minister in the same way men did. Those things felt fundamental.” Goslett felt the same. “Telling it from a fresh, female perspective, might our understanding of that journey, and Jesus’s mes- sage, be different?”
Lynne Ramsay, Joaquin Phoenix’s director in his other current film, You Were Never Really Here, sees his tortured character there as a Lazarus figure, reborn after sinking into watery depths. In Mary Magdalene, he resurrects Lazarus, and doesn’t feel much better. “There’s a wonderful mischief that comes through with Joaquin,” Edmundson considers. “A sort of acknowledgement of how extraordinary the whole thing is. I love just after he’s resurrected Lazarus, when he’s trembling all over, and profoundly terrified because of what he’s understood in that moment [that he must die for mankind]. Joaquin has that ability to look almost childlike in his frailty and distress. We did want him to be human. We wanted to feel that he had warmth and fragility. Partly to make room for Mary. I enjoyed imagining the human side of Christ—the fear and grief of leaving life and people who loved him, and the exhaustion of working miracles. Of everybody looking to you, and expecting.” Adds Goslett: “It was really important for us that Jesus is fully human and divine, and spontaneous. There was never a sense of, ‘Here’s a sermon I prepared earlier.’”
This is a film where Judas’s betrayal with a kiss is tragic and “tender” for Goslett. And in its bravest, most divisive scene, taken from the heavily disputed Gospel of Mary, she comes direct from the resurrected Christ with his message that the Kingdom he’s promised is within, only for Peter (Chewitel Ejiofor) to scornfully lead the male disciples, and the future church, on a divergent, more dominating path. There’s a Sussex vicar I know who reads from the Gospels, but replaces normal services’ readings from later New Testament descriptions of Peter’s sometimes draconian church-building with love poems. He ends services with the blessing of both Father and Mother, Son and Daughter. The fork in the road this strategy resists, which loaded the church with gender disparities and cruel tendencies it’s only now confronting, was fully intended in Mary Magdalene’s climactic scene. “The way they minister and care, that is the Kingdom,” Edmundson says. “It’s not God’s finger coming out of the sky at some point in the future. And with that other direction comes male dominance of the church.”
The “faith-based” genre is ultimately at its weakest, like most of Hollywood, in its inevitably blessed happy endings. But as Graham Greene had his character Monsignor Quixote say, the space left by doubt makes life, and faith, liveable, rather than a “desert where everyone is certain that the same belief is true”. As films such as Silence also show, allowing doubt lets Christian cinema earn our faith. THE INDEPENDENT
“Happiness is overrated. There has to be conflict in life.” “Fear is what makes comedy funny.”