Showing posts with label Mary Magdalene. Show all posts

2023/03/01

‘Mary Magdalene’ Review: A Revision in Need of Revision - The New York Times

‘Mary Magdalene’ Review: A Revision in Need of Revision - The New York Times

‘Mary Magdalene’ Review: A Revision in Need of Revision

Rooney Mara in “Mary Magdalene,” a film directed by Garth Davis.Credit...IFC Films

By Glenn Kenny
April 11, 2019

In much of popular culture, Mary Magdalene is portrayed as a temptress who found piety after Jesus delivered her from a stoning. This new movie, directed by Garth Davis from a script by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, is a revisionist depiction that lines up with recent historical scholarship about her, calling her an “apostle of the apostles.” Unfortunately, it’s a confused and frequently enervating effort.

The Mary of this picture is slight, pale, quiet and modest. Rooney Mara, the lead actress, conveys these four qualities seemingly without trying. We first see Mary working a field, then providing midwife services. She is a valued member of her Judaea community, but she has an unsatisfied spiritual yearning that others find alienating.

Then along comes Jesus, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix is a remarkable actor, especially good at containing stressed-out intensities. But some states seem beyond his grasp. Beatitude would appear to be one of them. When he goes for it, he projects a spaced-out air that’s a little cult-leaderish. Which may be his point — not that the movie actually presents a wholly consistent perspective.

The script often stresses the political struggles of Jesus’s time, and posits the apostles Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Judas (Tahar Rahim) as, besides seekers of the kingdom of heaven, determined anti-Roman activists.

In this narrative, Mary is the only follower who truly “gets” Jesus. But because the movie is so apprehensive about the subject of Christ’s supposed divinity, the ultimate gist of what she alone understands never comes across. “Mary Magdalene” dutifully telegraphs the nobility and compassion of its title character while remaining noncommittal about everything else in its path.

WritersHelen Edmundson, Philippa Goslett
StarsRooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tahar Rahim, Ariane Labed
RatingR
Running Time2 hours
GenreDrama

===

Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute but a devoted disciple who supported Jesus financially and spiritually, scholars say

'Reanalysing that reputation that she had we can see she was probably a woman of greater social status, higher social status, a woman of wealth who accompanied Jesus'
Alon Bernstein,Isaac Scharf
Monday 01 April 2019 15:07Comments

Pope Francis took the biggest step yet to rehabilitate her image by declaring a major feast day in her honour
(Shutterstock)

If there’s a feminist figure from the Bible for the #MeToo era, it could very well be Mary Magdalene.

The major character in the life of Jesus was long maligned in the West and portrayed as a reformed former prostitute. But scholars have adopted a different approach more recently, viewing her as a strong, independent woman who supported Jesus financially and spiritually.

The New Testament tells how Jesus cast demons out of her. She then accompanied Jesus in his ministry around the Galilee, before witnessing his crucifixion, burial and resurrection in Jerusalem, which is being commemorated by Christians this week and next. The Roman Catholic Church and Western Christian churches observe Easter on Sunday, Eastern Orthodox Christians a week later.

Recommended

Including Jesus in the #MeToo movement is a step too far

Muslim boys who insulted Christianity sentenced to memorise Quran

Jesus actor confirms return for Passion of the Christ

2

Pope Francis took the biggest step yet to rehabilitate Mary Magdalene’s image by declaring a major feast day in her honour on 22 June. His 2016 decree put the woman who first proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection on par with the liturgical celebrations of the male apostles.

“By doing this, he established the absolute equality of Mary Magdalene to the apostles, something that has never been done before and is also a point of no return” for women in the church, said Lucetta Scarrafia, editor of the Vatican-published Women Church World monthly magazine.

For centuries, Western Christianity depicted Mary Magdalene as a former prostitute, a narrative that began in the sixth century.

Pope Gregory the Great conflated Mary Magdalene with an anonymous sinful woman mentioned in the chapter before she’s introduced in the Gospel of Luke.

Historic England's best new listed buildingsShow all 34

Only in 1969 did the Catholic Church roll back centuries of labelling Mary Magdalene as such, stating she was distinct from the sinful woman mentioned in the Gospel of Luke. Eastern Orthodox Christians never depicted her as a prostitute.

Mary Magdalene was from a thriving fishing village on the Sea of Galilee named Magdala, which has been excavated extensively by archaeologists in recent decades.

The site is home to the oldest known synagogue in the Galilee, where a stone bearing the likeness of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was found, as well as a marketplace, ritual baths and fishing harbour. Marcela Zapata-Meza, the lead archaeologist at the site, has called it “the Israeli Pompeii”.

Modern scholars have adopted a different understanding of Mary Magdalene and regard her as one of Jesus’ most prominent disciples, who stood by him to the end while his most devoted apostles did not.

“Historical tradition says she was a prostitute from Magdala,” said Jennifer Ristine, director of the Magdalena Institute at Magdala. “Reanalysing that reputation that she had we can see she was probably a woman of greater social status, higher social status, a woman of wealth who accompanied Jesus as we see in Luke 8:2, helping Jesus and his disciples with her own resources.”

Nonetheless, the image of Mary Magdalene as a licentious, sexualised woman has persisted in Western culture, including in Jesus Christ Superstar and The Da Vinci Code.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister, said Mary Magdalene’s reputation was sullied by her depiction in art over the centuries.

“Art history made her become a prostitute, which is something that is not present in the Gospels,” he said, adding that she also has been portrayed as Jesus’ wife.

“It is important to find the real face of Mary Magdalene, who is a woman who represents the importance of the female aspect on the side of Christ,” he told the Associated Press at the Vatican.

The Gospel of Mary, an early Christian text, depicted her as a visionary who received secret revelations and knowledge from Jesus.

Claire Pfann, academic dean at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said Mary Magdalene must be seen for what she was: “An independent woman who has discretionary time and wealth from the city of Magdala, not identified by a father or a husband, whose life was dramatically restored, healed, changed by her encounter with this Jewish itinerant teacher and healer, Jesus of Nazareth.”

“It takes a long time for serious scholarship to trickle down to the popular level,” she added.

A new film on the life of Mary Magdalene, starring Rooney Mara in the title role, Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peter the Apostle, recasts her in that mold.

Mary Magdalene- trailer

The film has been released in Europe and Australia. A release date for the United States has not been set, following the collapse of its original distributor, the Weinstein Company, after a series of sexual harassment and assault claims against founder Harvey Weinstein. The rash of allegations made against Weinstein spawned the global #MeToo movement.

Ms Ristine said Mary Magdalene plays a critical role in the New Testament and carries an “essential pivotal message of Christianity”.

“Why is a woman there, giving testimony to that in a culture where woman are just not paid attention to, or not placed as witnesses?” Ms Ristine asked. “Well, this speaks very strongly to women today, that the power of their witness, the power of their testimony to speak up for a truth, can have effects that ripple down through the centuries.”

AP

Mary Magdalene movie review & film summary (2019) | Roger Ebert

Mary Magdalene movie review & film summary (2019) | Roger Ebert

Reviews
Mary Magdalene

Nick Allen April 12, 2019

NOW STREAMING ON:
Powered by JustWatch

For centuries, the Greatest Story Ever Told had it wrong. Mary Magdalene, one of the most recognizable women in the Gospels, was not a prostitute, but an Apostle just like Peter, Matthew, or Judas. It was Pope Gregory back in 591 who started this misrepresentation, which wasn’t fully addressed by the Vatican until 2016, when they restored Mary back to her place as one of the most important people in Jesus’ circle. That is an extraordinary correction—whether one considers the narrative to be history or just a story—and it is propagated here by an extraordinary film.

Written by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, Garth Davis’ “Mary Magdalene” is about the quasi-maniacal dedication of followers and the anguish of a messiah, as presented through a woman’s experience. Rooney Mara plays the title character with a quiet delicacy, often observant as Mary finds a place in the world and a cause in which to place her profound empathy. She was not just any spectator, this telling argues, so much as proof that at the core of Jesus’ teachings is a feminine influence.

At the beginning of the film, Mary wants a choice with her body and her life—she does not want to be simply married off and reproduce, as expected by her brothers and father. At the same time, Mary is not welcomed in the same worshipping space as the men, despite the importance of faith in her life. Her brothers and father deduce that she needs a forced exorcism and nearly kill her by drowning. Mary finds an out when a healer named Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix) comes to town, and decides to become one of his followers. Mary's connection with Jesus is unlike the ones he has with the men (including Chiwetel Ejiofor's Peter and Tahar Rahim's Judas), in part because she understands that the kingdom Jesus talks about does not concern splattering Roman blood, but in sharing love.

"Mary Magdalene" does not have any major beats regarding Jesus and the Apostles that anyone who has studied the story would not know. Christ gains a following performing the miracles like bringing a dead man back to life, with Greig Fraser's handheld cinematography immersing us in hysterical crowds that feature new believers. And once Jesus' followers speak loudly enough about him being a messiah, a term he lives in fear of throughout, the Romans crucify him. With Davis' editing gradually focusing on Jesus without losing sight of Mary, "Mary Magdalene" creates a definitive, rich foundation of raw compassion, where many of its scenes rely on simply what you feel from seeing their acts of mercy. The film compels you to look past previous iterations, and to engage the overall tale for its bizarre beauty: a radical movement, led by a tormented man of select words, who speaks of a kingdom that human beings can make a reality. As someone who watched it twice in 24 hours, "Mary Magdalene" moved me in a way that no previous film about Christianity ever has.

Mara is excellent in a role that displays her precision in her acting and reacting—she is the most subdued actor in the entire movie, but that does not make her work any less powerful. In the film’s more contemplative moments, she creates a compelling inner life. Listening, witnessing. But when Davis’ editing does focus more on her, interacting with the elated Apostles or the downtrodden Jesus, it is the work of a full character, created mostly in silence. Mara has a very emotional scene in which she and Peter care for people who are dying from starvation, and the mercy that she communicates as Mary is stunning.

In one of the best portrayals of Jesus these eyes have ever seen, Phoenix is more inspired by the likes of Rasputin, Charles Manson, and the Baghwan than previous Christ imagery. Shaggy, beat, but able to do things like make the blind see, Phoenix's Jesus is a human being who is visibly tormented by the power and wisdom that works through him. It’s an incredibly physical approach to such a famous being: no word is wasted as his frail voice comes through clenched teeth, his head often tilted back when sermonizing as if trying to maintain balance. And within Phoenix’s own career, it recalls his animalistic nature of Freddie Quell in “The Master,” a blind follower. Now, it is the magnetic expression of a leader with an immense power behind his sharp eyes and careful words, who performs miracles as if he is doomed to it.

There is a strong, crucial sense of mania within “Mary Magdalene” and its vision of a movement. Tahar Rahim and Chiwetel Ejiofor, especially—both who could lead biblical epics of their own—say the words of the Apostles that we know, but with such a bursting exuberance that we know they’ve completely drunk the Kool-Aid, and then some. These men are so desperate for a resolve to their pain, as Mary learns in her quiet, haunting conversations with them, that their lives have become an open-arms embrace for a kingdom that’s only as real as their faith. This is never seen as a criticism against the Apostles—instead it’s an incredibly honest take on full-fledged worship, and another example of the staggering compassion that “Mary Magdalene” has for the people in its story, and what they represent.

“Mary Magdalene” is a film I wish I had when I was taking religion classes, and also film classes. Davis poignantly uses the holiest of cinematic expressions, the magic hour—that time in between night and day when the sky is a watercolor mix of purple, orange, and pink, revealing a type of complex beauty before it evolves to darkness or light. The power in “Mary Magdalene” often starts with its imagery, which builds from its appropriately barren huts and monochrome costumes to make you appreciate how natural light is a nuanced expression itself. When characters speak on calm cliff sides as the day turns to night, as they often do here, it only compels you to engage the film in a deeper way.

The music of "Mary Magdalene" is significant on its own, but it has an added, sorrowful importance: it’s the last film score by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, who is co-credited with cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir. Jóhannsson was a composer whose power came from his ability to create precise atmosphere with rhythm and melody, regardless of the project. “Mary Magdalene” is a strong testament to Jóhannsson’s meticulous arrangements, his mournful string pieces paired with howling winds and prayers, further coloring Fraser’s extreme wide shots that show Jesus’ followers as seeds in a barren land.

“Mary Magdalene” is one of those movies in which numerous passages feel weightless, the culmination of so many vivid filmmaking entities contained in one picture. Simultaneously gorgeous and eye-opening, the film uses its grace to preach about the potential of storytelling—especially when it comes from an underrepresented perspective. Davis’ movie contemplates miracles and acts of love I’d heard about during a countless amount of hours at Sunday mass and beyond. But through the profoundly compassionate lens of “Mary Magdalene,” it felt as if I was learning about them for the first time.

HISTORY
DRAMA

Nick Allen

Nick Allen is the Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Mary Magdalene review: a reverent take on a woman most movies get wrong - Vox

A reverent, feminist new movie tries to give Mary Magdalene her due

Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix star in a reenvisioned version of the traditional Jesus narrative.

By Alissa Wilkinson@alissamariealissa@vox.com Apr 10, 2019,

Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara star in Mary Magdalene. — Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara star in *Mary Magdalene.*

Alissa Wilkinson covers film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

I don’t mean this as a slight in the least, but it’s true: Most Jesus movies are almost exclusively about a group of men. The ones that strive for veracity focus on Jesus and his disciples, an all-male pack. Women are frequently reduced secondary characters, or in some cases pushed off to the side entirely. They’re figures that need healing or appear in a crowd, but they’re not a big part of the story.

Yet Jesus’s mother Mary was a major figure of veneration in the early church. And the Bible makes it clear that women were among those traveling with Jesus — perhaps chief among them Mary Magdalene, a woman whom Jesus clearly loved, so much so that in John’s Gospel, she’s named as the first person he appeared to after his resurrection.

Jesus’s mother Mary, given her elevated state in the text and in some Christian traditions, has been the subject of a number of films, including the 1999 TV movie Mary, Mother of God (starring Christian Bale as Jesus) and the 2015 film Full of Grace, which depicted Mary contemplating her faith in her son as she nears the end of her life.

But in Mary Magdalene, directed by Garth Davis (Lion) and written by Helen Edmundson (Thérèse Raquin) and Philippa Goslett (How to Talk to Girls at Parties), the story’s a bit different. It may even be more closely aligned with the text and early Christian tradition too. Starring Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix, the film has some of the same problems as many movies about Jesus’s ministry. But it’s still an interesting addition to the canon because of its goal: to not just tell a story primarily about Mary Magdalene but also elevate the role of women in the early Christian Church.

Mary Magdalene’s role and identity has changed throughout Christian history

Mary Magdalene (likely so named because she came from a fishing village called Magdala) has been a source of interest and contention for centuries. In some old texts, such as the Gnostic Gospels, her close relationship with Jesus is a source of tension with other disciples. By the middle ages, she’d been conflated with another Mary (there are a lot of Marys in the gospels), the “sinful woman” or prostitute named in Luke who washed Jesus’s feet with perfume and her hair. And so she was, for a long stretch of Christian history, viewed with some suspicion by many.

Eventually, she was restored by the Catholic Church to her rightful identity as a disciple of Jesus. She’s now considered a saint in many Christian traditions, and in 2016, the Vatican officially raised her celebration day to the level of a feast day (a much bigger deal).

But even though the church no longer considers her to have been a former prostitute, that perception has continued in popular culture, with the idea that Mary was the wife of Jesus or had a sexual relationship with him showing up repeatedly.

For instance, in Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ (based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel), Satan tempts Jesus on the cross with a vision of his life, had he married Mary Magdalene. In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (you may remember its live TV revival last year), Jesus and Mary don’t have a romantic relationship, but Mary is portrayed as a former prostitute, and the song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” which she sings about Jesus, could be read as a confession of unrequited romantic love and desire.

None of that is here in 2019’s Mary Magdalene. Instead, Mary and Jesus’s close relationship is portrayed almost as a symbiosis, something they both need to survive and to carry out God’s will on earth. (That Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix are a couple in real life does admittedly complicate the matter, so it’s best to put that offscreen context aside.)

Before she meets Jesus, Mary lives with her father and several sisters in Magdala, where the women spend their days tending to fishing nets and the household. She has a knack for midwifery and prays fervently in the synagogue, but she feels as if she doesn’t belong.

That feeling comes to a head when she flees a betrothal to a kind widower, for reasons she doesn’t entirely understand, and her father and other men in the village deem her to be possessed by demons. Despondent, unwilling to submit to her fate, she lies in a state of depression until an itinerant preacher she’s heard of comes by. It’s Jesus, of course. He tells her that there are no demons in her, and that her deep desire to know God is a good thing.

He tells her, in essence, that she is not wrong for how she feels. Her feelings are valid.

Rooney Mara in Mary Magdalene. — Rooney Mara in *Mary Magdalene*.

The next day, Mary sees Jesus preaching nearby and joins the crowd — and soon finds herself caught up in the tumult that erupts when Jesus begins healing people of their diseases. She knows that she must follow him, even if she can’t exactly name the reasons why.

So the next morning, she leaves her family and joins his band of disciples, and they leave town.

Though the men are worried about what people will think of them — a band of 13 men, traveling with one woman — Mary is steely and determined and devoted to their work, undaunted by their disapproval of her. What develops is a close relationship between Mary and Jesus, who is often exhausted by his work and worried about the dark path he sees in front of him.

Meanwhile, the disciples — especially Judas (Tahar Rahim) and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) — seem, at times, to be more interested in how Jesus can serve their ideas of him rather than in following him. Living in Judea in times of increasing unrest against the Romans occupying their land, they dream of being liberated by Jesus, their Messiah. They are willing to brush past the sick and dying to pursue that idea.

But Jesus has a different notion of the kingdom of heaven, one more to do with love and service to one another — something Mary alone seems to instinctively understand. That doesn’t endear her to the disciples. But it may help shape the future of the church.

Mary Magdalene’s take on the Gospels is quietly subversive

Mary Magdalene takes a gently feminist perspective on the early days of the Jewish sect that would eventually become Christianity. It’s at its best when Mary’s presence challenges the men to see past their ambitions and care for the “least of these,” the people who couldn’t be as useful to their cause but were central to Jesus’s mission.

And in this, taking some imaginative license, Mary’s role is elevated. In one scene, Jesus and his followers enter a city, and the disciples are surprised when they realize he’s heading to preach not to the men but to the women of the town. When Jesus arrives, though, he’s briefly unsure of what to say, and it’s finally Mary he turns to for advice.

In fact, Mary gives Jesus lots of advice throughout the film and tells him she’ll be by his side, even into his death. (According to the Gospels, she was present at his crucifixion.) Later, she is the one to deliver big news to the disciples, while they start to make moves to push her out of the narrative.

Joaquin Phoenix and Tahar Rahim in Mary Magdalene. — Joaquin Phoenix and Tahar Rahim in *Mary Magdalene.*

For some viewers, it may not be apparent how radical this could seem to some Christian audiences. The movie essentially suggests that Mary helped found the Christian faith but was edged out by the patriarchy, which wanted to shape Christ’s message of love, forgiveness, and peace into something else entirely — something led by men. The disciples, the movie suggests, purposely downgraded Mary’s status within the group from beloved disciple, equal to them, to a woman who was simply around.

Whether or not they succeeded is up to the viewer’s interpretation, but given the dominance of patriarchal authority throughout Christian history and in some traditions to this day, the movie’s implication is very clear. At the end, however, the movie notes the 2016 proclamation from the Vatican, along with the title “apostle to the apostles” that has often been applied to Mary throughout Christian history, asserting her equality within the group. (The movie erroneously states at the end that this title was applied in 2016, but historians claim it appeared as early as the ninth century.)

The role of gender in church authority is an incredibly complex subject, involving thousands of years of arguments and perspectives on what “equality” looks like. It’s sparked rifts and church splits. That Mary Magdalene’s role was central to this isn’t much of a stretch.

And, of course, a movie won’t solve those theological arguments, many of which are deeply entrenched in millennia of traditions. But it is interesting to see Mary Magdalene tackle them with a perspective that is still essentially reverent, clearly drawing from the text and from church tradition.

Unfortunately, Mary Magdalene falls into some familiar Bible movie ruts

In fact, it might be too reverent. While Mary Magdalene does a good thing in going off book, telling an original story drawn from the text, it loses some steam by falling into the same traps as a number of movies about Jesus. There’s a sort of dreaminess and floatiness to the storytelling, reinforced by a score composed of lots of swelling strings and choral harmonies, making the story feel more like a cousin of fantasy than a story about some people starting a movement. The movie moves very slowly, which isn’t a de facto problem, but coupled with the ethereal quality of the storytelling, it feels unreal.

That may be exacerbated by the performances at its center. They’re quite good, of course; Mara and Phoenix are two of the finest actors working today, and Ejiofor is a bracing presence as Peter. (Mara and Phoenix, of course, are also both white; Hollywood’s long, curiously enduring streak of casting white people as Jesus continues apace, though this one at least springs for some ethnic diversity among the disciples.)

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Simon Peter in Mary Magdalene. — Chiwetel Ejiofor as Simon Peter in *Mary Magdalene.*

But Mara is almost always otherworldly (Cate Blanchett’s line in Carol that she was “a strange girl, flung out of space” works as a broad description of her), which makes Mary seem something slightly other than human, almost ghostly at moments. It’s hard to know what’s going on inside her, which is strange since the film centers squarely on her.

Jesus, on the other hand, is frequently played as entirely otherworldly, in a way that would belie the Christian idea that he was God, yes, but also completely a man. Played by Phoenix, that humanity breaks through — he cries, he smiles — but at times, he seems to slip into a near-stoned affect, as if Jesus was a hippie cult leader spouting vague aphorisms, not a man whom people found so magnetic that they had to follow him.

As a Christian and a longtime observer of trends in Christian films, I find myself hoping that someday, a director will manage to make a movie that renders a Jesus who fits with what I read in the Bible — a funny, emotional, passionate man, someone whose powers of attention to the world around him are far more developed than everyone else’s. He speaks in enigmas and riddles, but always with a twinkle in his eye. We’re drawn to him so much that we weep when he is executed by people who feel threatened by him, whether or not we believe in him in the world outside the movie theater.

I haven’t quite seen it yet, though I catch glimpses at times. But I appreciate the aim of Mary Magdalene, and the ways it reimagines a familiar story with modern implications, even when it falls flat. There are many stories worth telling from the Bible, and the immersive nature of a movie makes it possible to tell them in fresh new ways. Maybe the more filmmakers try to do so, the closer we get.

Mary Magdalene opens in theaters on April 12.

Mary Magdalene review – toothless attempt to overturn Sunday school myths | Film | The Guardian

Mary Magdalene review – toothless attempt to overturn Sunday school myths

Rooney Mara brings her customary intensity to the title role as Jesus’ ‘favourite pupil’, but the result is a bit too solemn to be a convincing reinvention

This movie, from screenwriters Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett and director Garth Davis, sets itself a bold task: to rescue Mary Magdalene from an age-old tradition of patriarchal condescension and misinterpretation. And yet it winds up embracing a solemn, softly-spoken and slow-moving Christian piety of its own.

Mary was a key apostle of Jesus, and intimate witness to some of the most important events in his life, but has been wrongly recast in popular tradition as a “fallen woman” and “prostitute”, perhaps because of a prurient need in the male religious hive-mind for a diametric opposite to the Blessed Virgin of the same name – a need to perpetuate the misogynistic ideology of madonna/whore, and simply to denigrate a woman’s importance.

This caricature of Mary Magdalene probably reached its low point in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar with Mary’s song I Don’t Know How to Love Him, with its startling lines: “He’s a man, he’s just a man, and I’ve had so many men before, in very many ways...” Too much information. This film sets out to challenge all this: Rooney Mara brings her pupil-dilated intensity to the role of Mary, Joaquin Phoenix is a wan, introspective Jesus, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Peter and Tahar Rahim is Judas.

The drama plausibly suggests that Mary was a fiercely intelligent, resourceful woman who rejected the male norms of marriage and children laid down for her, and insisted on following Jesus. This was what caused her to be (at least initially) condemned as mad or possessed: it is entirely convincing. When she takes up her new position among the apostles, the film suggests that she does indeed become a favourite pupil, permitted à deux confidences on hillsides. But all this means for Mary is doing an awful lot of enlightened gazing at Jesus, who in turn does a good deal of infinitely knowing smiles back at her, while their dialogue is muted and restrained.

The film takes us in reasonably short order through the familiar Sunday school events, like the raising of Lazarus, Palm Sunday, the expulsion of the money changers, the last supper and of course the crucifixion itself. But Mary washing Jesus’s feet with her hair has been removed and each of the big events seems weirdly low key and even anti-climactic.

For all that the film revises our view of Mary simply by placing the narrative focus more on her, its more radical specific changes are actually connected with the men who are treated very leniently. Judas’s motives for the betrayal turn out to be wrongheaded but not culpable and there are no thirty pieces of silver. Similarly, Peter’s threefold denial has been abolished. The film suggests – quite persuasively – that the peace-loving and quietist message of Christianity was finally understood by Mary, but not the macho male apostles. But the drama’s need to forgive Judas and Peter makes the story toothless. And the dreamlike vision of Mary Magdalene floating underwater is a bit of a cliche.
The performances of Mara and Phoenix are careful and respectful, though with nothing like the lightning-flash of energy and scorn that they have given to secular roles in the past. And this may be because the film needs to distance itself, a little high-mindedly, from that other vulgar Mary Magdalene tradition – the one about her actually having sex with Jesus, the idea posited in both The Last Temptation of Christ and The Da Vinci Code. It’s if the film feels the need to repudiate any suggestion of impropriety. What we’re left with is a platonic apostlemance.