Son of God and the Pitfalls of Biblical Moviemaking

I will admit to going into this one a bit wary. I’m always ready to cringe when anyone brings a Bible story to life. It’s so easy for these movies turn a vast, extraordinarily complex story, shot through with both light and darkness, into something with poor production values and a smarmy feel to it. I’ve heard The Passion of the Christ is good filmmaking, but the reports of flying flesh during flogging scenes have kept away from it. Violence is probably the thing I tolerate least in movies.

But I went to Son of God anyway. And in some ways, my fears were realized. There were some poor production values. The chief problem is the pace. The first part of the movies whizzes you through the highlights reel of the Old Testament, then the birth and life of Christ get a bit more airtime. From the Last Supper on, it slows down to a crawl. At the end there are lots of close ups of agonized and emotional people in slow motion, and the music plays on loudly. It reminded me of a critic who complained that the movie War Horse had too much “inspirational plowing.”

Also, as I had mentioned to the Friday Noon Movie Club, there is the problem of Jesus. He still looks way too much like the traditional Western image of him. In fact, he looks like Brad Pitt with some smudges on his face. I liked the actors who played John and Peter, and they looked like they might actually be from that time and place. I’ve nothing against the appealing Diogo Morgado who portrays Christ, but he does not appear to be from the pre-orthodontia phase of the world, which becomes quite obvious as he’s reduced to smiling spiritually much of the time. I wanted to see him righteously angry when he turned the tables over in the temple, but Morgado couldn’t quite summon up that kind of strength.

Personally, I think that filmmakers often fail at this because we just don’t know the man Christ well enough. We know enough to model our lives after him as best we can, but as has often been pointed out, it’s not so simple to decide things based on What Would Jesus Do. He was a mystery, and he was God. Even the disciples wondered what he was talking about half the time.

All that said, there were a few things I took away from this film.

First, though the character of Pontius Pilate comes off ridiculously at the beginning, in the end I appreciated some aspects of his characterization. The film makes clear the kind of politics he is dealing with. He allows his concerns for himself and his position to overtake his desire to do the right thing. At the end, as he tells his wife that it’s no matter, that this won’t mean anything, you see a person who is on the way to convincing himself that he is right. The Bible often mentions someone’s heart being hardened, which I’ve always wondered about. This gave me a glimpse of what that might actually look like.

Second, while I wished for more stellar cinematography (see the IMAX movie Jerusalem if you really want to have this old city take your breath away), I still felt like a got a feeling of what life was like then. Particularly what it means to journey from one place to another on foot in the arid land.

And, of course, I was reminded again of just what Christ’s sacrifice really was. I’m a very story-driven person, which is why movies appeal to me so much in the first place. A fleshed-out version of these events brings me a fresh reminder of what is so easily glossed over as I speak the words of the Apostles’ Creed.

And so, don’t go to this for great moviemaking. But if you want a taste of the land, or the life, or how some miracles might have looked, or most of all a fresh reminder of what price Christ paid, it might be worth your time.