The story of the birth of Christ
is so much a part of our lives that it is hard to believe that
Hollywood has never before brought it to the big screen, but
as The Nativity Story opens in theaters across the United
States, it is a first to concentrate solely on this story that
has been the subject of church pageants for as long as anybody
can remember.
In a world where every kind of
twist on adventure, spy thrillers, violent shoot-‘em-ups
and historical themes are Hollywood fare,
it has been surprisingly considered daring and brash in recent
decades to focus on religious topics. Yet emboldened by the
blockbuster success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion, Hollywood is beginning to remember that, yes indeed, there are Christians
in the audience.
Produced by Time Warners’ New Line
Cinema, The Nativity Story was created by a big studio
with big marketing.
While the holiday-movie season
is crowded with offerings such as The Santa Clause 3: The
Escape Clause, this time the producers remembered that if
200 million Americans consider themselves Christians, that is
more than a little niche and it is worth pursuing.
Most faith-based movies are made
on micro-budgets, designed for small markets, but not this time.
Hollywood is acknowledging the power of churches as they hope to spread
the word about the film. The premiere showing to an audience
of 7,000 was at the Vatican on Sunday, November 26th and
the word is the audience loved it.
According to USA Today, Lamar
Keener, publisher of the Christian Examiner, says he
doubts The Nativity Story will reach Passion levels,
but many churches are renting theaters for this film and acting
as ticket brokers for the faithful. Evangelical Christians are
"very excited about the movie because they understand it's
very biblically accurate," he says.
Filming a Significant Story
The question, of course, is how
do you take a story so beloved and familiar and create a script?
Do you put words in the characters’ mouths that aren’t in the
scripture? Do you create new characters and side plots? How
can you possibly portray Mary in more than the glimpses we get
in scripture?
That was the challenge for director
Catherine Hardwicke who previously made a couple of unlikely
Indie films as warm-ups. She had directed Lords of Dogtown,
about youths who make their mark by extreme skateboarding styles,
and Thirteen, the story of a teenage girl swept up in her
friend’s life of petty crime and drugs.
With this background, the script
was an unlikely choice for Hardwicke, but last January (that’s
right only — 11 months ago) when she received the script, she
thought about the possibilities of chronicling this significant
story from its personal impact.
Hardwicke said, “I read it and
started getting excited about the idea of going deeper than
they had ever gone into these characters. Usually, you just
think of them with their halos, not as humans. So I thought,
this is fascinating and I want to explore that world. And I
went in with a big pitch — ideas and photographs and talked
about how I really wanted Mary to be someone from the region,
not to look Swedish, not a blonde blue-eyed Mary, but somebody
who looked like she could live in that Mediterranean region
with that beautiful olive skin tones. I wanted her to be 13
or 14 years old.
“People think that most people
know the story, and I don't know how many of us grew up Christian,
but you don't really think about them as real people with problems
we would all have. You don't think about them on the first level
as being Jewish. We barely know anything about the story, and
we don't think very deeply about it usually, even though it's
a beautiful, magical story that has endured forever.”
Hardwicke said she was interested
to get inside of Mary, to understand how she might think and
how she would feel. She had made movies about teenagers before,
and here was a teenage unwed mother, finding herself with a
terrific burden and privilege.
"The film is about this young
woman's spiritual journey," Shoreh Aghdashloo, who plays
Elizabeth, said. "It's about Joseph's pure love for this woman.
It's not an easy thing for a man to share his wife with God."
Historically Accurate
Hardwicke was also interested in
being historically accurate. She said that you hear this story
your whole life and forget that Joseph and Mary were Jewish,
following the traditions they knew. She brought in many scholars
to help. An ancient astronomy professor came in to explain
what instruments the wise men would have used in their calculations.
A Jewish scholar came from Rome
to help create a small synagogue for their set. She created
a Nazareth boot camp,
that was like a full-on total immersion system in milking goats,
weaving cloth and baking bread.
She felt like other Biblical movies
that Hollywood had
undertaken in decades past were too stiff and formal, and she
wanted the action to be accurate, intimate and personal.
She also had the formidable challenge
of finding a cast who could be Middle Eastern in appearance.
She wondered, “Who on earth am I going to cast? There's no A-list actors or nobody from the Middle East.”
She finally turned to Keisha Castle-Hughes,
late of Whale Rider, to play the part of Mary. Oscar
Isaac, of Guatemalan heritage, was cast as Joseph, and Shohreh
Aghdashloo (a Muslim actress from Iran)
plays Mary's much older cousin, Elizabeth, who becomes the mother
of John the Baptist. Ciarán Hinds plays Herod with an intensity
that makes his insane slaying of the innocents believable.
The Results
So with this approach, how does
The Nativity Story work? It begins with the heart-grabbing
slaying of the children by Herod and then flashes back to Mary.
The film is strongest where it is exploring the relationship
of Mary and Joseph. She is a teenager with a problem — a responsibility
of nearly overwhelming weight and a pregnancy that almost gets
her the adulteress’s stoning.
When Mary is away at Elizabeth’s
during her first months of pregnancy, Joseph misses her, and
then is dismayed at her obvious condition on her return. Joseph
is gentle, but wracked with doubt, and when the angel finally
brings him around, he becomes a most gentle and loving protector.
Mary’s dilemma finds her ostracized
in Nazareth, a condition
that apparently follows her throughout her life. In scripture,
when Christ returns to Nazareth, he is called “Mary’s son” instead of
“Joseph’s son,” an indication that the town had not forgotten.
The journey to Bethlehem is etched
clearly as the film portrays the real hardship it was for a
people to be asked to make the journey back to their place of
birth, the dismay and discomfort Mary felt on a donkey’s back
for an 85-mile journey, the hunger they sometimes felt as they
were thrust into this wilderness.
Herod, who had his own wife killed
in his maniacal obsession with power, has placed guards at the
entrance to the city, knowing that the king who has been prophesied
will be born there. He tells them to look for somebody noteworthy
who might be the king. Joseph and Mary are passed over as hopelessly
insignificant.
Yet it is Joseph and Mary’s shared
dilemmas that knit them and they grow from a confused, newly-married
couple overwhelmed with an incomprehensible responsibility to
greater strength.
It is easy to consider the nativity
story peopled with statues like we have in our crèches, rather
than people with warmth and humanity, pain and confusion, but
The Nativity Story succeeds at enlivening the imagination
about who Joseph and Mary were and how they might have felt.
It is also noteworthy how faithful
the script is to the King James story — without invented subplots
or characters. In addition, Hardwicke achieved her goal in
making the story feel Middle Eastern and Jewish, right down
to the detail of everyday life and Mezuzah on the door. This
is not a show of pageant and color, but life in Nazareth.
Yet, for all its strengths, The
Nativity Story does not and cannot reach the film that we
have played in our minds all these years. It is glum compared
to that story of light played out in our hearts. Mary seems
too often one-dimensional, without vibrancy or depth. Her face
seems to carry one worried, depressed look and many times it
is the vibrancy of Joseph that carries the scene.
A stony part of Italy
is the background for the Holy Land, and Elliot Davis’ photography feels too
often grim and monochromatic. This is a story of hardship,
but what viewers may miss is a sense of joy.
Latter-day Saints who have seen
Kieth Merrill’s Testaments of One Fold and One Shepherd or
the short Luke 2, produced by Bonneville Communications
will miss the warmth, spirit, and power of those films.
However, we applaud this effort
and the direction it suggests — an acknowledgement that there
is a niche as large as the Grand Canyon
for films that convey spirituality. This film lacks the passion
of The Passion, but it has already stirred up its own
controversy.
New Line Cinema was scheduled to
be a sponsor of the traditional German Christkindlmarket in
the heart of downtown Chicago this Christmas, but the city asked the German American Chamber
of Commerce to reconsider letting the studio be a sponsor.
They said that they worried that showing clips from The Nativity
Story at this Christmas market would offend. City
officials have said that again there is no room at the inn for
a story about Christ.
