THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Martin Scorsese had for years wanted to make a movie of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. Even if he seemed an odd choice to do it, because his movies seem so explosively modern and contentious (MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL), when we got to know him, through watching his movies, most of them tinged with Catholicism and alienation, and listening to or reading about him, we knew he was more than up for the at best dubious challenge: He's just the right kind of intense, anguished Catholic, completely enveloped by the mysticism of his religion, to give us a fresh perspective on Christ as a man. I hope I can say this with support from other recovering Catholics: I also loved the majesty of the Church -- its physical grandeur and harmonious theme (that we as people must forgive ourselves before we can expect to be forgiven by a God, at least that's how I've always viewed the main tenet of Christianity throughout my Catholic education) -- and as a teenage moviegoer, I too was overwhelmed by movies like THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. The image of Christ was story book perfect -- the epitome of ethereal iconolatry. But when reaching adulthood, and trying to make sense of what I now see as legend, my view of Christ got tarnished: He was no longer Max von Sydow. Scorsese succinctly puts it this way about what he wouldn't do: "I didn't want a Christ who glowed in the dark."
Chief among the reasons religion is appealing to many is that there is no answer to the earthly finality of death, so therefore we hope there is something more, something beyond death, a God or supreme power with an eternity of answers. It is a matter of faith, yet maybe more realistically a matter of comfort. (Or, as C.S. Lewis might suggest, a way to avoid the fear of death as nothingness.) But out of this beautiful simplicity comes the various roads to God, each so detoured by hidden mines of biased interpretation and dictatorship that poor put-upon Madalyn Murray-O'Hair is right -- religion has caused mankind more misery and death than any other single idea in history. (It certainly would be hard to argue that the idea has brought us everlasting peace and love -- its primary goals.) The lasting power of the God myth to believers isn't that they've seemingly resolved death, it's in accepting otherworld perfection -- something we can't really relate to or achieve, something we can only be in awe of through imagination. Realism, then, becomes the enemy. While it's hard to comprehend all the arguments being made against Scorsese's film, the easiest to understand is that fundamentalist Christians vehemently reject as blasphemy the notion that a God, in this case a God's "son" named Christ, can be viewed as a human being and therefore subject to all human temptations. At the very core of Scorsese's belief is that his God sent his own son as a man of human flesh and blood and possible moral weakness precisely so that we could relate to him, and it's an admirable, if not altogether impossible position to take, because soon after it's unveiled, up pop so many contradictions and inconsistencies that, while we sure as hell aren't getting "a glow in the dark" Christ, we start hoping for one. Scorsese's naturalism exposes how rigged the religious game is.
In the 8/21/88 issue of the Los Angeles Times entertainment tabloid Calender, Lawrence Christon (honest, that's his name) wrote, "The protesters represent a much larger group of the alienated and disaffected, whose spiritual hunger has never been truly satiated. In THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST they see not only the deadly literalness of the reified image that displaces the spiritual imagination, but they also sense that this one last apprehension of divine purity, this single incorruptible ideal that they've held against the manifold pollutions of the modern world, has been taken away from them and used up by the movie." To paraphrase Blanche in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, they don't want realism, they want magic. Perhaps this explains why George Stevens' THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD was far less successful with critics than with the alienated and disaffected. When Stevens made his epic, his goal was to fuse reverence with skepticism by using nature as the bond; the huge panoramas of his colored Ansel Adams-like locales were used to enhance the basic belief that there had to be something that or someone who created it all. Stevens also knew that to succeed he had to re-define the sepulchral trap that often befalls the actor playing Christ, performing as the "receptacle of sacred relics." Max von Sydow is the very essence of Michelangelo or Raphael, and his screen persona seems otherworldly. Nevertheless, he managed to get all the epigrams and platitudes to resonate with stunning clarity of meaning. The big Cinerama screen helped as well -- the magic had magnified power. (Some of us still remember, in the original roadshow version of the movie before United Artist unmercifully cut it, the "dropping" of the thirty pieces of coin on the soundtrack during Judas's betrayal.) More significantly, there is no "real thing" about Von Sydow to trouble us, even if right now most of us claim to only want reality. Von Sydow's as far from real as Charlton Heston is as Moses -- we feel safe, secure in the knowledge that Stevens isn't going to explode possible falsehoods.
But it is the "real" in Christ that Scorsese as artist and troubled Catholic searched for in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, and it would have been hypocritical of him to make a movie that supported the other kind of view. That in the end he concluded that there was resistance to temptation and that he actually deviated little from mythology says this about Scorsese: he's deeply respectful. And certainly far more than the dummmy-headed protestors who never bothered to see the movie they feigned distress over. (Sound familiar? Rather like Dole screaming about violence in movies he's never seen while avoiding condemnation of the violence in movies made by Arnold and Bruce, who support his drearidacy.) Yet in weighing his sincere intentions with what's on the screen, the movie, very much like the novel, is a failure. There's naturalism to a degree: the movie has the most realistic look yet at what Judea might have been like, and the spikes being hammered into Christ's flesh are terrifyingly big, and we get Christ questioning and fearful of his father's plans -- but there's no spell. The center is severely crippled by Willem Defoe as Jesus. Unfair as it is, too many of us spend our time looking at the spaces between his teeth, and it is exactly that kind of visual handicap we don't need to deal with. If an actor playing the most discussed and mythicized figure of western civilization attempts to play him as an emotional, mental maelstrom, it has to be a performance ripped from within the character he's portraying, without the burden of distractions. After all, it is this daring conception that is the very heart of the novel and what Scorsese aimed for. How can we become involved with the interpretation when the actor's defects overshadow it? Defoe is also torn in another direction -- he's less the novel's Christ than he is Scorsese as Christ. (De Niro's least satisfying work in his movies with Scorsese comes when he too plays Scorsese instead of his characters.) Most of the yahoo fundamentalists who see the movie will not notice the substitution, but for the movie lovers out there, the resemblance of Defoe's urban intensity, his wiry nervousness, his manic jabberishness to Scorsese's is unquestionable, and so the element of the natural Scorsese wants and we want for him gets lost. The result is that not only does Kazantzakis's Christ get usurped, so does Christ himself.
I found myself surprised by some commendable things in the movie: Harvey Keitel's Judas is a man already out to kill Jesus and after he discovers the beauty behind the Christian message, he is torn between love and betrayal; both could be divinely-inspired duty. To see this view of him realized without apology is -- I can't resist it -- miraculous. Watching Christ dancing, drinking, contemplating fornication with Mary Magdalene will be labeled as blasphemy by the blankhead religious but how could Christ resist temptation without first recognizing what it is? If Christ has foreknowledge that he'll succeed in resisting, what is the lesson for imperfect man? It's brave that the cannibalistic aspect of Catholicism gets its sickie due -- that we see wine turned into blood. (This ritual is as repulsive as it is infantile.) The dream sequence, wherein Christ contemplates temptation, is a mistake in conception: not only too long but unconvincing; you can hardly wait till Christ rejects what Lucifer offers. Sex and children barely make it as lures into the lair of the devil. They're integral, are they not, to a God's master plan? (It was St. Boniface who said, "Man's road to God always begins with a sexual act." That's why I reject the Virgin Birth and priest celibacy -- they undermine the strength of the family. Think about how the Church glorifies men, represses women, demands the faithful to accept the dictums of supposed celibates -- one of whom claims inhuman infallibility. How can so exclusive a fraternity pretend to be an advocate of "the family" when so much of what it celebrates undermines the family's strength?) Though Scorsese's temptations are all subduedly played out, you find yourself wishing for a few De Mille orgies as an entertainment reprieve. Peter Gabriel's music comes on with such African-Brazilian roots that I wondered if it weren't lifted from some of Sergio Mendes's less commercial recordings, like "Primal Roots." Still, it's potent stuff, and heavily so during the slow-motion walk Christ endures at the beginning of his crucifixion. With Jews smiling and laughing and mocking him from behind, it's likely to be recognized as the movie's most memorable, if not controversial moment. Adding to the power of this scene are two women on either side of Christ, in the foreground. Their faces are exaggeratedly compelling and repulsive -- you want to slap them out of sight.
Putting aside one's admiration of Scorsese's courage to make TEMPTATION, it's an an oddly indifferent movie made by a man so committed to his religious spirituality: the story has neither a mythological nor intellectual hold of us. Hard as Scorsese tries, he can't unleash the power of the myth; the defiantly implausible material acts as its own gainsayer. Inevitable it is: when you dance with religious myth, you end up with blisters filled with contradiction. No matter how you finagle the material, you get trapped by its preposterousness, not too unlike how creation scientists get trapped by their blatant dismissal of not the theory but fact of evolution. The best you can do is avoid disgracing yourself, which as novelist Kazantzakis and as movie maker Scorsese managed to do. THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is Scorsese being true to himself; he's been tortured for what to viewers seems like aeons by befuddled beliefs and remains so. And he can not be accused of being a blasphemer or a hypocrite to his masochistic pleasures. His tango, however, is over: Realism has no function in religion.
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