Was the box office for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” that 2004 show-biz shocker, a fluke? Or did it reveal a massive and neglected audience for reverential fare?
We’ll learn more from the box-office receipts for “The Nativity Story,” New Line Cinema’s holiday gift that brings elegant Christmas-card scenes of Jesus’ birth to life onscreen.
Christians will presumably flock to “Nativity,” even though the same Time Warner unit bears responsibility for those “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movies. Home video and inevitable TV repeats in future Decembers will enhance proceeds.
Director Catherine Hardwicke (“Thirteen,” “Lords of Dogtown”) says she sought “epic intimacy” to evoke “another time and beautiful landscape.” Strikingly austere vistas in Morocco and Italy represent the first-century Holy Land.
The 10-nation cast boasts Oscar nominees Shohreh Aghdashloo (“House of Sand and Fog”) as Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist; and the magnetic Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider”) in the primary role of her cousin Mary. (As it happens, Castle-Hughes, 16, is now pregnant out of wedlock.)
Oddly, Jesus’ ministry and crucifixion have provided ample movie material while his birth is largely ignored, apart from cheapos for the church-basement market. Perhaps that’s because this, possibly the most famous story ever told, lacks suspense.
The movie’s historical consultant, the Rev. William Fulco of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, endorses mild “higher criticism” of the Bible in a publicity handout that will rile fundamentalists.
The accounts in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke “are not completely compatible,” Fulco says. Since “very little was known of the events,” he explains, “the stories were developed using what is called midrash, a sometimes creative reconstruction of events based on what is actually known, elaborated from clues” in prior writings.
Screenwriter Mike Rich (“Finding Forrester,” “The Rookie”) is devoutly Christian. Since he turned the minimal scriptures into 94 minutes, how does “Nativity” compare with the Bible?
Rich follows a largely literal replication of Matthew and Luke. Unlike some of Gibson’s “Passion” embroidery, the elaborations emerge naturally from the biblical and cultural background.
Specifically:
* Rich emphasizes the characters’ Jewishness and, unlike with Jesus’ passion, the only villains of the Nativity were the Romans.
* The show bears a PG violence warning because it begins with the Romans’ slaughter of the innocents so the paranoid King Herod can eliminate youngsters who’d threaten his reign (see Matthew 2:16-18).
* Rich similarly presents Nazareth villagers as living on the economic margins, suffering from ruinous Roman taxes.
* Mary might have been as reluctant to wed Joseph, as Rich supposes, since it was probably an arranged marriage.
* It’s certainly plausible that the holy couple, as here, would have been afraid, confused and worried rather than serenely accepting the miraculous unwed pregnancy that would have scandalized small-town neighbors. (Joseph fully accepts Mary’s virginity.)
* This onscreen Joseph is roughly Mary’s age. There’s a common Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox view that he was much older, to undergird belief that Mary remained perpetually virgin even after Jesus’ birth.
Trivia question: How many wise men were there?
Answer: The Bible never says, only noting that the group brought three gifts. Inevitably, though, Rich shows the traditional trio crossing trackless desert while Mary and Joseph struggle toward Bethlehem.
“Nativity” has the wise men following a literal star, actually a notable conjunction of heavenly bodies such as occurred in 7 B.C. and 5 B.C.
The film ends with a voiceover as refugee Mary defiantly proclaims that God “has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; he has put down the mighty from their thrones” (Luke 1:46-55).
Omitted for some reason is the baby’s presentation in the temple and Simeon’s prophecy, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. … for mine eyes have seen thy salvation” (Luke 2:22-39).
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