“Faithful Viewer” is an occasional feature in which RNS reporters
plumb religion and spirituality in film, television, books, music and
other forms of popular culture.
An unbeliever in the midst of an existential crisis meets Jesus and has
a conversion experience. High-mindedness — not high jinks — ensues.
Audiences have seen this old Hollywood trope before: in “Quo Vadis,” (1951), “The Robe,” (1953), “Ben Hur” (1959). And now in “Risen,” opening Friday (Feb. 19), a month before Easter.
And while a lot has changed in the nearly seven decades since the first
of these “come to Jesus” movies, the core plot mechanism of
“he-of-little-faith meeting the ultimate man of faith” remains.
Why the resurrection of such an old narrative device, minus the
sequined costumes, wigs and Max Factor makeup, which have been replaced
by whips, scourges and buckets of blood (thanks, Mel Gibson and “The Passion of the Christ”!)?
“I think the idea of being carried through the narrative of Christ,
from his Crucifixion to the Resurrection and the Ascension, through the
eyes of nonbeliever allows us to come at this from a soft angle,” said
Joseph Fiennes, the British actor who plays unbeliever Clavius in
“Risen.” “Clavius represents the everyman. We’re all on a hunt,
theological or not. We’re all on some form of investigation or
discovery.”
In “Risen,” Clavius is a high-ranking Roman soldier who, as the
right-hand man of Pontius Pilate (an excellent Peter Firth), has a
front-row seat at the Crucifixion. With his own eyes he sees Jesus dead
and buried in a sealed tomb. So when the body is missing and reports of
Jesus sightings come in, Clavius turns into the most skeptical of
detectives, looking for the corpse.
Instead (SPOILER ALERT!) , he encounters a very much alive, very jolly
Jesus (“Yeshua,” in this film, played by Cliff Curtis). From there,
let’s just say Clavius makes some changes in his life.
The end.
Not much of a surprise in terms of plot — and that’s the point, said William Blizek, founding editor of the Journal of Religion and Film.
“It’s a nice model and it works,” Blizek said. “It is about change.
You’re changing for the better. If you’re a nonbeliever and you see a
nonbeliever become a Christian, the message to you is, ‘If you do this
you’ll be a happy camper, too.'”
But that kind of Christian comfort food can work against a movie, said Doug Cowan,
a professor of religious studies at the University of Waterloo who
studies religion and film. Movies that present a more controversial idea
of the Gospels or of Jesus — think “The Last Temptation of Christ”
(1988), where picketers were so upset by the film’s married Jesus that
they attacked a theater — can bring in larger audiences, curious about
the controversy.
“Those movies aren’t hot dogs and beer,” Cowan said. “They say there
are some very hard things we need to chew over in this movie.”
Case in point — 2004’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Director-writer
Gibson said it was based strictly on the New Testament Gospels, but
scholars such as Cowan said it was also based on the very graphic
visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich,
a 19th-century mystic nun. And many critics condemned it for its
anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews as the bloodthirsty killers of Jesus.
“That wasn’t comfort food,” Cowan said, and audiences came out in record numbers.
But gentler, easier-to-swallow Bible movies such as “Risen” have their
place, Cowan said. They are for “reality maintenance,” he said — not
intended to make new believers as much as to reinforce the beliefs of
existing ones.
Hollywood “is always telling the same stories because we are always
asking the same questions,” Cowan said. “Who are we, where do we come
from, what is the purpose of my life? We are simply driven to ask the
questions, whether we get the answers or not.”
Kimberly Winston is a national correspondent for Religion News Service
Courtesy: Religion News Service
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