Mary Magdalene (2018)

The key casting weakness at the heart of Mary Magdalene is Mara, her porcelain-doll beauty and laser-beam gaze failing to disguise her blank presence and narrow range. Hardly an ideal match for a role that demands screen-filling, history-changing charisma. Thankfully a heavily bearded Phoenix brings more firepower, playing Jesus as a doubt-wracked mystic-stoner cult leader somewhere between Charles Manson and The Dude from The Big Lebowski. His current run of meaty anti-star performances goes from strength to strength.

On viewing this clearly well-intentioned, attractive, wistful-to-the-point-of-inertia film, it’s easy enough to see why Mary Magdalene has languished: if it’s not exactly a hot-ticket for the Catholic faithful, neither is it something the arthouse might yearn to see. And if the casting of Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus seems odd, well, it is odd and hard to move past the casting as a glassy-eyed Phoenix looks to the heavens for inspiration, delivering sermons in his unmistakable American-accented voice. Rooney Mara - the palest fisherwoman the Middle East is ever likely to see - puts her all into playing Mary Magdalene as a drippy doe-eyed empath, awarded a stock-issue back-story in which her desire not to marry puts her at odds with her loving but uncomprehending family.

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.

A question mark lingers, however, over the extent to which this early A.D. creation can convincingly be converted into a feminist icon. Her limpid eyes front and center, Mara plays the part as a quivering reservoir of empathy waiting to be channeled in the right directions; after some shaky introductory scenes, it’s a performance that grows on you, yielding a more thoughtful and touchingly relatable Mary than, for one, Gibson’s altogether idealized, two-dimensional, none-more-Catholic Madonna (Monica Bellucci). Yet in this incarnation, Mary remains a gal longing for a savior – it’s just he happens to be the Savior, that’s all

A further problem: we start to doubt whether he’s all that. The unpredictable JP as JC sounds promising, and Phoenix undeniably looks shroud-ready, Biblical mane, prophetic mien, and mystic gaze all very much in place. (In a film of prodigious face-fuzz, his beard would give Homeland’s Saul a run for his shekels.) Phoenix scarcely radiates warmth, however, and his big oratorical moments are undermined by some affected speech patterns that a more experienced director might have stepped in and shut down. Instead, he appears smug and superior, a holier-than-thou hippie tutting through a first-wave toga party – the first Jesus outside the blasphemies of “Family Guy” to seem a little bit of a dick.