Crisbaj.com December 2024

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MY REVIEW: Netflix’s ‘Mary’: Confusing Westernized Fantasy

FOUR STARS out of TEN…

We just finished watching Netflix’s ‘just in time for Christmas’ 113-minute-feature entitled ‘Mary’. Since this plushly-backed project was clearly attempting to jump on the success of rebel-rousing ‘The Chosen’ in attracting millions of Bible-peep viewers, we grabbed our chairs around the laptop and gave it a go.

This attempt in spinning a Bible-based story with creative edges quickly digressed into a confusing mangle of incongruent source-material, cranked through a Western idea-mill that slipped into a fantasy world filled with stereotypes and previously-used and heavily tropy portrayals.

Directed by DJ Caruso, ‘Mary’ quickly avoids the Bible narrative surrounding Mary and Jesus’ birth and becomes a haphazard, disjointed tale. The veteran acting chops of Anthony Hopkins as the twisted king Herod doesn’t bring cogency to this film, and his final artsy scenes play like a bad LSD trip. Newbie Israeli actress Noa Cohen was engaging as Mary, but limited by an awkward script and wobbly lines.

To have enough to build a script-story about Mary’s parents, birth, childhood and circumstance… something that canonical Scripture only hints towards… the writers engaged an enormous amount of non-Biblical, confusing and historically questionable ‘apocryphal’ sources.

The script suffers from these tainted apples. The Biblical accounts we do have, particularly from St. Matthew and St. Luke were all written before 75AD, and confirmed as eye-witness authoritative by numerous church councils before 300AD. The story they tell is highly cogent to most of us, only occasionally slipping into this film.

The main source material used for this movie ranges from the Qur’an (written 609-632 AD), the apocryphal ‘gospel of James’ (also known as the ‘Protovangelium‘, written around 275AD and not by the writer of the New Testament book James) and the ‘gospel of Pseudo-Matthew’ from the same time-frame. There are multiple Papal documents and decrees sourced about Mary dating from 800AD to the Middle Ages. Many of these later writers were not interested in historic accuracy but ideological assertions, building conflicting narratives and, blended together, make for the impossible history found in this film.

Even though the end-credits claim ‘this is based on real events’, ‘Mary’ also suffers from very poor scholarship on the realities of Jewish life in Palestine at the time of Jesus’ birth. The costuming was more a mix of modern Opera and Sci-fi spectaculars than historic Jewish garb, and the cinematically-lush ‘Second Temple’ was more a stylized European cathedral housed in a British university than the actual Temple described in numerous writers of that era. The scenes of Mary in her supposed childhood ‘service to God in the Temple’ is more inclined to Dune than a Biblical-era epic.

The significant miss-fire of details in many things Jewish at the time of Jesus… courting rules, customs, dress, the Temple, religious practices, interactions between men and women… was distressing.

Any historic biopic needs to have footing in the real setting, with a plausible story. ‘Mary’ takes a Jewish story and pours it into a Westernized mold for modern American Netflix viewers.

The director’s attempt to portray the role of satan and angels in a ‘Passion of the Christ’-esque fashion simply didn’t help at all. This includes Gabriel telling Joseph how to find Mary at the river by going right…

My biggest disappointment came when credits rolled the name of pastor Joel Osteen as one of the Executive Producers. C’mon, Joel, you could have exerted some influence in the word-crafting of key quotes from the Scriptural story where God was praised, rather than the final scripted focus on the terse and painful parts… and, bro, Anna in the Temple like a hip-hop Diva! C’mon!

By the way, some significant amount of violence and gore… don’t let the little kids watch this, thinking it’s a warm and tender ‘Christmas story’.

‘Mary’ is promoted as the glorious back-story of a woman venerated by millions. Sorry to say… not really.

TAKE-AWAY:

‘Mary’ on Netflix… ehhh.

4 out of 10 stars.

[as of this writing, it was trashing on Rotten Tomatoes by both professional and audience reviewers, currently carrying only a 44% approval level]

written by crisbaj

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