The Fourth Wise Man (1985)

With Mary, performing so well for Netflix at the moment, I've decided to track down/re-visit a couple of other performances around the Nativity story.

Top of my list is The Fourth Wise Man (1985) starring Martin Sheen and Alan Arkin, as well as Charlie Sheen in a bit part role. The film is an adaptation not only of the Gospels, but also of Henry van Dyke's 1895 book "The Other Wise Man", itself a reworking of the Befana/Babushka stories from Italian/Russian folklore. As the title suggests, the film features Sheen (snr.) as Artaban, another wise man, who misses his rendezvous with his now-more-famous colleagues. Instead of seeing Jesus in Bethlehem he spends the next 30 years trying to catch up with him, repeatedly getting distracted by people who need his help, unable to resist the yearning to do something for them rather than follow the saviour. And of course it turns out that he was "following" him all the time.

This is not the only time the story has appeared on our screens. Another TV movie, The Other Wise Man was broadcast in 1953 and narrated by none other than Ronald Reagan. More recently, an animated film, The Fourth King reached our screens in 2007 and featured as part of our family's Christmas viewing for a few years.

Unsurprisingly, Sheen is good value in the lead role. The way his character lays aside his privileged background to focus on folksy, pragmatic, leadership tackling problems affecting those on the margins of society, feels strongly reminiscent of his role as President Bartlett in The West Wing in what feels like another world these days. Artaban is a physician as well as a magi and inevitably ends up helping those who need his medical insights rather than his astrological ones.

Arkin, almost 20 years after his Academy Aware nomination for The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (dir. Norman Jewison, 1966), provides some of his trademark pithy humour. He plays Orontes, Artaban's world-weary slave, on a promise from Artaban's father of gaining his freedom if he returns his son to him safely. As Artaban's mission extends indefinitely he comes to resent the supposed humanity of his master's compassionate side which keeps him trapped in servitude indefinitely. Only when he tries to leave does he realise the innate worth of the life he has lived.

Both men seemed to involve their families in the production. In addition to Charlie Sheen's cameo, his brother and his sister Ramón and René were in the cast, as was their uncle (and Martin Sheen's brother) Joe Estévez -- thanks to Angel Sanchez's review for that observation. Similarly Arkin's then wife Barbara Dana and son Adam also make brief appearances. Veteran's Eileen Brennan and Ralph Bellamy round out the cast. James Farentino, best known round these parts for his portrayal of Simon Peter in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) provides the voice of the adult Jesus as the film draws towards its conclusion.

Nevertheless. the production itself is fairly unremarkable and a little on the corny side at times (even by the standard of biblical Christmas movies). You don't have to be familiar with the source material to spot that Artaban is going to spend his life being so distracted by living as Jesus would want him to that he never manages to encounter Jesus himself until it's too late.

It's a funny myth in some ways because if the story rests on Jesus being some kind of revelation of a higher moral code, it also suggests that those characteristics can spring up regardless of whether one is familiar with Jesus and his message. Readers will have their own views on which of those two tenets they favour, but acknowledging both seems a little inconsistent. But then this tension goes back to the Bible itself, as typified in Matthew 25:37-40, which ends up being directly quoted by the screenplay late in the film.

Michael Ray Rhodes's direction is workmanlike, if uninspired and the low budget of the production and its 80s TV vibe do little to help matters. Nonetheless, its message that following Jesus means preferring the needs of the poor and vulnerable to our own personal goals, still seems to be one that many who take his name need to do more to acknowledge.

Mary (2024)

This is my fourth attempt at writing a review for Netflix's new film Mary (dir. D.J. Caruso), which is certainly far more attention than I'd planned on giving it originally. That's partially driven by my business in my day job -- not to mention the season -- but it's also because while I was not particularly taken by the film on my first viewing, it's become a little more interesting as I've grappled with how to write about it.

One of those questions is the team behind it. In many ways Mary is a bit of a left-field offering for Netflix. One critique of the film I read, said that Hollywood never does the Bible right. This surprised me, because even without having read much about it, it felt every inch like a Christian Bible movie. I've seen enough to know the signs. 

It turns out that this is essentially a faith-based film. The film names televangelist Joel Osteen as one of its executive producers as well as Adam W. Schindler, from the right-wing think-tank America First Policy Institute, as is its biblical scholar. Moreover, director D.J. Caruso's last film was another faith-based effort Shut In (2022) and before that he directed Redeeming Love (2020), the not-quite-modern-day adaptation of the Book of Hosea.

Yet Caruso is coming from a very different faith background to Osteen and Schindler. Caruso is a Roman Catholic, as he revealed in a fascinating interview with my friend Peter Chattaway. So while the film is essentially conservative, in that its presentation of Mary is unlikely to shock or surprise anyone, it doesn't feel like a right-wing evangelistic film.

Caruso's Catholic background is apparent right from the start as the film begins with the events surrounding Mary's birth. These episodes are not included in the canonical gospels, but do feature in the Protoevangelium of James (also known as the Infancy Gospel of James) from the second half of the 2nd-century AD. While the film doesn't overly dwell on this part of the story, it does include a number of its initial elements: Mary's parents are called Anne and Joachim; Joachim goes into the dessert while Anne prays for a child at home; an angel reveals that they will have a child; it's understood that there's something miraculous about the conception; then when she's young she is sent to the temple. 

From there things diverge and the focus moves to the palace of Herod the Great (Sir Antony Hopkins) while Mary grows up. Having snagged a major star like Hopkins, the screenplay gives him plenty of screen time, but it's clear that Caruso is unable to get the best out of him. The performance from the two-time Oscar winner is well below the level of everything else I've seen him do. It's tempting to blame his age, until you remember that he was nominated for an Oscar less than 4 years ago for his portrayal of Pope Benedict in The Two Popes (2020). 

Hopkins has long had an active Christian faith and taken many faith-related roles over the years from St Paul in Peter and Paul (1981) through to Methuselah in Noah (2014) and the recent Freud's Last Session (2023) where he played the titular psychoanalyst debating God's existence with a fledgling C.S. Lewis. Perhaps he was just too keen to accept the role he didn't vet it as well as he might have.

Certainly there are problems with the script. For one thing it seems to lack a sense of conviction, unusual for a Christian movie. I've always thought The Nativity Story (2006) tried to be three different kinds of film (a gritty coming of age drama at the start, a historical road movie adventure in the middle, and a traditional Christmas card schmaltz-fest at the end), but it certainly had no shortage of ideas or ambition. He's it's hard to work out what we should really care about.

I think that's partly because the film is far more interested in its male leads than in its eponymous hero.  Hopkins murders his way through wives, sons and workers, in order that we can be quite clear that him slaughtering of Bethlehem's innocents is very much consistent with his character. Joachim too gets far more developed than he has been in previous Nativity movies. But Mary, for all her screen time, feels rather underdeveloped. She takes in all the things happening around her, but is essentially a passive character. The subtlety of Noa Cohen's performance might be more revealing in the hands of a different director, but here any real sense of who Mary was is lost.

Yet while the film fails to really land Mary's character, it has a far more developed take on Joseph. For one thing it eschews almost all sense of him having second thoughts about marrying Mary and recreates him as someone who loves her completely from first sight. His character diverts significantly from his role in James, and to a lesser extent Matthew and Luke, but it does so in interesting ways, even if the scene where he thrusts a short sword into Lucifer's back, in a possible fantasy sequence, feels out of place. His unbridled devotion though, which plays as more than just strong teenage emotions, is quite a refreshing angle to look at things from.

The one female character who does get developed fairly well, at least far more significantly than in Luke chapter 2 is Anna, the female prophet who "never left the temple but worshipped night and day, fasting and praying" (Luke 2:37). Anna befriends Mary, when she first gets sent to the temple, and defends her later on when Mary's pregnancy is discovered later on. She appears as a mentor to Mary. The film also has Mary's mother and Elizabeth present at the birth, which was featured in the 2003 BBC documentary The Virgin Mary but not in any other onscreen depictions that I can recall.

Visually there's the occasional nice shot some of which reflect classical compositions and poses without feeling forced or sappy, but things feel a little too pristine and sterile at times as well. Moreover, as with most Netflix productions much of the quality props and sets are lost to the over-dark lighting. That doesn't appear to be a tribute to "O Little Town of Bethlehem" with its mention of "the dark streets", not least because the film's biggest failing is that it never fully manages to convey the "everlasting light" which will finally meet "hopes and fears of all the years". That is the real heart of the story, but it remains unignited here.With more heart, conviction and, above all, hope, Mary's flaws might have disappeared a little more into the background. Instead its notable elements are overshadowed and its blessings left unimparted.