Worthwhile testament to the ‘13th apostle’
Mary Magdalene PG cert, 95 min ★★★☆☆
Dir Garth Davis Starring Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Tahar Rahim, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Denis Ménochet, Hadas Yaron, Ariane Labed
Mary Magdalene is something of a milestone in Biblical cinema: it must be the first Life-of-christ film that could plausibly double as a mood board for a Scandi chic living room. Peasant life in early first-century Judeaea may have been a hardscrabble business, but in Garth Davis’s film it is also a fantastically tasteful one.
I say this not to poke fun, but to explain the very particular level on which it’s easiest to engage with Davis’s ambitious new film – an unexpectedly austere, solemn follow-up to Lion, his no less refined but far more open-hearted 2016 debut. Unlike Lion’s true-life adoption story, Mary Magdalene neither breaks your heart nor grabs your throat. Instead, it goes straight for the forehead: it is a brow-furrower. It also features the final completed soundtrack by the tremendously talented Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who died last month at the too-young age of 48, which brings a spiritual quality to the project that its other components don’t quite muster.
Mary Magdalene sets out to retrace Christ’s ministry from its title character’s perspective, recognising her as his unsung 13th apostle, while rebuffing the persistent myth, first put about by Pope Gregory in AD591, that she was a repentant prostitute.
Played by Rooney Mara with an alabaster stillness, Mary starts out as just another young woman from the Magdala fishing community, albeit one with no appetite for the arranged marriage her elder brother (Denis Ménochet) has set up. When Mary gets cold feet, she is dragged down to the beach for a midnight exorcism, and the only man who can draw her out of her torpor is a travelling preacher, played by Mara’s real-world beau, Joaquin Phoenix, with a beard like gorse and a high and husky voice.
This is – spoiler alert – Jesus Christ, and as Mary attends to his message she falls platonically head over heels, and soon abandons her village for life on the road with his small band of followers. Phoenix’s look, manner and accent all suggest a Californian New Age cult leader – and the way in which the actor makes his sermons sound as if they’re tumbling unbidden out of his head has a prickly supernatural force. Some scenes you might expect to feel a little routine, but they also repeatedly nudge Mary into the margins of what has been billed until now as her story, and it takes the crucifixion to make her fully interesting again.
Where Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett’s screenplay really strikes gold is in its fresh spin on Judas Iscariot, superbly played by Tahar Rahim. Oddly bloodless, but thoughtprovoking in a discussion-group kind of way, Mary Magdalene is less successful as a film than as an exercise, but at least it’s a worthwhile one.