Review: ‘Mary’ on Netflix presents the Virgin mother with an edge
Noa Cohen as the title character in “Mary” on Netflix (photo: Netflix)‘Twas something other than a silent night that first Christmas Eve, according to “Mary.” There was no room at the inn—not because of a Roman census but because rumors foretold that a Messiah would be born there. Nativity tourists crowded the Bethlehem hillsides. Magi were already on the scene. A virtual team of midwives attended the virgin birth. And a mad King Herod was primed to launch a slaughter of innocents, between rebuilding the Second Temple and killing his wife.
“You may think you know my story,” says Mary (Noa Cohen), having galloped into the movie on horseback and stared down the camera. “Trust me. You don’t.” The round yon virgin clearly has an edge.
But in creating what one is left to call a biopic, writer Timothy Michael Hayes and director D. J. Caruso didn’t have a lot to go on, Gospel-wise. Luke mentions Mary only about a dozen times; Mark names her once; the background details have always been scanty at best. So they turn to the apocrypha and the Jewish historian Josephus to fashion what is essentially a coming-of-age story about the Mother of God—and, to a lesser extent, an infancy narrative about Jesus. The results aren’t disrespectful, just a hodge-podge, a sort of overly reverent sword-and-sandals epic rich in awe-struck characters, Luciferian mischief and historical opportunism.
Per the apocrypha, the Nazarean olive farmer Joachim (Ori Pfeffer), long wanting a child with his wife, Anne (Hilla Vidor), and wishing to make himself worthy in God’s eyes, spends the requisite 40 days in the desert. There he is visited by the Archangel Gabriel (Dudley O’Shaughnessy), one of the movie’s more creative manifestations—a wraith in brilliant blue who suggests a divinely conjured prince and informs Joachim that a child is coming.
Like her friend Elizabeth (Keren Tzur), who is pregnant with John the Baptist, Anne is really too old to have expected a child. But Mary arrives. She is the offspring of one’s dreams.
Mr. Caruso has instructed his cast, or so it seems, to act like enraptured icons rather than real people, though the storyline does call for anger, awe, occasionally acts of violence and a moment of resistance on Mary’s part: Joachim has made a promise to Gabriel that in exchange for fatherhood, Mary will be put in service to God, which means the temple, where she will live a cloistered, boarding-school life. She accepts the fate she is given—just as she will accept her great mission later in life, and not much later. (That Mary is so young at that first Christmas is probably historically accurate.)
At the temple, she is menaced by Satan (Eamon Farren) when not inspiring her classmates to perform acts of charity. She also inspires a young man named Joseph (Ido Tako) who asks Joachim for her hand; contrary to tradition, this is an age-appropriate match, both sharing the ability, and flexibility, to ride a horse at full speed with an infant in their arms when the time comes to flee into Egypt.
The cause of that flight, of course, is Herod the Great, played by Anthony Hopkins (and not to be confused with his son, Herod Antipas, under whom both John the Baptist and Jesus were executed). At 86 years old, Hopkins summons up a performance that begins haltingly but then blossoms into full-blown homicidal mania and barking madness. “I’m the king of the Jews,” he says when told that a “savior” is expected to be born in Bethlehem, and promptly orders every infant there to be murdered. “When you find this ‘savior,’” he tells his chief scoundrel, “bring him to me. Alive.” The purpose of killing every infant, of course, is that you don’t know which one you’re looking for. But motivated employees find a way around the problem. And besides, Herod is crazy.
The movie is a bit bonkers, too, and if the point hasn’t been made by now, there are enormous liberties taken at every turn, the purpose of which is to produce energy and cinema. And entertainment. But the messaging is also important, and one has to wonder sometimes at whom the messages in some of these very profitable religious-themed movies are aimed. Joachim, in one of the film’s more confusing sequences, is killed either by assassins working for Rome, because Joachim harbored Jewish Zealots at his olive grove, or by Zealots themselves.
The point, regardless, is about life under an oppressive regime influenced by extremist points of view. The audience presumably targeted by a movie like “Mary” would seem to approve of both, if recent events are any indication. Herod might have wound up ambassador to France.
John Anderson is a television critic for The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to The New York Times.
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