HIP-HOPPING BETWEEN IRREVERENT AND PIOUS
There’s lots to be enjoyed and admired in ‘The Book of Clarence’, but you can’t have your communion wafer and eat it too. By Tymon Smith
Easter at the movies tends to offer two predictable types of fare: easily digestible safe family entertainment and pious, melodramatic, earnest biblical epics for the faithful that offer a timely reminder of the fact that this particular holiday period is about more than just late season seaside getaways.
The style of the biblical epic has changed very little since its heyday in mid-20th-century Hollywood, when films such as Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur and The Greatest Story Ever Told, offered Godfearing, anti-communist post-war America, wide screen, early special effects-laden, soaring reaffirmation of the righteousness of its superior Christian values and mission.
Films that have tried to offer a less serious-minded or alternative vision of the life of Jesus and his teachings have usually been met with outrage and boycotts by the faithful. The sacrilegious, black humoured offence of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian in 1979 didn’t exactly start a wave of similarly shibboleth stomping films and, a decade later, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ —a devotedly religious attempt to imagine Jesus as more mortal than his biblical incarnation — was boycotted by the Catholic church and banned in many countries, including, predictably, apartheid era South Africa.
Enter Britain-born musician turned director Jeymes Samuel, whose previous film, the hip-hop-flavoured allblack cast revisionist Western, The Harder They Fall, offered a dark-humoured but smartly righteous antidote to the genre’s lily-white history and conservative mythmaking propensities.
This time it’s the biblical epic that gets the all-black, hip-hop-infused, postmodern kick to its core values with The Book of Clarence, a film that, like Life of Brian, is focused on the story of a character whose fate runs parallel to Jesus, but who isn’t the Messiah and rather, at least to begin with, “a very naughty boy”.
LaKeith Stanfield plays Clarence, an AD33 Jerusalem hustler who, when we meet him, is engaged in a wild street chariot race against local tomboy and wildling
Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor) that offers plenty of Ben Hur-winking adrenalin as the competitors wreak havoc in the streets of the Italian town of Matera (standing in for ancient Jerusalem).
Clarence and his sidekick, best friend Elijah (RJ Cyler), have borrowed money from local loan shark Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi Abrefa) and bet it on the outcome of the race, hoping to win big and use some of the profits to impress Clarence’s crush Varinia (Anna Diop), who also happens to be Jedediah’s sister. Things don’t quite work out, and Clarence finds himself in a serious pickle with money owed to Jedediah and his side-hustle weeddealing gig not bringing in enough to help pay his debt. Exasperated, he sets off to find his twin brother Thomas (also played by Stanfield), an apostle of the real Messiah everyone’s talking about on the streets of Jerusalem.
Clarence attempts to convince the disciples that he should become their 13th member. He’s met with scepticisim, especially from one Judas Iscariot (Michael Ward), who proposes that Clarence demonstrate his commitment by doing a good and worthy deed.
Annoyed but undeterred, Clarence decides to show Jesus’ friends his worth by going to a local gladiator school and challenging the mighty and seemingly immortal Barabbas (Omar Sy) to a fight, which if Clarence wins, shall see all the gladiator slaves freed by their master.
From there it’s a hip-hop, skip and jump to a series of hustling adventures in which Clarence, rather than becoming a devotee of Jesus, decides to become his own New Messiah and use the money donated by witnesses to the “miracles” he performs to pay off his debt.
Unfortunately he’s chosen a really bad time to get into the messianic con game because Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy) has been ordered by Rome to nip the messiah madness in the bud and arrest and crucify anyone claiming to be one.
By the time the film’s inevitable and disappointingly earnest final act arrives, Samuel’s ambitious and wellintentioned attempt to breathe some much-needed new life into the biblical epic genre has unfortunately lost its focus — shifting from a black humoured, irreverent, urban postmodern comedy into the predictably pious and inoffensive vein of the films that are its initial intended satirical target. That said, there’s much to be enjoyed and admired about Samuels’ ultimately failed attempt to reinvigorate a tired, old wheel before it implodes into shambolic messiness.
The ultimate lesson here seems to be that you can’t have your communion wafer and eat it too — you either go full blasphemous Life of Brian or bloody sentimental Passion of the Christ, but walking a line somewhere inbetween will quickly turn you from water walking messiah into drowning pretender.
The Book of Clarence is available on DStv Box Office from April 4.