The Talkies/On The Last Temptation

...This Jesus doesn't even know his grammar: he says "if I was" instead of "if I were," uses like for as, and announces that "it's me the prophets preached about...

...T he idea here is clearly to remove 1 Christ from the pages of Scripture, to make him more human...

...The film is freighted with obtrusive dissolves, excessive atmosphere (camels, turbans, sand), and a musical score that relies too heavily on ditsy recorder music and a hard-rock African drumbeat...

...Paul who, when Jesus (in his fantasy) identifies himself and demands that he stop preaching, declares, "I don't care whether you're Jesus or not...

...Whoever that is, come here, and throw these...

...It's sheer torture—one of those deadly boring films, like Barbra Streisand's A Star is Born, that drag along so numbingly that you get the feeling they want you to walk out...

...they give us crowdpleasers like The Robe, Quo Vadis, Ben Hur—glossy platitudinous spectacles marked by stilted dialogue, excellent posture, syrupy musical scores, and a thoroughgoing (if thoroughly fake) reverence toward Holy Writ (or, more accurately, toward the crudest popular twentieth-century American conceptions thereof...

...With an act like this, the real Jesus would never have made it to the big time...

...But then there isn't much intellectual rigor here to speak of—or, for that matter, any real sense of engagement with the idea of God...

...And believe me, I would've cleared out of The Last Temptation after twenty minutes or so if I hadn't already decided to write about it...

...When he's with Mary Magdalene (who is played by the lovely and gifted, but ever-spacey, Barbara Hershey), the two of them look and behave like one of those aging flower-child couples who live in Topanga Canyon, drive around in pick-up trucks, and analyze each other in pop-psych fashion ("You were hanging onto your mother," Mary Magdalene tells Christ, "then you were hanging onto me, now you're hanging onto God...

...Not at all...

...But the most troubling thing about the film is that its theology is a mess...

...If I have to crucify you to save the world, I'll do it...

...And what remains, I'm afraid, is not very much at all...

...He has robbed Jesus of historicality, of divinity, of all but the most superficial sort of humanity, and—yes—of a heroic dimension...

...When Jesus abandons his fantasy of a married life and accepts his fate on the Cross, you get the impression that he's doing so because it's a good career move...

...Yes, Christ was both human and divine...

...And having reached (in that fantasy) a ripe old age, he tells a cantankerous St...

...Dafoe and Hershey in particular seem incapable of saying hello without putting on an intense Actors Studio expression...

...he whimpers...

...His mistake in The Last Temptation of Christ was to have taken on a subject extremely ill-suited to his grim, grubby, visceral, violence-obsessed, and utterly contemporary intellect...

...So it is that The Last Temptation, whose advertising would lead us to believe that it manifests a dignity, intelligence, and even godliness unprecedented in Jesus movies, in fact takes the genre to new depths of bad taste, fatuity, and moral offensiveness...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 and, like all of Scorsese's movies, it offers violence and gore aplenty, an abundance of yukky things that force you to look away from the screen...

...The portrayal of Christ's followers is strictly revisionistic: where the old Biblical movies presented them as gentle and soft-spoken, possessed of an inner peace, all the adherents of Christ in this film—John the Baptist, the disciples, St...

...Silly and offensive though this film is, to be sure, the filmmakers' intentions were patently not frivolous, nor their motives basely pecuniary...

...I'm happy...

...he has done extraordinary work (After Hours remains one of my favorite films of the eighties);he is a master when it comes to making movies about whacked-out all-American anti-heroes...

...Martin Scorsese is a serious artist...

...Jesus as "Tonight Show" guest...

...We're supposed to see him struggling with temptation, struggling against the necessity of his final sacrifice ("Do I really have to die...

...No, he says, "Themeek will be blessed...

...yet he's not only tempted but weak, surly, vacillating, and impotent: a hollow vessel who occasionally has delusions, hears "voices," and acts like a guy on acid at the Port Authority in New York...

...This is a noble motive, perhaps...

...it contains too much talk and too little narrative drive...

...Is there any other way...

...The Last Temptation is overacted throughout...

...Paul: "I enjoy my life—for the first time I'm enjoying it...

...Lennon-style homilies abound: preaching his New Order, Jesus says, "All I'm saying is the change will happen with love, not with killing...

...for they shall inherit the earth...

...Fundamentalists who are lucky enough not to have seen this picture decry it as a willful, indeed cynical, act of sacrilege, a crass exploitation of Christianity...

...to Scorsese and company, the interesting thing about Jesus is that he was human, and to be human, in their view, is to be preoccupied with sex and self-gratification...

...And sex figures importantly...

...There's no sense of profound love or goodness here, no sense of a huge soul in torment...

...Thus, in the course of his fantasy marriage to Mary, sister of Lazarus, Jesus tells her: "Don't ever leave me...

...Paul is indefensible...

...I don't understand...

...You keep expecting the boys to pass around a joint...

...When he's not whining he alternates between crying jags and shrill pronouncements about sin and death and the hereafter—none of which is in the least inspiring, for the script deliberately robs the Gospel of its poetry...

...This is a Lite Jesus—a timid, sniveling, banal, seedy-looking, not particularly bright Saviour who's utterly without majesty or depth or what junior high school teachers used to call "leadership qualities...

...if those old Hollywood Biblical movies held Christ at arm's length, this film—based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, and directed by Martin Scorsese from a script by Paul Schrader (his collaborator on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull)—tries to climb into Christ's skin, to get inside his head...

...but a Christ horny for Mary Magdalene and tempted by the dream of a wife and some cute kids is simplynot consistent with Biblical teachings...

...Nor is a St...

...After all, when competent movie people set out to make a few bucks off of Christianity, they don't turn out a picture like The Last Temptation...

...but it's also an exceedingly dangerous one, for to break down the barriers that those vulgar old Hollywood epics tacitly observed is to risk a degree of vulgarity—and, yes, a degree of profanity—that even Cecil B. Bruce Bawer, TAS's regular movie critic, is the author of Diminishing Fictions (Graywolf Press...

...Sacrilegious this film may be, but not intentionally so: on the contrary, it's the work of people who plainly thought they were doing something devout...

...He's Jesus as seen through the filter of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, of est and Transcendental Meditation, of Jim Morrison and John Lennon...

...The film shows him, for example, dancing at a wedding: Jesus as regular guy...

...DeMille never approached...

...Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled...

...To ascribe such a pragmatic view of Christ to St...

...Paul—are loud and pushy and obnoxious, selling salvation as if it were a cheap suit...

...Speaking in public, he usually doesn't even know what he's saying: "When those soldiers were torturing Magdalene I wanted to kill them and then I open my mouth and out comes the word love...

...Willem Dafoe, who will be remembered for his portrayal of the Christ figure Sergeant Elias in Platoon, plays the Nazarene as a high-strung hippie—an oversensitive Haight-Ashbury type who spends most of his time whining to his apostles about his inner conflicts, confusions, doubts, and longings, and having impromptu rap sessions with them about such things as the relative importance of the soul and the body...

...Lack of eloquence, you see, equals sincerity...

...But what results is one of the most inarticulate protagonists ever to fill a movie screen...

...And the righteous will be blessed too...

...There's not even any warmth...

...You get the feeling that Dafoe and Hershey's way of getting into the characters was to decide that Christ and Mary Magdalene must have been pretty much like George Harrison and Mia Farrow after a visit to their Indian guru...

...No, The Last Temptation seeks not to exploit Jesus but to know him, to understand him...

...In the Sermon on the Mount, he doesn't say, "Blessed are the meek...

...no, he picks up a stone and says: "Who has never sinned...

...When some men attempt to stone an adulteress to death, Christ doesn't say, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her...