Greg Daly
This year’s ‘Good Pagan’ movie aims to unite believers and non-believers, writes Greg Daly
“Nobody knows anything,” proclaims legendary Hollywood screenwriter Bill Goldman time and again in his 1983 classic Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess – and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
Raiders of the Lost Ark, he says, was “offered to every single studio in town and they all turned it down”, with the exception of Paramount. University turned down Star Wars. Columbia started work on E.T. before deciding it had limited audience appeal and dropping the project. In reeling off his examples, Goldman somehow refrained from telling the classic tale of how when the prospect of filming Gone With The Wind was raised at MGM, Louis B. Mayer’s right-hand man Irving Thalberg supposedly said, “Forget it, Louis. No Civil War picture ever made a nickel.”
Perhaps, then, nobody should have been too surprised when 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, widely ridiculed in advance, not least for Mel Gibson’s choice to shoot the film in Latin and Aramaic, made more than $600 million worldwide (€544 million), with $370 million (€336) being earned at the US box office alone.
It took a few years before Hollywood was in position to tap into a market the major studios had long thought extinct, but the last few years have seen a spate of productions directed primarily at Christian audiences. 2013’s The Bible was a huge hit on The History Channel, its writer Richard Bedser saying that he wasn’t really surprised at its popularity – “there is a thirst for it”, and 2014 saw Darren Aronofsky’s modern midrash Noah being followed just months later by Ridley Scott’s leaden Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Attempt
Last year’s AD: The Bible Continues didn’t match 2013’s series either critically or in terms of viewing figures, but cinematic grapplings with biblical tales haven’t dried up, with The Young Messiah, based on Anne Rice’s novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt due out soon, hot on the heels of Risen, an attempt, in the words of star Joseph Fiennes, to strike a balance between “deeply conservative and boring Sunday school Bible films” and “revolutionary revisionist films that have nothing to do with the Bible”.
Risen, due to open in Irish cinemas on March 18, tells the story of Clavius, a Roman military tribune, played by Joseph Fiennes, who arrives in Jerusalem in time to witness the Crucifixion, and is shortly afterwards tasked by Pontius Pilate with finding the body of Jesus – here called Yeshua, as he would indeed have been known at the time – missing from its tomb despite the presence of guards.
Clavius is a fictional character, of course, but the film’s premise isn’t an absurd one, building on the Biblical foundations of Matthew 27-28. The Gospel account, of course, describes the Jewish authorities appealing to Pilate to place a guard on the tomb lest the apostles steal the body and then claim that Jesus had risen. “This last piece of fraud would be worse than what went before,” they reportedly claimed.
After the tomb was found empty, according to Matthew, some of the guards were bribed after they told the chief priests what had happened, being directed to tell anyone who asked them that Jesus’ disciples “came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep”.
“And should the governor come to hear of this,” the priests continued, “we undertake to put things right with him ourselves and to see that you do not get into trouble.”
The soldiers took the money and did as they were told, according to Matthew, “and to this day,” he writes, “that is the story among the Jews”.
It’s not clear from the Gospel account whether the guards stationed at the tomb were Roman troops or temple guardsmen, but Risen opts for the former; when the priests request that the tomb be monitored, Clavius channels the biblical Pilate by saying “you have a guard”, but the priests hold out for Roman security and are given a couple of undisciplined thugs, who get drunk on duty and indeed appear to fall asleep.
Fighting machine
This might surprise those who tend to think of the Roman army as a well-oiled fighting machine, but there is no shortage of ancient evidence that suggests that all too often Roman soldiers were anything but gleamingly efficient cogs in that machine.
One might, for instance, point to how despite serving legionaries being barred from marriage – perhaps the most obvious “civilian pursuit” alluded to by St Paul in 2 Timothy 2 – any number of soldiers had long-standing relationships and indeed children with local women, with neither relationships nor offspring being recognised by the state. That the sentries assigned to watch over Jesus’ tomb might have been corrupt, rowdy, drunken louts is all too plausible.
The film follows the Gospel account in having the guards be paid to say they’d fallen asleep on duty, but any hopes the priests may have had that the governor would hush the whole thing up prove fruitless: Pilate wants a body, and Clavius, he’s sure, is the man to find it.
So begins, in effect, a kind of CSI: Jerusalem, with Clavius and his sidekick Lucius – played by Tom Felton, almost certainly best known as Harry Potter’s schoolboy antagonist Draco Malfoy – embarking on an quest to find the corpse of Christ, interrogating witness after witness and taking it for granted, of course, that Jesus is dead.
It seems a reasonable supposition, after all: even had the man put to death as ‘King of the Jews’ not died of suffocation on the cross, after the flogging and torments he had endured on his path to Calvary, he surely would have died when a Roman lance was thrust into his side. All the more peculiar then to Clavius that despite the fact that Jesus is clearly dead, his followers consistently maintain that they know he yet lives.
Risen stands in a well-established subgenre of religious films sometimes dubbed “Good Pagan movies”, perhaps most famously exemplified by the 1953 CinemaScope classic The Robe or 1954’s Quo Vadis – itself but the most famous of four cinematic renderings of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1895 novel of the same name. The “Good Pagan” is, of course, a well-established figure in the western imagination, its prototype probably being the Roman poet Virgil, author of a verse that supposedly pointed to the coming of Christ, and Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory in his Divine Comedy.
Although the hard-bitten Clavius is no Virgil, being a soldier and a devotee of Rome’s war-god Mars, his honestly questioning mind makes it hard for him to hold to his Pagan faith as the case for Christ becomes undeniable.
Clavius’ almost agnostic outlook may strike some viewers as suspiciously modern, but it is worth remembering that to many scholars of ancient Rome, second only to Virgil in the pantheon of Latin literary greats was the first-century BC poet-philosopher Lucretius, whose De Rerum Natura, usually translated ‘On the nature of things’, held that ours is a wholly material world, and that if gods exist they do not interfere in our affairs. Indeed, C.S. Lewis, according to a friend, would on a regular basis “anxiously ask if the chaplains had really got it into their heads that the ancients had got every whit as good brains as we had”.
Putting his brain to good use and wearing out his sandal leather as he goes, Clavius eventually makes his way to the Upper Room and charges in, determined to arrest Jesus’ closest followers. Los Angeles’ auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron describes this as his favourite part of the film: “As he takes in the people in the room, he spies Jesus, at whose crucifixion he had presided and whose face in death he had closely examined. But was he seeing straight? Was this even possible? He sinks down to the ground, fascinated, incredulous, wondering, anguished.
“As I watched the scene unfold, the camera sweeping across the various faces,” Dr Barron continues, “I was as puzzled as Clavius: was that really Jesus? It must have indeed been like that for the first witnesses of the Risen One, their confusion and disorientation hinted at the Scriptures themselves: ‘They worshipped, but some doubted.’ Once Thomas enters the room, embraces his Lord and probes Jesus’ wounds, all doubt, both for Clavius and for the viewer, appropriately enough, is removed.”
Narratives
The bishop especially liked this scene, he says, not merely because of how it was composed, but because it reminds him of once fashionable theological debates where scholars who doubted the concrete reality of the Resurrection suggested that fictitious resurrection narratives had developed among the early Christian community as a way of symbolically expressing a conviction that their crucified leader had survived beyond death and was still with them, his spirit living on among them.
Such theories, Dr Barron says, drawing on the English Biblical scholar and onetime Anglican Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright, are deeply unhistorical, since it is “practically impossible to explain the rise of the early Christian movement apart from a very objective construal of Jesus’ resurrection”, as well as being “profoundly un-Jewish”.
“When a first-century Jew spoke of resurrection, he could not have meant some non-bodily state of affairs,” Dr Barron maintains, noting how dualist distinctions between the spiritual and the material were wholly alien to the Jews of first-century Palestine.
For any Jews who encountered the Resurrection, he explains, the experience would have been jarring, even incomprehensible, with the New Testament giving the distinct impression that “something happened to the first Christians, something so strange and unexpected and compelling that they wanted to tell the whole world about it”.
In Risen this “something” happens to Clavius relatively early in the film; his encounter with the Risen Christ draws the film’s first half to a close, allowing the second half of the film to be devoted to his accompanying the disciples to Galilee and joining them at the lake in the scenes we all know well from the end of John’s Gospel. For Steven Greydanus of The National Catholic Register and decentfilms.com, this is a risky move, because placing the film’s dramatic climax so early poses a real creative challenge in making Clavius’ encounter with Christ propel not merely the film’s external action but his own internal development.
Whether the film meets that challenge is something that individual viewers will have to decide for themselves, but its creators probably had little choice but to structure the action in this way if they wanted to square the circle of keeping Clavius as its central character while encompassing the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension, something Fiennes thinks has been rarely – if ever – done before.
That the film is sincerely meant seems clear: its producer, Pete Shilaimon, is a Chaldean Christian whose family fled Iraq for the United States when he was a child, but who has strong memories of his mother hiding under her clothes the cross she wore around her neck but having stones thrown at her anyway. Two of his uncles have fled the Middle East more recently, and now live in Turkey and Germany, having lost everything. “I wear my cross proudly today,” he says, “and you can’t do that in a lot of countries.”
Scripture
Jointly written by Paul Aiello and director Kevin Reynolds, the success of the film, Fiennes thinks, is “that he adheres to Scripture”. Although some might question the ahistorical representation of Mary Magdalene as a former prostitute and the portrayal of Jews in the film, Fiennes believes the film’s makers made a serious effort to work with Church communities to ensure fidelity to Gospels.
That said, he hopes the film can reach beyond a confessional audience, telling Aleteia’s Diane Montagna that the film should be judged to have succeeded “if anyone from any background, any religious or non-religious belief, can sit down and share the space together and enjoy the screen”.
Anyone familiar with Reynolds’ previous work, notably including 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1995’s arguably underrated Waterworld and 2002’s The Count of Monte Cristo should be confident in his ability to appeal to a broad audience, at least visually, and won’t be surprised either to learn that the film isn’t devoid of humour. Granted, a film that opens with a battle followed by a crucifixion might not seem the kind of film to lend itself to many laughs, but aside from Clavius’ own dry wit the film is lightened by, for instance, the comical protestations of the guards who had been tasked with warding off any attempts to steal Jesus’ body from the tomb.
If this sometimes playful tone might sound like it could jar, we should perhaps remember that not merely did the ancients have brains every whit as good as ours, but senses of humour as robust too. Risen may eschew the solemn, even po-faced tone of religious films – including “Good Pagan movies” – from Hollywood’s Golden Age, but this should perhaps be regarded as a strength rather than a mere quirk. Besides, as G.K. Chesterton famously said, “angels can fly because they take themselves lightly”.