‘Mary,’: Mother of God!

It’s easy enough to see how Netflix greenlights a title like ‘Mary’. You want to have something for the Christmas-loving crowd that still remembers who Christ was, but his story’s all played out. What about his  mom though? Everyone thinks they know Mary, Mother of God, but do they really? It is perhaps symbolic of just what little rigor was behind this pitch that ‘Mary’, in the opening narration, explicitly says that we don’t really understand her story…and then proceeds to tell a story about Mary that’s pretty much just every random thing people know about her, from the Bible or otherwise, presented in an appallingly boring way without anything approaching a clear theme.

There are a few interesting visual ideas in ‘Mary’. Dudley O’ Shaugnessy plays a rather androgynous looking Gabriel to contrast with Eamon Ferron’s Satan who looks and acts like a sex pest creep. ‘Mary’ largely achieves these effects through strong performances and subtle visual effects. Amusingly enough, neither of them really dress any different from any other random extra, they movie just presents them with a special kind of energy that makes them seem like hallucinations.

No, you’re not hallucinating, they did indeed cast Sir Anthony Hopkins as Herod, and he plays the role in such a way I’m not entirely sure he knew he wasn’t the lead actor. There are a lot of scenes with Herod, certainly more than I was expecting considering that Herod never actually meets Mary and on paper this just looked like stunt casting so that marketing could say that Anthony Hopkins was in the movie. But looking back on ‘Mary’ as a whole, and its unwillingness to use artistic license, an extended Herod subplot is kind of necessary, since he’s one of the few people in the New Testament whose existence we can verify by other historical sources.

Herod having five kids with a woman who hates him, with whom whose family he’s spent most of his life at war? That actually happened. A lot of Jewish history as observed by the Romans was pretty crazy, even if it wasn’t usually that much more crazy than anything the Jews wrote about their own history. How and why the Kingdom of Judea functioned both in its own political context and also as a client state of the Roman Empire is a genuinely interesting story, and it’s a bit of a shame the closest we’ve had to a discussion of it in film is Monty Python’s Life of Brian ambivalently acknowledging infrastructure projects as having had a positive influence on their society.

What does any of this have to do with Mary? Oh, nothing, absolutely nothing. The Mary story you’re familiar is most likely just that she was a teenager who God chose to give birth to Jesus, probably because she was a good person, and Mary doesn’t do anything more than this.

The Mary storyline so poorly connects to anything that King Herod is doing that by the time Mary and Joseph are on the run it’s a bit unclear whether their persecution because of King Herod’s political machinations, or because a lot of Jews are weirdly eager to stone a teenage girl to death for being pregnant out of wedlock, or maybe Satan’s just being a jerk. What exactly Satan is trying to do in regard to Mary is never entirely coherent, and a better movie would use this ambiguity to its advantage to try and humanize its characters as reacting to trauma and possibly not being entirely sane because of the stress of that.

But as the movie presents, Mary’s story is so straightforward and so predictable there’s just not much to be done with it. Mary doesn’t actually do hardly anything except eventually become pregnant and give birth.  This is a Chosen One narrative, or maybe even a Shared Cinematic Universe narrative, about a character with very little original material to work with and a screenplay that seems terrified of trying to add its own additions to the lore. The end result is just incredibly dull and inoffensive to the point that even Anthony Hopkins  wandering around a throne room filled with babies, muttering about which of these babies he needs to kill, mostly just elicits a yawn.