"The Nativity Story"

OK, "The Nativity Story" will not be the big collosal movie of the holiday season. And, if you're a Christian or not, its not a story with an ending that anybody but the very young will be in suspense about.

Like all good movies--and I think it is a good movie--it tells a basic story centered on a few characters and doesn't try to reinvent cinema. It also puts some meat on the bones of the story of Jesus' birth from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Here we have a real life flesh-and-blood Holy Family to root for.

This is a literate and touching film, with a Sense of the Sacred, yes, but not that cloak of smugness and hyper-piety that turns many people off to religious films (and sometimes to organized religion, period.) And, yes, there is no Gibsonesque neurosis-pageant here. This is about two Jewish people 2,000 years ago in a country that once belonged to their ancestors and now is ruled by pagans with no concern for them. There is some "local government",however, if you are generous in calling the nasty puppet Herod the Great a local. He's into architecture and killing, in that order (or maybe reverse). The historical Herod the Great may well have gone mad at the end of his life, but here the actor playing him makes him seem a cunning survivor. He's picked up many bad habits from his "friends" in the Empire.

There are the requistite vile Roman tax collectors, overbearing soldiers and the inevitable violence. But its treated as just part and parcel of the lives of people in a small Jewish village. Joseph is just a man trying to get a bit ahead in the world. Mary (played by Keisha Castle-Hughes, who got an Oscar nomination for her work in Whale Rider) is a young woman whose not sure she loves this guy, and then, after a visit from an Angel, she has to worry about getting stoned to death. Here the film seems the most real--she comes home pregnant and is far from some haughty goddess telling off the world. She's a girl in trouble and with an alibi that seems plain crazy to all concerned.

Our Joseph, however, is a mensch. He gets a little help from a dream, but you get the feeling he would have done the right thing, the real "right thing by this girl anyway. If these characters as written and acted are in some way close to the real-life counterparts, the Lord knows how to pick good parents for an unusual assignment.

This is something unusual, this emphasis on the young Mary and her cousin Elizabeth (pictured above) particularly--at least in a mainstream film if not in the fine art of Leonardo's "Virgin On the Rocks" and other paintings. Women matter in this film, I'm sure the director saw to it. Butits important I think to rememberthat they mattered to the real, grown-up Jesus of all the Gospels.

Also, in my experience, The Nativity is simply a framing device for a biographical films about Jesus. It's there in both versions of "Ben Hur (1925 and 1959) and in Franco Zefferelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" (1976). The mother gets a quick viewing and then its off to adulthood and the Mission of the Son of Man.

It's also a framing device for comic effect in "Monty Python's Life of Brian"(1979) where there are Three Other Wise Men who come to the wrong house in Bethlehem, bother the heck out of Terry Jones's maternal figure of "Mandy" and wind up worshipping a ordinary kid while, just down the street, in a manger, the Real Deal is happening.

After I saw this newest film, I looked up some reviews. It seems to have met with a mixed reception among our cinema critics. Mick LaSalle's review in the San Francisco Chronicle comes pretty close to my own primary take on why the film works as entertainment:

"What could have been an after-school special or some somber straight-to-video exercise becomes, in the hands of screenwriter Mike Rich and director Catherine Hardwicke, a gritty and affecting picture that takes the story of Jesus Christ's conception and birth and depicts it as it might have happened. Its hard edges and unabashed piety will remind some of "The Passion of the Christ," but "The Nativity Story" has none of the neurosis or fetishism of the Mel Gibson film. It's also not a closed shop, catering to one specific vision of Christianity. It's a lovely thing aimed at everybody. "

Yo, Mick. When the Infant is born and the young mother, Mary says, "He is for all mankind," it resonated to me. The film has earned its uncynical and unmodern climax at The Manger. Anyone else looking to make a film from the Bible hopefully will take heed.