The subject of a Jesus movie is technically Jesus. But every movie based on the biblical account of Jesus — and there are many such movies, stretching back to 1898 — says at least as much about the people who made it as it does about the man himself.
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” paints a heavily Catholic, heavily bloody image of a suffering hero. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” draws a romantic, Rennaisance-derived portrait of a lush, otherworldly Christ. “The Jesus Film,” produced for evangelistic purposes, takes its text entirely from the biblical account, attempting to render a literalist version of a savior. William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” functions almost like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of the story, with the main character crossing paths with Jesus only occasionally while experiencing a more broadly appealing revelation about radical forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. (And, yes, racing chariots.)
“The Book of Clarence” is something entirely different than these and dozens of other renderings. But it bears some passing resemblance to another contemporary Jesus hit: “The Chosen,” a wildly popular television show that was crowdfunded and produced by Angel Studios (of last year’s megahit “Sound of Freedom”), and was so popular on streamers that the CW bought the rights to broadcast the first three seasons in 2023. (The fourth season will premiere exclusively in theaters this February.) Its popularity owes as much to a broad appetite for faith-inflected content as to its central concept: This is Jesus and those around him as you’ve never seen them before. They’re humans, with lives and dramas — not flat figures on a stained-glass window, or storybook characters, or ethereal saints. (It helps that the Jesus of “The Chosen,” unlike many other representations, actually looks like he’s from the Middle East.)
As with that series, “The Book of Clarence” is a highly ambitious attempt at relatability, with an added reverence for the old-school “Ben-Hur”-era Hollywood biblical epics. Jeymes Samuel, who wrote and directed the film, clearly knows and loves the Bible story. He also doesn’t feel particularly beholden to a literalist rendering of the text. Here, Jesus and the apostles and their neighbors and friends are played by Black actors from around the diaspora, mostly in their own accents. The white actors play the Romans, a colonizing force of oppression.
If I counted right, the words “Jew” and “Israel” aren’t uttered in “The Book of Clarence,” and “Palestine” only a couple of times. Instead, the film uses the blueprint of the biblical narrative and a gifted cast to build out an apocryphal tale of someone who’s not in the story at all: Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield), the twin brother of Jesus’ apostle Thomas (also played by Stanfield), who lives with his mother (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and is in a world of trouble. (The Bible does suggest Thomas has a twin, but that’s the extent of it.) Clarence has debts to a guy named Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi-Abrefa), who is ready to crucify him — literally — if he doesn’t pay the money back by the deadline. Clarence is also in love with Jedediah’s younger sister (Anna Diop) and trying, with the help of his best friend Elijah (RJ Cyler), to raise the money to stay alive and get her to take him seriously.
After some mishaps — including a very funny scene with John the Baptist (David Oyelowo) and a fight-turned-friendship with a gladiator named Barabbas (Omar Sy) — Clarence has an idea. There seems to be a lot of money in being a messiah, a guy who goes around preaching and collecting followers. Why not him?
There’s a hint of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” around “The Book of Clarence.” I’m fairly confident that nobody in first-century Palestine was named Clarence, for one, which makes the character — an atheist stoner who sells first-century weed and gambles — stick out self-consciously, a guy from 2024 plunked down in ancient Jerusalem. There’s also a looseness to “Life of Brian” that “The Book of Clarence” sometimes apes, an episodic nature that in this case feels more like unfocused narrative structure.
But something “Life of Brian” does that few Jesus movies have accomplished is give a sense of the proliferation of self-proclaimed messiahs in the era, as common as influencers and wellness gurus. “The Book of Clarence,” too, stretches that premise out to a comic effect, though it eventually turns tragic. This film is considerably more serious and reverent about its topic than poor Brian’s tale. (Nobody’s singing about looking on the bright side of life at this Golgotha.)
Does it work? Sometimes! And it’s also sort of a mess. Samuel is telling a contemporary spin on the tale, and focuses a great deal on both Roman oppression and Clarence’s journey toward meaning and purpose — to fully embody his potential, something that can only happen when he believes in God. Taking an occasional foray into magical realism, the movie is more concerned with the divinity inside Clarence than it is with Jesus’ work, which makes it not entirely clear why Jesus is even in this one. It’s an empowerment ballad, a plea with the audience to break free of their own chains. All of those themes muddle the mixture, and Samuel’s stylistic flourishes and musical cues get repetitive and overbearing after a while.
But what’s good about “The Book of Clarence” is what so many movies lack: taking really, really big swings. There are fights with gladiators and a chariot race. But there’s flashy camerawork that quotes both music videos and old movies, with a lot of zooms and cuts and wipes and iris effects.
At one point the characters go to a sort of roadside hookah bar at which something very strong is in the bowl, and other patrons, caught in ecstasy, float in midair. When Clarence gets an idea, a lightbulb appears over his head. The crucifixion scene is startlingly graphic. There are a few swear words and sex jokes and, really, just a whole lot going on. “The Book of Clarence” is undeniably a faith-driven movie, despite its elements that would never show up in a release from the conventional Christian film industry. Mimicking and flouting genre conventions, it keeps the audience guessing, and it’s better for it.
So, having seen a whole lot of Jesus content over the years, I have to admire what Samuel is after here. Retellings of the Jesus narrative are as ubiquitous as retellings of, say, Shakespeare, but are much less inventive on the whole. If “The Book of Clarence” doesn’t totally work, its combination of the sacred and the irreverent is enchanting. It gets bogged down in its own mud, but it’s certainly shooting for the stars.
The Book of Clarence
Rated PG-13 for crucifixion, crudeness and ancient weed. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.
Source link
#Book #Clarence #Review #Messiahs