Mary Magdalene never came to a theater near me, but if it had, I probably would have waited to see it at home because even though I think that Joaquin Phoenix is a superb actor, I have been repulsed by him as a person for my perception of his enthusiastic association with Casey (rapey) Affleck in I’m Still Here. It would have been the second time after You Were Never Really Here in which I was loud and wrong. Mary Magdalene is the most unique and relatable of all the Jesus films that I have ever seen although my mom, who is a more conventional Christian, had a lukewarm response to it because it did not follow the customary, expected beats that most Jesus films follow. She did not even realize that Phoenix was playing Jesus until I pointed it out. I imagine that a person completely unfamiliar with the story would be completely lost and have zero point of orientation with the subdued, occasional abstract, tonally perfect, verbally minimalist narrative.
Mary Magdalene is tonally perfect because while the Catholic Church has only recently figured out that she was not a sex worker, since I was a child, but especially since the nineties, my Jesus and his women disciples, his witnesses, have always imbued my faith with a countercultural perspective, a feminist perspective. Even the stories of the Old Testament devoted to highlighting God hearing about women being financially cheated, raped, etc. in a culture that still prefers that they keep silent or conform to gender norms encouraged me to reject most aspects of the fundamentalist culture that I was immersed in then apply that standard to other issues that may or may not directly affect me. What would Jesus do? The opposite of whatever the majority would want Him to do. So I loved how this story depicted a woman’s life of faith in a culture that believes a woman of God should stay under a man’s authority, get married and have children or she was a shameful woman.
Even though I saw it coming, when Mary says “to know God,” then Garth Davis, Mary Magdalene’s director, shows Jesus for the first time, I loved it. The scenes with Jesus interacting with Mary and other women felt real to me, especially the points when the women vocally disagree with His admonishments, but my Jesus would urge me to follow God over any man and care about all the horrible things that happens to us. The editing in this film is perfection, especially the way that it communicates Jesus’ visions and Mary’s interpretation of what it feels like to be with God.
When you are making a creative, fictional work adapted from a Bible story, the creator has two choices: completely adhere to the basic facts as they were originally written or be emotionally authentic. One reason that I hated The Young Messiah is that they failed at doing the latter by simply shifting the setting of all the stories in a different time period. It was lazy and infuriating with a crippling lack of creativity. Mary Magdalene is the opposite. It keeps the titular character as the focal point, and Jesus never hijacks the story. He only comes into focus in proportion to his relationship to her. So the filmmakers give us a character whom viewers can relate to, and Jesus’ role in the story is not diminished as a result of this shift in attention because His relationship to her is the same as it would be to us if we existed then (or I would argue now). This story also takes liberties in the story, but only to further humanize its characters where there has not been such charity before particularly in the story of Judas.
Mary Magdalene is a movie that invites its viewers to compare and contrast experiences through themes revisited throughout the film. It is definitely a film that shows rather than tells and hopes that you will get the lessons that it is trying to impart—a visual Jesus parable, which is probably why people don’t like it. Pay particular close attention to sick/death beds, any scene that takes place in or near water, especially baptisms, or various places of worship as sites of madness, chaos or stillness according to others but a desperate attempt to correct the inadequacies on earth to reflect heaven then compare the experiences of the different characters in those spaces, how the scene is different from the prior scene and what does that difference tell you about the characters in that scene and do characters trade places frequently throughout the film? The most powerful idea of Mary is that her gift is to be fully present and offer comfort in times of hardship for other people, to be a witness and make them the hero of their story at their nadir, to elevate their importance disproportionate to how the world sees them.
Most films about Jesus are celebratory even when depicting the most painful moments of His life, but Mary Magdalene is always a film that is aware of death even at His most popular moments. Pardon my French, but what I loved most about this film is how they drew out the points of exhaustion and horror as Jesus would occasionally freak the fuck out at how much He wanted to do (best thing that a therapist told me was that even when He was on Earth, Jesus did not heal everyone so we are all limited in what we can do), but physically could not and the impending painful death that lay before Him. It makes the other (male) disciples’ excitement at the approach to Jerusalem seem particularly callous though they don’t know what is to come. Mary does not know either, but her unconscious familiarity with uncomfortable spaces makes her at least more sensitive and questioning regarding what happens next. The theme of brothers, biological and spiritual, throughout the film could be a challenging one for male viewers. Initially the spiritual brothers are a welcome change from her biological ones, but then they fall short because they cannot experience what is actually happening, but are still understandably stuck in their expectations and positions in society. Phoenix does an amazing job stroking Judas lovingly without anger but also alternating with troubled, haunting looks as He is unable to verbalize what is to come. This uneasy balance between terror and delight is delicious.
Mary Magdalene admirably tries to be diverse, but inadvertently I noticed that characters were proportionately saltier depending on the shade of their skin so the American white characters are basically the ideal, the black guys are the most jealous, and the brown woman is angry with the exception that the largest French guy is an intimidating brute. The black women are just in the background. On one hand, hurrah, we’re not Judas anymore, but I always thought of Peter as more of an enthusiastic bull in a China shop, not a guy angling for favorite son though that reading is also fair since all the disciples definitely engaged in that competitive spirit. Side note: I almost did not recognize Chiwetel Ejiofor. I think that he put on a little grown man weight, which is a good thing.
Mary Magdalene is not a perfect film. The main character is Mary, but I felt as if the other disciples were played by actors who were too good and made their characters seem too interesting to not at least have moments in which they got to shine as much as Judas and Peter. So I may have scaled back Judas and Peter more so Mary could have moments with the others though I would not cut one second of the scene with Mary and Peter in Samaria—a powerful lesson from Jesus without Him explicitly giving it. Philip seemed really like he had an amazing story to tell because he sensed danger before anyone else and wanted to get Jesus out of there. I wanted to know what honed his instincts. While Mary played a major role in Jesus’ ministry, she was not a Smurfette. Jesus always rolled deep with women in his posse.
There is a war against Christians, but it is a war by Christians who are uncomfortable with the full implications of Jesus’ words and just make Jesus in their own image versus those of us who are not and are also fine with openly challenging and confronting Jesus when we feel as if He falls short of giving us what we think that we need. It is the only way to explain how Davis’ Mary Magdalene did not get more theater time or promotion when he was recently showered with accolades for Lion and Top of the Lake. While Davis may not have quite succeeded at recreating the holy silence that Marielle Heller did in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, he definitely succeeded in creating an emotionally complex, original depiction of the Bible that felt real to me.