Mary Magdalene and Christian cinema’s resurrection

“There are no demons here,” Joaquin Phoenix’s Jesus mildly tells Rooney Mara’s Mary Magdalene. Her possession is all the New Testament tells us of its most infamous woman’s early life. The Christ of director Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene doesn’t exorcise her affliction, but lifts it like a loving psychiatrist. He sees no devils, only a woman misunderstood by her family. This feminist revision of Christianity’s whore figure typifies one of the Christian story’s most thoughtful tellings. The non-Christian filmmakers discern the radical love at its heart with outsiders’ clarity. “Rooney and I are not necessarily religious in any way,” Davis confirms. “But what we connected to was the spiritual message...[of Jesus] that’s been lost.” Davis didn’t intend a film only for Christians. “We want to bring this incredible story to everyone.”

This film joins a surge of wildly diverse Christian-inspired cinema, from the blasphemy-baiting, velvet-black tragicomedy of Paolo Sorrentino’s TV masterpiece The Young Pope, to Martin Scorsese’s best work in a quarter-century with Silence’s excoriating examination of doubt and denial in 17th century Japan, to Kevin Reynolds’ recasting of the resurrection’s aftermath as a Roman police procedural in Risen, to the fearsome piety of War Room, a shock US box office no. 1 made by evangelical pastors Alex and Stephen Kendrick. Auteurs’ personal ambiguity can conflict with the zealous certainty of America’s conservative Christians. But both draw from the same deep well.

When Joseph Fiennes’ centurion asks his troops in Risen, “Who among you knows the woman Mary Magdalene?”, half the barracks sheepishly put up their hands. Funny as it is, the scene continues the common misconception of Mary as the “fallen” woman who washed Jesus’s feet. So does Monica Belluci’s sultry version in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and Barbara Shelley’s titular, Messiah-attracting Last Temptation of Christ for Scorsese. All are based on a confusion which infuriates Mary Magdalene co-writer Helen Edmundson.

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“There are lots of Marys in the Bible,” she explains, “and they’ve become conflated. The big blow was Pope Saint Gregory the Great in the 6th century, who wrote quite extensively that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. What grates is the way the Catholic Church in particular felt it necessary to create these polar opposite models of women: they had the Virgin Mary, and therefore by necessity they needed the opposite. It’s permeated and been problematic for centuries.”

“What I find really interesting,” says Edmundson’s co-writer Philippa Goslett, “is that since 1969, when the Catholic church formally separates these women out, the idea of Jesus’s bloodline has been prevalent. If Mary Magdalene’s not a prostitute, she must have been his lover. I hope that this film goes some way to restoring her spiritual authority, which is there within the Gospels, and has been so denigrated over the centuries.”

The biblical Mary Magdalene only exists in five New Testament lines, which nevertheless make her a key female witness to Christ: among the disciples when he arrives in Jerusalem, watching his crucifixion then keeping watch over his tomb, the first person he meets on his resurrection, and his messenger of this marvel to the disciples.

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“Everything else is conjecture,” says Edmundson, who also consulted the non-biblical Gnostic Gospel of Mary in order to write a woman who’s more than just an observer. “We felt that if this Mary was strong enough to leave her home and everything she’d ever known with no going back, to join this group of men who had no idea of what their fate was going to be, then we could make her strong enough to point out to Jesus that if only men can be preached to and baptised, then that’s cutting out half the population. And to be a Mary who can actively baptise and minister in the same way men did. Those things felt fundamental.” Goslett felt the same. “Telling it from a fresh, female perspective, might our understanding of that journey – and Jesus’s message – be different?”

Lynne Ramsay, Joaquin Phoenix’s director in his other current film, You Were Never Really Here, sees his tortured character there as a Lazarus figure, reborn after sinking into watery depths. In Mary Magdalene, he resurrects Lazarus, and doesn’t feel much better. “There’s a wonderful mischief that comes through with Joaquin,” Edmundson considers. “A sort of acknowledgement of how extraordinary the whole thing is. I love just after he’s resurrected Lazarus, when he’s trembling all over, and profoundly terrified because of what he’s understood in that moment [that he must die for mankind]. Joaquin has that ability to look almost childlike in his frailty and distress. We did want him to be human. We wanted to feel that he had warmth and fragility. Partly to make room for Mary. I enjoyed imagining the human side of Christ – the fear and grief of leaving life and people who loved him, and the exhaustion of working miracles. Of everybody looking to you, and expecting.” Adds Goslett: “It was really important for us that Jesus is fully human and divine, and spontaneous. There was never a sense of, ‘Here’s a sermon I prepared earlier.’”

This is a film where Judas’s betrayal with a kiss is tragic and “tender” for Goslett. And in its bravest, most divisive scene, taken from the heavily disputed Gospel of Mary, she comes direct from the resurrected Christ with his message that the Kingdom he’s promised is within, only for Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to scornfully lead the male disciples, and the future church, on a divergent, more dominating path. There’s a Sussex vicar I know who reads from the Gospels, but replaces normal services’ readings from later New Testament descriptions of Peter’s sometimes draconian church-building with love poems. He ends services with the blessing of both Father and Mother, Son and Daughter. The fork in the road this strategy resists, which loaded the church with gender disparities and cruel tendencies it’s only now confronting, was fully intended in Mary Magdalene’s climactic scene. “The way they minister and care, that is the Kingdom,” Edmundson says. “It’s not God’s finger coming out of the sky at some point in the future. And with that other direction comes male dominance of the church.”

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This questioning, questing attitude to Christianity can also be seen in Scorsese’s Silence, in which Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver’s Portuguese priests watch their religion’s violent purging by shoguns in mist-shrouded 17th century Japan, and the apostasy of Liam Neeson as their mentor, an Apocalypse Now­-like Kurtz figure. Their Shinto captors taunt the “selfish dream of a Christian Japan” which has triggered such slaughter, when “it wasn’t necessary to win anyone over to one [religious] side or another, when there is so much to share”. Still Scorsese, like the Shusaku Endo book which his austere film is based on, secretes a small kernel of Christian faith inside its thunderous doubt.

Just as quietly profound is Oscar-nominated actress Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, Higher Ground (2011), in which her character is greatly comforted by intermittent faith among a “Jesus Freak” community, but ultimately runs aground on the rocks of its implicit misogyny, and her flickering doubt. Funny enough to include “Christ-like sex” instruction tapes, as well as being tenderly feminist, Farmiga’s non-denominational Christianity informs her film’s open-mindedness.

This isn’t the dominant view in the US, where the last 15 years has seen an explosion in what Hollywood studios call the “faith-based” market. “With The Passion of the Christ in 2004, we shift into the modern era of faith-based films,” says Rich Peluso, head of the Sony subdivision devoted to it, Affirm Films. “In the 13-year period before, there were 10 faith-based [US] theatrical releases. In the same period after Passion there were 100. Passion of the Christ defined for Hollywood that there was an audience eager in engaging with this content, so it became a valid business argument to pursue.” Peluso has run Affirm since its founding in 2007, when a film by Southern pastors Alex and Stephen Kendrick, Facing the Giants, surpassed box-office expectations. Finding insufficient good indie Christian films, Affirm used traditional studio development skills to also make their own. When the Kendricks’ War Room topped the US box office in 2015, making $73 million from a $3 million budget, their bet had paid off handsomely. “We had a big celebration in the office,” Peluso recalls. “Affirm’s done over $500 million around the world. When we started we were a couple of people in a hallway, but we’re now counted on in Sony to deliver.”

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Working Title Agency was also founded in 2007, says its president Bill Reeves, to market, license and develop films for “an audience with faith-based values that was being underserved by Hollywood films that were either not affirming their values, or worse were offensive to their values”. He notes that the startling profit ratio of War Room and other major US hits such as Soul Surfer (2011, about a female surfer’s faith helping her after a near-fatal shark attack) is even bigger in DVDs and online. “The Hollywood norm is that cinema box office is the same ‘downstream’; faith titles are multiples of that.”

Much of this is down to recommendation by evangelical church “influencers, gatekeepers and leaders” who Affirm keep close with, Peluso notes. The spread of films for this conservative audience can be as broad, though, as in the mainstream world of Scorsese. “Risen stars an Academy award-winner, Joseph Fiennes,” Peluso says, “in a story which while it’s based in biblical content is also historical fiction from a [Roman] non-believer’s perspective. That’s going to be marketed differently from War Room, which is written and directed and produced by pastors of a Southern Baptist church in Georgia. We identify and square away the primary targets with every project, then reach as wide as possible. We’re not about proselytising. We’re about storytelling that comes from a biblical worldview.”

Some of the most approachable films for this Christian market have been produced by Pure Flix. Their hit God’s Not Dead series (God’s Not Dead 3 reaches the UK next month), sets up a series of straw men for its heroes to defeat, from the right to believe God created the world in the first film to God’s Not Dead 2, in which Ray Stark’s pointy-shoed dark lord of an ACLU lawyer is the unlikely villain prosecuting a teacher for quoting Jesus when discussing Martin Luther King in class. With its hippyish, gay-friendly Pastor Dave, light touch and strong acting, the series is like a reverse Inherit the Wind (in which teaching evolution was defended). Scenes inverting footage familiar from abortion clinics to show Christian supporters stoically suffering the hate-filled faces of liberal protestors, though, show the embattled sense of American culture war which permeates even here.

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“Movies have unfortunately moved to very dark places,” Reeves warns, “and in our culture, whether it’s news, politics or war, people are getting depressed, and they need an escape. The point of our movies is that people leave feeling some kind of hope that they’re not getting from their other entertainment choices.”

The Kendricks’ films come from a world that’s even more alien to largely secular Britain. “I wish my wife would pray for me like that,” a man says in War Room, with envy usually reserved for the bedroom. The woman concerned, Elizabeth (Priscilla Shirer), literally casts the Devil from her house, and saves her marriage by learning to “submit” to both God and her husband. Rooney Mara’s Mary is sorely needed here. But the film has the virtue of the amateur Shirer’s fervently powerful performance. War Room co-writer Stephen Kendrick believes it’s explained by her faith. “In the scene where she casts the Devil out, you can tell that Priscilla genuinely believes in God, and cares about those things.” The Prayer Coordinator in War Room’s credits show the highly unorthodox cinema being made by the evangelical Kendrick brothers. So do uncompromising scenes of answered prayers; “realistic”, Kendrick says, in their experience. “We know that America has slowly been pulling away from God and our Judeo-Christian roots,” he warns, revealing his cultural standpoint.

The Kendricks hope their films will lead to a new, evangelical Great Awakening in America, not Oscars. Reeves, though, says this isn’t the whole faith-based film story. “There’s a big audience within the faith audience that want comedies, documentaries, action adventure, war, they want romance. Sometimes people just want to go to an action thriller and not be bombarded with f-words and nude scenes. They just want to be entertained.”

Neither Kendrick nor Reeves have much time for what the latter calls the “theological inaccuracy” of Silence and Mary Magdalene. Peluso diplomatically wishes these films well, saying they were offered to Affirm, “but it doesn’t make sense with our brand”. The feeling is mutual for Helen Edmundson. “When Mary Magdalene was shown to some quite right-wing Christian types in America, they didn’t like it, and their main problem is that Mary would have been very happy to be subservient.”

One of the film’s producers, though, sees an untapped audience otherwise abandoned in the culture war crossfire. “We didn’t want to give in,” says Iain Canning, “to the idea that a Christian audience wouldn’t embrace a film which was in some ways about equality and feminism.”

The “faith-based” genre is ultimately at its weakest, like most of Hollywood, in its inevitably blessed happy endings. But as Graham Greene had his character Monsignor Quixote say, the space left by doubt makes life, and faith, liveable, rather than a “desert where everyone is certain that the same belief is true”. As films such as Silence also show, allowing doubt lets Christian cinema earn our faith.

‘Mary Magdalene’ is out on 16 March. ‘God’s Not Dead: A Light In Darkness’ is out on 30 March