The critics did not seem to like the movie overall, though they liked various aspects of it instead. So be it. I suspect that the delight I experience in it is a consequence of the knowledge I bring to the story about who Yeshua really is, and the fact that whenever the director includes a "Biblical" scene he does not violate the text, but stays fairly true to it. Thomas is the disciple who must touch the wounds and authenticate them for himself and for Clavius too, and thus for us.
However,the more I thought about the experience of the movie, the reason for my enthusiasm became clearer to me. At Mass on Saturday night, one of its delights is that I experience the real presence of Christ at the last supper. The priest is there sacramentally as Christ, he says the words from the gospel, "this is my body, this my blood," he elevates the body and blood and I receive it. The priest is no longer the priest, the bread and wine are no longer bread and wine.
In a very real sense the movie accomplishes a similar thing in its medium. The movie gives us the one thing that I imagine most Christians truly desire: the movie gives its characters the experience of meeting, touching, eating with, talking with, and finally embracing the resurrected Christ, really. since the movie is not sentimental we can take the experience of the encounters seriously. The actor Cliff Curtis in the movie becomes Yeshua, the risen Christ in the story. The effect of the movie, for me, was close to sacramental. The Mass and the movie are both dramas; the priest and the actor both become the real presence of Christ, each in his own medium. Each in his own building, Church or Cathedral and movie theater. Each setting may provide a transforming experience after which we return to the everyday reality we know so well.
As I was thinking later about the movie and what I had written, there are a number of scenes that fit my theme of the face to face encounter and that kept standing out as very powerful, though I want to watch it again to be sure that I get them right. The memorable encounters take place with Mary Magdalene, with Bartholomew (before and after, so to speak), with the second soldier given the task of guarding the tomb, with his aide Lucius, who is pursuing the disciples and Clavius, with Peter, in the dark, and finally and climacticly with Yeshua himself. One of the movie's commentators says, "who wouldn't want to spend five minutes on a rock with Jesus?"
Clavius had questioned the first of the two men selected to guard the tomb and got an obviously concocted story. The Jewish leaders had paid him to spread the "stolen body" story. The second guard, however, eventually tells the truth to Clavius for he has already been pardoned and cannot be executed for his sorry role in the affair. His face is another one that stands out in my mind as significant to the idea of the story as I remember it.
The second and third scenes that keep playing out before me are Clavius' encounter with Bartholomew as Clavius is trying to find out where the disciples are and Clavius' encounter with Mary Magdalene in a similar context. Each encounter reveals a different aspect of the meaning of Jesus. Each scene is also a developed encounter between two important characters and is worth some consideration. But first, back to the text, so to speak. In a way the encounters with the new "Christians" are easier to remember than Clavius' encounter with the second guard, but still, back to the text.
After reviewing the action of the story, the significance of the face-to-face holds, though the first one of the characters who has met the resurrected Yeshua is an old blind woman, Miriam. In her closeup she tells how a blind woman (emphasizing that the story is truly about seeing!) can know who is confronting her. She says she knows voices and this voice is significant because it belongs to the man who "loved me" and who "lifted me up." She marvels that a man would do this for an old, insignificant, in that culture, woman! Two themes then are revealed in this first encounter as Clavius tries to track down Yeshua's corpse but meets only those who have met him alive: "seeing" in Miriam's blindness and the idea of being "lifted up" as she describes her meeting.
The second important encounter is that with Mary Magdalene, whom he must chase down before he can get her story. One of my problems with this encounter is that Clavius goes to his Legion to find if anyone knows Mary. When he asks if anyone there knows Mary, some what hesitantly at first, most of the men raise their hands. In the movie she is definitely a prostitute and the movie sacrifices dignity for humor. On the other hand we do see that people on the periphery of that society, like Miriam and Mary, are now at the center of whatever has happened here, for Biblically, in the resurrection accounts, Mary is one of the first to see Jesus outside the tomb.
In the movie though once Mary is caught and she somewhat tells her story, her face (image) which had been in shadow is now filmed looking up out a window and into the light. She tells Clavius, "If you knew what happened there, all cares would cease!" Clavius offers her freedom to reveal where the disciples are, but she simply responds that she is already free! A very tired Clavius lets her go, at which point, I think, his exhaustion wins out, he turns an hourglass over so that the sands begin to run out, as does time; he tells Lucius to wake him when the sand is done.
What happens while he sleeps, not so surprisingly, is that he dreams. We see a vast angry sea in a storm with a figure on a cross in the distance. Biblically the sea is an image of chaos and destruction, the void, and that works here with the crucified as the camera moves across the roiling sea toward a closeup of the figure on the cross, Yeshua alive and looking down at, undoubtedly, Clavius who awakens immediately. It's good to reflect that Clavius is moving ever closer to his first meeting with the resurrected Yeshua. At this point the dream makes it somewhat terrifying for him as we remember that he is responsible for the crucifixion too.
After the dream sequence he meets his paid informer again who offers to give him one disciple: "I'll give you one," he says as if having to consult his memory and think about it. The informer, like a continuation of the Biblical Judas, gives him the somewhat giddy and a little "touched" perhaps, Bartholomew. Bartholomew has seen the resurrected Yeshua and is almost beside himself with joy and delight though he will not give up the others. Clavius, having been told that Yeshua comes and goes, asks Bartholomew to conjure him up, obviously understanding nothing about the resurrection figure. Bartholomew explains that "God is not at his beck and call." God? Clavius is looking for rebel soldiers. Bartholomew says that the weapon of this kingdom is love, which changes everything.
Clavius takes the wind out of Bartholomew's sails, to borrow an old cliche, by accusing him of not being at the crucifixion because "you ran." Then Clavius delivers a vicious attack by threatening to crucify Bartholomew who happily spreads his arms, tells Clavius to "Strike," but then falls to his knees as Clavius throws a nail before Bartholomew and then describes in vicious, vivid details what happens to a human body, Yeshua's body, when he was crucified. "Nails rubbing bone." Etc. etc. Clavius seems to put poor Bartholomew into "mortal terror" with his verbal reenactment of the crucifixion of Yeshua. "Where are the disciples?" he thunders at the seemingly stricken disciple on his knees before him. Bartholomew slowly and soberly gets to his feet and comes to Clavius and whispers in his ear, breaking into the former delight and laughter: "They are everywhere!" With that Clavius seems to give up and let's him go. Freedom, it seems, another instance, as with Mary. Clavius is full of terrifying threats, but he harms no innocent figures, nor even the guilty ones for that matter. Bartholomew is last seen dancing down the street, happy and laughing again. "They are everywhere!"
The scene with Bartholomew is a rather wonderful unfolding of the consequences of meeting the Risen messiah and clarifying the nature of Yeshua and what the resurrection is all about. Earlier when Clavius had asked Joseph of Arithemia if Yeshua was a king, Joseph responded by showing Clavius the crown of thorns. Yeshua is no threat militarily to Caesar; the disciples are not rebel warriors.m Bartholomew had reinforced that idea by reciting the "render unto Caesar" phrase that Yeshua himself had used. As the movie makes very clear, we are dealing with two antithetical realities: a reality of war, power, conquest, death and destruction and a reality where peace, joy, love and forgiveness are the primary realities. The movie chronicles Clavius' movement from having embraced the first reality, to meeting the power embodied in the other reality, the power that brings a dead man back to life with no animosity for the figure who killed him.
Enough for now, or perhaps enough period. I'll see. I find it delightful myself to think and write about a movie I obviously enjoy very much. (Monday, 8/29/16)