Hardly a 'Tale of the Christ'

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Still, the underlying question of how to portray Christ on the screen remains. It is, fundamentally, a theological question. The Hollywood biblical epics like "King of Kings" (MGM, 1961) and "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (United Artists, 1965) all fail to resolve it. Allegedly "realistic" depictions of Jesus, usually in a glistening white robe, and his era--think beards, camels, and desert landscapes--may be cleverly staged, but they cannot avoid placing Jesus in a picture-book past, leaving us to wonder what connection, if any, he has with us today.

Only Pier Paolo Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (Titanus/Arco/Lux, 1966) comes close to closing the then-now chasm, and it does so by challenging the vacuous sentimentality of the previous films and delivering a baldly political Jesus.

This, then is the dilemma of the filmmaker who tries to make a Jesus film. The central subject, despite all the assiduous work of the Jesus Seminar, is far more than a historical figure for Christians. But attempts to contemporize him, although usually more interesting than the "bathrobe" dramas, still fail to close the gap. Films such as "Jesus Christ, Superstar" (Universal, 1973) and "Godspell" (Columbia, 1973) took real risks by portraying Christ as a rock icon (in the former) and a circus performer (in the latter). Their filmmakers at least recognized that the "Jesus of history"--even celluloid film history--is just not enough, and for this they deserve some credit. Even Monty Python's deliciously irreverent "Life of Brian" (Warner Brothers, 1979) succeeds in communicating some of the biblical Jesus' biting criticism of religious hypocrisy.

The problems with these "with-it" representations of Jesus is that they become dated very quickly. But this may not be a fatal failing. The very nature of Christianity requires that it address each newly unfolding stage in human history--and they follow each other in more and more rapid succession today--with an interpretation of Jesus that engages its sensibilities while remaining true to the Gospel message.

In my own view, by far the most successful of the "Jesus flicks" is still Denys Arcand's masterful "Jesus of Montreal" (Max Films International, 1979). It is so effective because it address what might be called the "hermeneutical" problem head on. It concerns a group of young French Canadians in Montreal seeking to make sense of a Passion play they have been asked to update and perform. As the film unfolds we watch them struggle with the Gospel accounts and with what they might mean today. As they do, the actors gradually take on the character of the biblical figures they are playing, and find themselves in similar situations.

No film I know about Jesus overcomes the "gap" between the Jesus of the text and the Jesus of our lives today as well as this one. That's because "Jesus of Montreal" acknowledges that for countless modern people this gap does indeed exist, and it cannot be avoided by dusting off the long robes and false beards and renting the camels and donkeys one more time.

No, whatever its Academy Award credentials and box office success, Ben-Hur is not a "Tale of the Christ." It is not even very good entertainment. The chariot race is admittedly a thriller, but the rest of the film is a swollen, slow-moving Technicolor dinosaur, of interest only as a fading artifact of film history, a sorry commentary on the state of religion in American popular culture, and yet another flimsy attempt to serve both God and mammon at the same time.

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Mel Gibson's 'Passion of the Christ' The Other Jesus Movie A Review of the 'Ben-Hur' Movie