Rick McGinnis:
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
The Christmas schedule this year on Netflix is the usual avalanche of undistinguished, largely low-star-power romantic comedies with titles like The Merry Gentlemen, Meet Me Next Christmas, and Hot Frosty. Sticking out amidst the rom-coms, evergreen holiday films, and fireplace videos is Mary, a film that tells the story of the Virgin Mary from her childhood to the flight into Egypt.
The film stars Israeli actors Noa Cohen as Mary and Ido Tako as Joseph; the producers cast most of the principles in Israel “to ensure authenticity” according to director J.D. Caruso, a decision that led to the inevitable social media backlash. Star-power is parachuted in by Anthony Hopkins, who plays King Herod, the designated villain in the story (though Satan has a walk-on part).
Mary seems to have been a late addition to the Netflix holiday schedule; the streamer acquired the film in late September of this year, after filming on location in Morocco ended in April. Caruso, who’s known for thriller, horror, and action pictures, is a journeyman Hollywood director who has been allowing his faith to influence his choice of projects lately; in 2020 he made Redeeming Love, a “Christian Western romance” and Shut In, a thriller that was the first original film produced by conservative media company The Daily Wire.
(One of Mary’s executive producers is evangelical megachurch pastor Joel Osteen, which might be a red flag for some potential viewers.)
The script for Mary went through 75 drafts, and Caruso’s “spiritual advisor” on the picture was auxiliary Bishop David O’Donnell of the archdiocese of Los Angeles. The result, at least going by the trailer, is a beautifully photographed, action-filled story with epic touches; the spiritual and miraculous aspects of the Nativity appear to be depicted without irony or re-interpretation, and if there’s a sucker punch waiting for the religious among the film’s potential audience, neither the trailer nor the post-production rumour mill have provided a warning.
(You can’t help but speculate if the film was acquired by Netflix as a prudent course-correction in anticipation of a potential win by Donald Trump in November’s presidential elections, a tack into the wind of a cultural shift.)
I have been writing about Christmas movies for years, with the certainty that an appreciable majority of people have favorite Christmas-themed or holiday-set films that they either watch as part of their Advent ritual or use to nudge themselves into the holiday spirit. The last few decades have seen an explosion of holiday rom-coms – shaggy dog or fish-out-of-water love stories that often involve a young woman, either single or involved with an unsuitable man and on the career track up some demanding corporate ladder.
She travels home to some picturesque small town where a hunky local turns her head; the denouement is a winter wedding, though variations include the rural swain turning out to be heir to a family fortune, possessed of some million-dollar innovation he’s created in his woodshop, or an actual prince in disguise, the climactic nuptials celebrated in some Ruritanian castle. Every variation of this plot has been done to death; genders have been swapped while it’s been reduced to self-parody, though that hasn’t stopped a few new ones showing up every year, as selections from the subgenre’s thick back catalogue fill the December menu of every streamer and network.
There are the straight comedies whose humour satirizes the over-commercialization of the holidays and the crassness of modern life. Some of the evergreen titles have a gentle touch – pictures like Home Alone, Elf, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and this sub-subgenre’s progenitor, Miracle on 34th Street.
And there are harsher films that target how far “The Holidays” have strayed from whatever Christmas is supposed to be about: I know a lot of people who adore director Bob Clarke’s 1983 picture A Christmas Story, based on original stories by Jean Shepherd. I opt for an altogether far more misanthropic film, Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa, a film that could provide a shock cure for seasonal dismay by rubbing your nose in the worst, most unseemly scenario of a suburban, mall-bound commercialized Christmas.
It’s not worth examining all those pictures that make “best Christmas movies” lists simply by being set around the holidays: Die Hard is the most famous example, and films like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands and even Eyes Wide Shut have trailed in its wake. If we’re going down that route, I’d insist that Ridley Scott’s Alien be included, if for no other reason than I have an irresistible urge to watch it every year after the Christmas dishes have been cleared away and my family has gone to sleep.
There are films that people watch with what I can only call moral urgency – pictures that they rely on to overcome the numbness that sets in after weeks of shopping soundtracked by Christmas music playlists, holiday work parties. and the annual round of news stories about “the war on Christmas.” Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life tops this list of films, alongside A Charlie Brown Christmas, Meet Me in St. Louis, White Christmas, and the numerous filmed versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
For the long decades when I was a single young man and then a single not-so-young man my standby was the 1951 film of A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim. I identified with Scrooge, like most of the film’s fans, and relied on his transformation from miser to good man to nurture hope that my loneliness and misanthropy weren’t necessarily chronic or even terminal.
I’ve come to rely less on Sim’s Scrooge since becoming a father. Perhaps it was because he had done his job so well reminding me that charity and family were at the heart of the holidays; perhaps it was also because no one else in my family shared my long, desperate attachment to the gothic Victoriana of that cinematic retelling of Dickens’ story as a kind of moral horror movie.
At the centre of Christmas, though, is the story of the infant Christ, the Holy Family, the transformational fulfilment of biblical prophecy, and the power of faith over tyranny. Powerful, difficult, frightening stuff – more so today than in long recent memory. And yet none of the regular attempts to tell the story of the Nativity on film have turned out to be as abiding as any of the many very different films I’ve listed in this essay, despite considerable, sincere effort.
And it’s into this void that Netflix’ Mary walks. I have no way of predicting if J.D. Caruso’s film will beat the odds, or if Noa Cohen will bring the Virgin to life as a woman and a mother – “relatable” to audiences who are habituated to imagining her at the apex of a universe of saints, the first among women, or who have been taught to scoff at the virgin birth, the first and cheapest talking point in the pseudo-religious doctrine of secular civic virtue.
I hope, at the very least, that there’s no sting in the tail of Caruso’s film – a Trojan Horse designed to lure in both the devout and the honestly curious and diminish what’s both sacred and human about Mary’s story or top-load it with timely political allegory. We’re in the habit of putting lonely career girls, lost children, clownish fathers, and bad Santas at the centre of our Christmas stories. It would be truly innovative to find our way back to the family – the woman, the father and the child – who are the reason our year ends with what is, for most of us, an expensive and stressful holiday.
