>>REVIEW
THE NATIVITY STORY
STARRING: Keisha Castle-Hughes, Shoreh Aghdashloo and Oscar Issac
DIRECTED BY: Catherine Hardwicke
Opens Friday, December 1
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As far as refresher courses in basic biblical history go, The Nativity Story is certainly more palatable than the last major release on the life of Jesus. Whips, blood and pesky foreign gibberish are replaced by good old-fashioned sentimentality, English mixed with a few obligatory Hebrew phrases and conflicts that don’t need any more than a few minutes to resolve.
Though the screenplay takes great pains to illustrate the suffering of the Jewish people under their Roman-backed king, Herod (King Herod), finer details like the character of Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes) are neglected. By the time the angel Gabriel (Alexander Siddig in a refreshing departure from the familiar long, blond-haired Aryan version) visits her to deliver the good news of her immaculate conception, what we know about Mary could fill the immaculate twinkle in her eye. When she later asks her cousin Elizabeth (Shohreh Aghdashloo), mother of John the Baptist, why she has been chosen, we have to ask the same question.
While, in fairness, the character of Mary was always a little underwritten in the original Gospel, screenwriter Mike Rich’s failure to realize her as anything but a wide-eyed ingénue is inconsistent with his treatment of other peripheral characters. Joseph (Oscar Isaac) is shown as a man of conviction and humility, and Herod is revisited periodically to remind us that, despite the warm holiday fuzzies, there is still a villain in this story. Even the three wisemen – Melchior (Nadim Sawalha), Balthasar (Eriq Ebouaney) and Gaspar (Stefan Kalipha) are drawn as a silly trio of caricatures – the complaining one, the wise one, and the faith-ed one.
Shot almost exclusively on location in Matera, Italy and Ouarzazate, Morocco, with ragged period costumes and a faint patina of dirt lending everything a more realistic feel, director Catherine Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story is still basically a familiar Christmas card. Melded with a PG-rating, its realism is muted only by the necessities of keeping it safe for families. After all, when both John the Baptist and Jesus are born covered in nothing but a fine layer of Vaseline and completely without umbilical cords, can it be anything but a miracle? |
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