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The Last Temptation of Christ
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I believe that somewhere along the
line, as a general principle of filmmaking, of narration in fact, whether it’s
narrative cinema, fictional or documentary film, there should be something that
is like a black hole at the centre of the narration. There should be something
that you cannot talk about, or something that you cannot break, which is
precisely what allows you the detour. In many ways, I have this vision, this idea,
that language in general, expression in general, is only possible if there is
this impossibility of expression at its core. We talk because there is
something that we cannot say. If we could say it, maybe we wouldn’t talk.
– Jean-Pierre
Gorin, 1987
There
is often an Urtext, a matrix-text,
lurking beneath the œuvres of filmmakers: some primal story or myth, maybe a
special novel or movie seen in early childhood, that generates multiple
versions and allusions in the form of displacements and detours. Yet it is
precisely this Urtext which must never be directly depicted, represented,
tackled and materialised on screen. When that happens, the result can be
massively disappointing.
This
may be especially the case when the primal story is religious in nature. Did Martin
Scorsese get too close to the source of his deepest inspiration when he finally
managed to film The Last Temptation of
Christ? Why is there such a discrepancy between these Unholy Saints of the
Biblical tale, and the magnificently sordid gangster-boxer-criminal characters
of his best films? [2022 Postscript: Scorsese once again got the chance to
finally film his other dream-project, Shüsaku Endō’s Silence, in 2016 – with a similarly
deflated result.]
Not
being a Believer myself, I should allow for the possibility that there is a
level on which I did not quite meet up with Scorsese’s dream-project. My faith (belonging more as it does to Cinema
than to Christ) was sorely betrayed by its unreeling: unbelievably, it turns
out to be an utterly monotonal, sombre, stylistically straitjacketed Scorsese
movie, without any suppleness, without even a hint of humour. What heresy!
Without
being too normative about it, there would seem to be a host of factors and
problems facing any adaptation of the New Testament story which Scorsese has
failed to resolve in his crack at this biggest of the Big Themes. Like Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), Last
Temptation announces itself not as a historical reconstruction of the
gospels; rather, it is a heuristic staging – already at one remove from the
Bible itself – of Nikos Kazantzakis’ “fictional exploration”, a symbolic and
theological meditation on Christ’s Man/God, Spirit/Flesh dualities.
It
occasionally adopts (in its more successful moments) a minimal, elemental
stylisation close to Roberto Rossellini’s Franciscan ethereality (however hard
it is for this auteurist to believe that the director of Raging Bull (1980) could render blood, dust,
violence so damnably immaterial). But, mostly, it opts for a deadly
mixture of Franco Zeffirelli-type piety and a queer sort of low-key, you-are-there
emotional realism – a combination which allows for little play, and even less cinematic self-consciousness. It’s embarrassed
even to be a Scorsese film … even though that’s deeply what it is. [2022
Postscript: Musician-actor John Lurie’s not entirely pleasant 2021 autobiography The History of Bones paints a dark
picture of the film’s production, and indicates some left-in gaffes worth
looking out for.]
Happier
by far are those projects – reverent or irreverent as they choose to be – which
mediate themselves via the archive of representations (not the reality) of
Christ: think of Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail
Mary (1985) and the precocious little kid who storms away from his parents’
car bleating (in French) “I am He who Is!” Scorsese struggles at every moment
of Last Temptation to furiously
suppress what can only be termed inevitable showbiz expectations, including
many that attach to this most showbizy of directors – questions like: will
Christ do a Raging Bull in the money lenders’ temple? How will the film show
the miracles? The telling of the
parables? How big will the crowds be? What about the loaves and fishes?
When
the not-yet well-known Willem Dafoe is on-screen alone as Christ, Scorsese
manages to keep such pagan thoughts about an oft-told tale at bay; but, sad to
say, the second that Harvey Keitel as Judas, David Bowie as Pilate or Harry
Dean Stanton as Saul/Paul enter the frame doing their schtick, the
fragile condition of illusion well nigh collapses. And the hilariously
straight-faced attempts at making New Testament lines sound fresh and
spontaneous (Judas: “You know what you said yesterday about turning the other
cheek? I didn’t like that!”) don’t help matters much. Doubtless a (quite valid)
majority response to the film will be simple bemusement or amusement.
Even
to one like I who is not deep in theological rumination, the film seems
simplistic on its chosen level. This Christ for Modern Man displays all the
standard equivocations and anguishes: moments of self-doubt, hints of
megalomania, hedged bets on his ultimate transcendence (the film tears away
from the projector gate à la Two-Lane
Blacktop [1971] before it can represent resurrection).
A
Scorsese lover can only be appalled at the film’s determination to announce and
read-out every one of its preferred meanings: the Flesh/Spirit problem
(irritatingly conservative in its gender-mapping onto profound male buddies and
fleshy, tempting dames); Christ’s abrupt and bizarre journey from love to the
axe to sacrifice; even the parables are immediately translated for the dummies
in the diegesis and in the movie theatre.
I
stand to be corrected on this by more spiritual souls, but Scorsese’s rendering
of Kazantzakis’ thematic appears feeble indeed.
In
a memorable apotheosis of auteurist excess, a mad fan once wrote: “Better
Scorsese should have made a flawed The Last
Temptation of Christ than The Color
of Money [1986]”. But, in the event, the flaws outweigh even this
conviction. Better that Scorsese should have made The Hustler III than
this dismal, strained, pious affair!
MORE Scorsese: The Aviator, Cape Fear, The King of Comedy, The Blues, Rolling Thunder Revue, The Irishman, After Hours, Bringing Out the Dead, Casino, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Kundun © Adrian Martin September 1988 |
