Netflix’s family-unfriendly ‘Mary’ fails to inspire in a pointless Biblical epic
Film review: ‘Mary’ by D.J. Caruso, ★★☆☆☆
The better Biblical epic films and TV shows frequently take one of two approaches to flesh out a story that may be derived from only a chapter or two of scriptural text. One is to serve as something like a Bible commentary, offering insight into the characters; the prime current example of this is The Chosen, the wildly popular TV series that humanizes the characters of the Gospels. A second approach is to use the Biblical text as a springboard to explore ideas that don’t have all that much to do the text itself. A classical example of this approach is 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which had Jesus facing temptations that went far beyond the tale of Jesus’ temptation in the desert.1
The opening of Mary, a Netflix original film for this year’s Christmas season, all but promises that one of these approaches will be taken: Mary, played by acting newcomer Noa Cohen, faces the camera and says, “You may think you know my story. Trust me, you don’t.”
But Mary takes neither of the above approaches: It adds nothing much of significance to the brief Biblical narratives2, and it doesn’t take advantage of its nearly two-hour length to explore ideas that might challenge viewers.
But it does have plenty of violence. Although Christmas-season films tend to be designed to be suitable for family viewing, Mary most decidedly is not. It depicts plenty of violence, mostly of the sword-stabbing variety, enough to push the limits of the TV-14 rating that Netflix presumably contracted for.
Mary hints early on that it might become something more than it turned out to be. Early scenes showed the oppression that residents of Jerusalem were under in the person of King Herod, played by veteran actor Anthony Hopkins. What an interesting idea, one relevant to current events, it would have been to explore how Roman occupation affected Mary and the baby Jesus. Life under occupation forms the backdrop for the entire New Testament, and a filmmaker with this in mind might have been able to explore how that affected the environment that Jesus grew up in.
Another promising hint early in the film came in the appearance of Satan. Why would Satan be interested in getting Mary to turn away from the mission that God had given her? We never get to find out, as this subplot, one not in the Bible, turns out to be a dead end.
Instead what we get is a bland, perfunctory telling of a Nativity story that, like many Nativity depictions popular in today’s culture, conflates the accounts of the gospels of Matthew and Luke.3 Although Cohen seems to be a fine actress, we never get to find out for sure, as her character seldom extends beyond the single dimension of being devout. The same might be said of Ido Tako, who plays Joseph; we never see the struggle he might have faced being betrothed to a woman who was pregnant but not by him. The only actor who has a good role in this film is Hopkins, who comes across as evil as the tyrant Herod was in real life.
The one bit of tense drama written into the Biblical story, an incident in which Mary, Joseph and the baby face mortal danger, seems to be been included into the plot only for the purpose of getting the Joseph character to engage in deadly violence.
In the end, Mary doesn’t have much to offer. You can learn as much about the main characters by looking at crèches, and Charlie Brown’s reading of the Christmas story is more inspiring.
A more recent example of this subgenre is 2014’s Noah, which departed widely from the Biblical text.
The film also draws a few characters, such as Mary’s father, from New Testament apocrypha.
In the account of Matthew, the Magi don’t show up in Bethlehem until a year or two after Jesus’ birth. This film, like many other popular depictions, has them arriving in Bethlehem around the time of the birth.