A Little More Awe

[November 29th, 2006] Two years later, and again we are faced with a Christiological epic and a new Mel Gibson movie. Fortunately, this time they are two different animals: The Australian Jew-baiter is preoccupied with ancient Mayans, and the Biblical tale is left in the uncontroversial hands of director Catherine Hardwicke. In any case, The Nativity Story would seem less likely than The Passion of the Christ to prove divisive. The doctrine of the Incarnation does not come weighted with the legacy of blood libel, and it would take quite the splenetic personality to grow offended by the angels harking. I challenge you to find the skeptic who doesn't secretly entertain warm feelings when Linus dims the footlights, reads from the Gospel of Luke and explains what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

So: lights, please. In the days of Caesar Augustus, a young Nazarene named Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes) gets a woodland visit from a chap in white, who explains that she has been selected to incubate the Messiah. She knows her visitation is going to be less heartening for the people around her—her parents, for starters, and especially her fiancé, Joseph (Oscar Isaac). This is fertile ground for Hardwicke, who previously helmed Thirteen and here considers another adolescent girl in trouble. The director's most radical suggestion is that young Mary possessed a defiant streak—her request to visit her cousin Elizabeth (Shoreh Aghdashloo) is equal parts a bid for empathy and a willful stalling for time. Mary may be blessed among women, but mostly she's scared.

Her dilemma is convincingly human, and much of the credit for that belongs to Portland's own Mike Rich, who penned the screenplay. Rich suddenly finds himself a hot commodity in religious circles—he visited the Vatican for a premiere last weekend and "shook hands with more cardinals than I would have in the locker room after the World Series"—but he has grounded the Story in recognizable feelings. "Do I know how it feels to be chosen to bear the son of God?" he asked in an phone interview with WW Tuesday. "Of course not. But I can understand the emotion."

Humane as it is, The Nativity Story is hardly a revisionist history. It remains scrupulously faithful to Christian pieties (if not to the texts: the Gospel of Matthew places the Magi's visit at a house, not the manger) and culminates with a crèche scene right out of Victorian Christmas cards. But a dash of the hokey is hardly the worst sin this kind of devotional work can commit; the history of Biblical movies is littered with crass sex-and-sandals galas where the star of wonder played second fiddle to the wonderful stars. (The tone of such productions is epitomized in a Hollywood legend revealed by Christopher Hitchens: John Wayne, cast as a Roman centurion in The Greatest Story Ever Told, was asked to declare, "truly this man was the son of God." When Cecil B. DeMille suggested the Duke "try it with a little more awe," Wayne generously provided a second take: "Aw, truly this man was the son of God.") Compared with this vulgarity—or Gibson's Medieval outlook—The Nativity Story's simple, square approach is welcome. Equally laudably, it emphasizes Jesus' appearance to the most unlikely people: frightened and desperate provincials. The movie ends with a recitation of the song of Mary: "He has filled the hungry with good things/ But has sent the rich away empty." Two millennia later, the poor are still with us, but the revolutionary hope remains poignant. In this Nativity Story, the star that flashes out above Bethlehem is an ironic point of light.