***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton, Victor Argo, Andre Gregory, and Verna Bloom
Directed by Martin Scorsese & written by Paul Schrader and Jay Cocks, from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis
1988
168 min R
When I was seven or eight I was about to watch, for the first time, the only James Bond movie to star George Lazenby. I asked my mother if it was any good, and she said “it’s a good movie about a guy who just happens to be named Bond, but it’s not really a James Bond movie.”
Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” is a very, very good movie about a guy named Jesus who has a ministry in the Holy Land and who gets crucified, but he’s not the Jesus of the canonical Gospels. But that’s okay because the film is explicit, both in title cards and in its story, in stating that it is NOT based on the Gospels. It is based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis (author of “Zorba the Greek”) in which he uses the life and public ministry of Jesus in order to examine his own lifelong struggle between the spirit and the flesh. This never-ending conflict is most clearly embodied in Gethsemane when the movie’s Jesus tell his Father that “the world we can see is so beautiful, but the world we can’t see is beautiful too.”
Everyone who has any interest in Jesus has to do this some day. We have to try to see things through his eyes. The question we always hear in trying to understand Our Lord is “What would Jesus do?” but another, equally valid one is “What would I do if I were in Jesus’ place?” We cannot escape our miserable human condition so any attempt to understand the one who was both completely divine and completely human will be flawed. That he is both human and without sin seems contradictory, and wiser men than I have argued this in circles for two millennia. So we introduce inaccuracies. The inaccuracy Kazantzakis introduces, in order to form his treatise on the inner battle between the flesh and the soul, is that Jesus is capable of sin. Truth be told, the only sin we actually see him do in “The Last Temptation” is the sin of doubting. A sin, yes; in fact God kills Moses for it. Jesus confesses to other sins in the course of the movie, but we never actually see him do any of them. He may well just be carrying and confessing the sins of others, which is his job anyway.
If you’re not of the Christian persuasion then Jesus is just another historical figure who can be manipulated for the needs of an artist. But author Kazantzakis was Greek Orthodox, Scorsese is Catholic, and screenwriter Paul Schrader (director of “Auto-Focus”) is Dutch Calvinist. “The Last Temptation of Christ” is rated R, not at all appropriate for children, and not the first place you should start learning about the life of Christ. Its intention is not to bring Jesus to the masses, but to bring us its creators’ spiritual experiences, which is essentially the purpose of every movie that is not empty sound and fury. Is it reckless to present this image of the Lord to those who know nothing of him and are too careless to read the movie’s opening disclaimer? Is it worth denying the rest of us Kazantzakis’s intimate spiritual experiences to shelter people who don’t know any better? Potential misunderstanding is the burden of disseminating any information into the world, or of opening your mouth at all.
But back to “The Last Temptation” itself, which plays as a series of “what if?” scenarios following the life of Christ. The movie is pure speculation and does not present theories like “we have proof of this” or “this is how you should think of Jesus.” There is no proof that Judas (Harvey Keitel) was a revolutionary Zealot or that Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey) was really a prostitute. The movie isn’t trying to convince us “this is how it was” or even so much “this is how it could have been” but “isn’t this intriguing and stimulating for our own spiritual lives?” On a budget of a scant seven million dollars, Scorsese gives the movie a nitty-gritty, low-budget feel. Nothing is back-lit, crowds are small, special effects are minimal, and day-for-night sequences don’t always trick us. Yet the low-budget, no-effects reverence paid to events like the Last Supper is more endearing than if they were given a Peter Jackson layer of gloss.
So who is “The Last Temptation’s” Jesus? As played by Willem Dafoe, he is a man of great love and almost greater doubts, a man whose heart is too full to hate anyone. He is uncertain of God’s plan for him, uncertain of his own powers, uncertain if he is even the Messiah. I think it was the literary critic Harold Bloom who said all religious writing is spiritual auto-biography, so that means that Jesus is Kazantzakis; or, more accurately, he is Jesus and Kazantzakis’s response to Jesus rolled into one. When Jesus complains “Father, I’m sorry I’m a bad son,” it may not be Jesus’ we’re hearing, but the author. And when Jesus finally proclaims “take me back, I want to be your son, I want to be crucified,” it is a beautiful moment of spiritual affirmation from Kazantzakis that God has given him the strength to take up his cross.
The Jesus of the film is also the embodiment of mankind’s often troubled relationship with the Almighty. If we accept that Jesus is the convergence of the dirt and the divine made real, then maybe this doesn’t even qualify as symbolism. God is great and wonderful, but it’s no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest. Sometimes Dafoe’s Jesus sees God as the ultimate headache. Our urge to meet the divine, to be moral, to be lifted higher, are undeniable, but sometimes we just want to be left alone and the spirit won’t let us. Jesus goes through phases and moods just like the rest of us. He tries to hide from God through self-immolation and his work as a carpenter. His ministry changes from one of love, to one of “slitting the Devil’s throat,” until he finally reaches the idea of sacrifice. But his greatest temptation is to give up his ministry completely, to ignore God, and to live as a normal man.
“The Last Temptation” makes clear that the life of the average man is by no means an ignoble one. It was God, after all, who created marriage and family. To deny the beauty of this life is to deny God’s will, just as denying Jesus’ humanity is considered heresy. At one point Jesus’ guardian angel tells him “sometimes we angels look down on man and envy you.” This is why the temptation to be just a man, to experience love, marriage, and fatherhood, is Christ’s greatest adversary.
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