Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN JESUS AS HAMLET THE LAST TEMPTATION' The Last Temptation of Christ has been labeled "blasphemy" by some religious groups, and "morally offensive" by the Communications Department of the...
...At least Scorsese has a real sense of that hard agony...
...Both Kazantzakis and Scorsese share the modern, puritanical reduction of sin to '' sins of the flesh...
...He has no better moment-and Scorsese makes no better case for the "humanity'' and' 'relevance'' of this image of Christ- than, when challenged about apparent changes in doctrine, Jesus explains,' 'God doesn't tell me everything at once...
...A dream with a simple sequence of Christ and Mary Magdalene (perhaps even with some modest display of affection) would have served just as well-were it not for Scorsese's penchant for overstatement and, to be frank, a troubling view of sex...
...But creative revision and naive projection are different...
...But the film's diction isn't plain modern English or even American...
...it also says what no man of historical Judea could ever possibly have said...
...But the dream is not merely weak dramatically...
...It's not in the novel...
...It begins well-with an angelic figure leading Christ (Willem Dafoe) down from the cross to a beautiful, lush landscape where he finds Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey...
...Looking backward can often mean fresh perception of the past through revising worn interpretations, bringing to light neglected facts, or underlining the role of marginal groups...
...Both the novel and the film also project modern attitudes into the past, flattening history into a pale reflection of the present...
...Other actors rely on cliched acting tricks (raised eyebrows, piercing squints) to make points...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...And Scorsese insists Jesus certainly was a man...
...the first gives us real relevance, the second shlock...
...Scorsese is disingenuous when he feigns shock that his film has offended people...
...But Scorsese relies on Kazantzakis's treatment, which presents Jesus not only as very human, but as very modern-a Hamlet, an existential searcher, at times an antihero: the novel could have been called The Last Temptation of J. Alfred Prufrock...
...SCREEN JESUS AS HAMLET THE LAST TEMPTATION' The Last Temptation of Christ has been labeled "blasphemy" by some religious groups, and "morally offensive" by the Communications Department of the USCC...
...as Wordsworth said, bare simplicity can result in poetry...
...Director Martin Scorsese-a non-practicing Catholic and former junior seminarian-made this film from a deep desire to express his own religious beliefs, which are both unorthodox and earnest...
...None of this makes the movie less irksome: "blasphemy" (or should it be "heresy...
...He also undercuts his efforts at authenticity-the grimy shots of ancient Palestine, or the wildly eclectic, highly Oriental musical score-when the actors (in the ultimate banality) are "just like us...
...The film preserves this modern aspect and Scorsese presents Christ as a neo-Romantic, who declares "the law is against my heart...
...In directing his cast, Scorsese has mistaken solipsism for relevance...
...I only get it pieces at a time.'' The line strikes home for anyone who has experienced the struggle to see through a glass darkly...
...Barry Miller as Jeroboam is especially awful...
...On the other hand, those who say the film is irreligious or, worse, a "Jewish production" are wildly off base...
...Universal Pictures, distributor of the film, is also disingenuous in its claim that the sex in the film doesn't matter because it occurs while Christ dreams on the cross: the whole film industry trades on the credibility of dreams...
...if anything, it has some anti-Semitic images and lines, including one about Jewish politicians...
...its content also raises several deeper questions...
...Willem Dafoe, the benign, almost Christ-like sergeant in Platoon, is at times an inspiring Jesus...
...Yet the movie is sincerely meant...
...Did Scorsese need the explicit love-making that follows...
...Did I find the film "morally offensive'' ? No...
...the world and the devil are mostly forgotten...
...it's low, broad Californian...
...a small scene after an improvised "sermon on the mount...
...No recent film is more difficult to judge on both moral and aesthetic grounds...
...Add to this Scorsese's choice of everyday language to underline "relevance...
...David Bowie is a strong Pilate, his English accent nicely conveying an elegant Roman...
...It makes some scenes laughable, particularly those involving the Judas figure (an entirely novel conception of the character, played by Harvey Keitel), who talks like a Mafioso (or is he imitating the tough guy character actor Jack Warden...
...There might have been some spiritual resonance in the use of modern language if understatement ruled...
...His explanation of nonviolence as "breaking the chain of evil" is especially compelling...
...A master of gore in his previous films, Scorsese has also provided gruesome scenes-perhaps too strong for some stomachs-of the bone-crunching reality of a crucifixion...
...Scorsese has created moments of genuine spiritual grandeur: the raising of Lazarus...
...the sequence goes on far longer than necessary...
...The book and the film are two from the heart...
...At its core the film manifests a Manichean opposition between goodness and sexuality...
...There are two notable exceptions...
...It poses a sexist opposition between a pseudo-spiritual macho sense of mission and the lure of women: once Christ loves one woman, the screenplay implies, all hell breaks loose...
...Scorsese displays none of the sarcasm dismissive of religion prevalent in so many films in the last decade...
...The book has been popular at some Protestant divinity schools and among theologians taking a new look at the human aspects of Christ...
...Lurking behind this is the same obsessive puritanism about human nature that Scorsese ostensibly wants to attack...
...shave the beards, change costumes, and it's the local news...
...But his dramatic touch is uneven, yielding long exposition scenes filled with tortured verbal gobbledy-gook and tedious passages, including the dream sequence in which the crucified Jesus unconsciously imagines what an ordinary, domestic life would have meant...
...Am I horrified that some do...
...Such a line not only distorts Jesus' words ("I come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it...
...it develops into other scenes where, it is implied, this domesticated Christ practices : bigamy...
...His movie completes a serious, fifteen-year project, begun after he read Nikos Kazantzakis's novel in the early 1970s...
...Aside from the unease the explicit sex causes, these scenes weaken the original point of the dream-a contrast between the cross and simple domestic joy, not the cross and sexual promiscuity...
...hurts more when it comes from within a tradition...
...and Jesus' final words of triumph...
...Scorsese manages some of the former with scenes of cult-like frenzy and homeless and mad people in the streets of Judea: the cinematography suggests powerful and troubling likenesses to today...
...Intentionally or not, Universal also issued misleading prerelease statements about the content of the dream, which is neither as short nor as innocent as it claims...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 15
