How Is Your Faith Now?

The Nativity Story and Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple.

The Nativity Story, 2006. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, written by Mike Rich. Starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub, Ciaran Hinds, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Stanley Townsend, Alexander Siddig, Joe Pesci look-alike Nadim Sawalha, Eriq Ebouaney, Stefan Kalipha, and Farida Ouchani.

Now showing in theaters around town.

In Catherine Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story, there is a moment where Mary, played by the normally combative Keisha Castle-Hughes, receives a vision from an angel that looks, as my colleague pointed out, like something from Xanadu. This heavenly creature has long flowing curls and radiates with the glow of Olivia Newton-John magic, and kindly tells Mary that she’s going to be impregnated with the son of God. But Mary doesn’t seem altogether baffled; she does not seem angry; she doesn’t question whether the wine has gone to her head, whether this is a demon, anything–she merely accepts that this is an angel, and she’s about to become the Virgin Mary. All in a day’s labor, I guess.

The Nativity Story is a visually arresting film and is chock full of very good and very decent actors from varying cultures and races (Hardwicke and Co. should be lauded for avoiding a Charleton Heston or Jim Caviezel in any of the roles). It is also stultifying, a film whose tedium grates after about an hour, and one whose spiritual power can almost be matched by a Christmas card at your local Hallmark store.

The story is the right from your Bible-school: Herod rules Israel with an iron fist, taxing the living hell out of the Jews, taking their land and their children if the poor folks fail to pay their tariffs. Hardwicke gives us an excessively idyllic scenario and, as is the tradition in Hollywood today, ladles on the verisimilitude: there are scenes of winemaking, of cheesemaking, of housemaking, and etc. Mary is a happy, devout, and headstrong–her arranged marriage to Joseph (Oscar Isaac) gives her the serious grumps. According to Jewish law, the couple must wait one year before shacking up together and consummating their marriage.

Of course, it’s going to be one tough year. Mary will be out in the olive groves when our angel comes, and afterward, decides in the meantime to visit her aunt Elizabeth (Shohreh Aghdashloo), an elderly lady who is bearing the future John the Baptist. Joseph is concerned that Mary won’t come back to him to start a family–he can tell that she’s displeased with an arranged marriage. But off she goes, and aunt and niece laugh and share prophecies and all is well… until Mary returns home, not a little pregnant.

The problem is that none of the characters seems overly troubled about any of these plot twists. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie in recent memory that so often explains its tension away through dialogue. “Mary, you could be stoned for this!” her father warns her upon her return, when she’s great with child. It’s important to hear this, because nothing we’ve seen suggests anything more than mere displeasure. Her family can only screw up its face at the news, Joseph ruminates for only a moment before deciding to accept her pregnancy, and the townsfolk who supposedly want to beat her to death simply turn their noses when she delivers cheese to their door.

The Nativity Story is clearly a response to the bloodletting of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, so much so that it seems almost as though the filmmakers also thought that excessive tension was to be avoided as well. It also appears as though the studios were busy eyeing the box-office take of The Passion, and trying to remind Hardwicke that Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ was a bomb–for the innocuousness of Nativity Story eventually devolves into a spectacle worthy of the 1950s religious epics. Herod, played by the normally brilliant Ciaran Hinds, does little more than gnash his teeth and make evil pronouncements, while his evildoers ride through villages in slo-mo while the holy people wail. When the three wise men–who, at this point, have been a trio of happy bickerers, carrying on as if they were on some kind of sitcom–arrive in Bethlehem, the star that shines down on the baby does so with the subtlety of a Hollywood arc lamp announcing a new strip club. Despite the so-called realism of the film, Joseph and Mary, despite sleeping outdoors, fighting rivers, and barely eating, look gorgeous in the manger, their hair perfect and clothes unstained.

Most tragically, though, is the question of faith. At one point, upon seeing the arc lamp illuminating the baby Jesus, one of the three wise men turns to another and says, “How is your faith now?” But faith in The Nativity Story is never questioned. From a business-perspective, it’s true that being as controversial as Last Temptation means nothing but bad press and miniscule box-office, but this movie seems almost intent to offend no one. Oddly enough, Castle-Hughes was well-nigh brilliant in Whale Rider, a similar role, really, as a girl who provokes and eventually transforms her community by being the next in a line of chiefs, who at that point have been all male. Her performance there was combative, confused, and touched with moments of humor and pathos. Her Mary is a cipher, a woman who seems to have more trouble accepting that her husband was chosen for her than God himself is going to impregnate her. Would it be too much to show her buckling at times under the yoke of this responsibility? Or to have the family infuriated, as opposed to simply appearing slightly irked? Or have the Jews so riven by the forces of Rome that they’ve become so entrenched in their faith that visits from angels have become commonplace? Or perhaps that Rome might appear too much like a current superpower, and the Jews too much like another devout culture moved by its religious beliefs to resist? If the filmmakers wanted to avoid all controversy, they succeeded. But even Mel Gibson courted controversy, and his movie, grotesque though it may be to some of us, will be watched by its faithful years from now. The Nativity Story seems almost afraid of its subject, unwilling or unable to touch even a modicum of the passions and beliefs of its time.

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Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, 2006. Directed by Stanley Nelson, written by Marcia Smith.

Showing for one week only at the Oak Street Cinema.

Most of us know the story of the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones, the man who led over 900 confused souls to their death by poisoning in Guyana in November 1978. For some of us, the images–of the dead, face down on the grass and holding one another–have haunted our consciousness for decades. I still have bad dreams every once in awhile, still recall the newscasts that conveyed the popping of the gunfire that killed a cameraman and a congressman, the bodies of young babies between their parents making me wonder what in God’s name could people do to one another, when they think they’re working in God’s name.

Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples Temple is not, in cinematic terms, a great film. It is probably not a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen, although watching it on a cold night, huddled with dozens of other curious people, might make this intense film even more intense. The strength of Jonestown lies in its utter respect for its subjects and its expert weaving of interviews with the numerous footage at hand. Jones and his followers could be presented as freaks, as people who were somehow a part of the San Francisco hippie culture who took a serious nose-dive into insanity. I would guess that many people looked upon these folks in that manner–I did, until a New Yorker profile of Jones’ sons years ago changed my mind. Here, the director, Stanley Nelson, shoots his subjects with patience, and allows them to reveal, carefully, in their own time, just what brought them to Jones and kept them in his clutches. The pain that resonates from these subjects is palpable to the point of almost being too much to bear–by the end, it would take only the most hard-hearted and cynical person not to fall into a wealth of conflicted feeling and tremendous melancholy. We see a man who could not stop his wife and baby from drinking poison, but who could not drink it himself, and must live with this decision for the rest of his life. An addict for whom the Peoples Temple saved his life. And moments that seemed truly like bliss, where a group of kind and caring people tried their damndest to make this earth, this life, a place of considerable joy. The result is a moving film of a people sickened by what they saw going on in the world around them, and who were taken in by a man who was, at one point, moved by his faith, bent by paranoia, ruined by society, and by a hunger for control. And as one of the survivors breaks down and weeps, mourning that the notion of heaven, either here or in the afterlife, has left her completely, we are left with the chilling understanding that sometimes the reach for absolute faith can leave one tumbling into an abyss.