Mary Mag­da­lene

Unless explic­it­ly tar­get­ed at the reli­gious audi­ences who have turned the faith-dri­ven God’s Not Dead series into a prof­itable fran­chise, films about bib­li­cal fig­ures typ­i­cal­ly have to rely on more than just their sto­ry­line to seduce sec­u­lar viewers.

Sure enough, as sug­gest­ed by the tagline ​‘Her sto­ry will be told,’ Garth Davis’ Mary Mag­da­lene promis­es to give a voice to a char­ac­ter from the life of Jesus who is often ignored in favour of more famous male apos­tles and, of course, Christ him­self. After all, Mary Mag­da­lene was the first per­son to see Christ res­ur­rect­ed, and thus might deserve a film of her own.

Because the details of her life are large­ly unknown – at least to main­stream audi­ences – the first part of this new film is the most inter­est­ing. Drama­tis­ing Mary’s every­day life before she met Christ, this ver­sion of the sto­ry shows her as an excit­ing­ly mod­ern and inde­pen­dent woman. Here, Mary did not leave her home sim­ply to fol­low Christ, but also because she refused to mar­ry a hus­band cho­sen for her by her family.

Yet the film’s fem­i­nist theme is mud­dled by a dis­ap­point­ing insis­tence on reas­sur­ing the view­er that, against pop­u­lar belief, Mary was not in fact a pros­ti­tute – on-screen text book­end­ing the film explains that this mis­con­cep­tion orig­i­nates from the 6^th cen­tu­ry. As laud­able as cor­rect­ing a 15 hun­dred year old mis­take from a most­ly fic­tion­al text might be, it can­not com­pen­sate for the harm done in fur­ther per­pet­u­at­ing the demon­i­sa­tion of sex work.

The film’s pro­gres­sive cap­i­tal and its more inno­v­a­tive aspects are fur­ther deplet­ed when the focus inevitably shifts to Christ him­self. This might not be a fault of the script at all: as the film strug­gles to recen­tre on Mary, it is hard not to sus­pect there sim­ply might not be that much to be said about her.

Yet Rooney Mara in the title role man­ages to hold our atten­tion even when the film focus­es on the preach­er, her per­for­mance out­shin­ing that of Joaquin Phoenix as the Son of God. Her intense gaze and the strong sense of intel­li­gence ema­nat­ing from her imbue her char­ac­ter with a pres­ence that Phoenix’s odd­ly cliched and unin­spired inter­pre­ta­tion lacks completely.

Amid the mild tor­por, there is some fun to be had in spot­ting pop­u­lar actors from var­i­ous cor­ners of world cin­e­ma min­gling among the cast, pre­sum­ably mak­ing the film eas­i­er to mar­ket out­side of the US but also help­ing it avoid accu­sa­tions of white­wash­ing. A high­light is Tahar Rahim, here play­ing a rather dif­fer­ent ​‘Prophet’ in the role of Judas. He makes the most of a char­ac­ter whose con­fused inten­tions again seem the result of an ill-con­ceived attempt to put a mod­ern spin on his ulti­mate betrayal.

Mara thank­ful­ly recap­tures the spot­light towards the film’s end. But by this point it has already become clear that, although a rather ele­gant and serene inter­pre­ta­tion of an eter­nal sto­ry, this film has lit­tle new or inter­est­ing to offer either to believ­ers or non-believers.