Mary – Coming-of Age Nativity

“You may think you know my story. Trust me, you don’t”

In time for the Advent season, Netflix is giving us Mary, from director D.J. Caruso. It is styled as seeing the Nativity story as a coming-of-age story. All the biblical (and extrabiblical) characters are there. Most (but not all) of the important parts of the Nativity are included. For some, this might be a useful devotional piece for the Advent and Christmas seasons. But….

Let’s start with the story as told here. It opens with a scene of Mary (Noa Cohen), Joseph (Ido Tako) and their infant with a date A.D. 1. So we know what story is being told. It then moves back to before Mary’s birth, as her parents pray for a child. The first of several visits from Gabriel set the story in motion. Joachim and Anne will have a child, but they must promise to let her grow up in the temple. When the Mary is old enough, she is brought to the temple where the prophetess Anna oversees her rearing as Mary serves God.

Meanwhile, Herod the Great (Anthony Hopkins) is ruling Judea with an iron fist. Hopkins plays Herod as a Mad King, killing anyone (even a beloved wife) who does not bend to his will. Even early on there are reports of Messianic hope that lead him to violent actions. His madness grows throughout the film.

When Mary reaches adolescence, Gabriel is busy again arranging a meet-cute moment with Joseph, and announcing Mary’s pregnancy. And well, you know…, they end up in Bethlehem; Herod kills the babies; they escape. There are a lot of chase scenes: fleeing a local mob who want to stone Mary because of her pregnancy, fleeing from Herod and Romans. It has to be an action movie to get our attention.

I have to admit going in that I’m not much of a fan of biblical dramas, so you’ll need to take my impressions with a grain of salt. Nearly all biblical dramas try to mitigate the power of the story they are telling. That is certainly true here. The film does portray the story as God’s action to bring Jesus to the world, which is consistent with the biblical accounts. But it is much more of a mellow (if violent) story than the radical stories in the Matthew and Luke.

A key illustration of this is that when Mary visits Elizabeth (cf., Luke 1:39-56), we get Elizabeth (and the unborn John) recognizing Mary’s specialness, but we do not get Mary’s song of praise to God for turning the world upside down (the Magnificat). The revolutionaries in this film, Zealots, are seen as an impotent and, at times, malevolent group. Yet Mary praised God for the revolution he is bringing through her child.

I also take exceptions to harmonizing the Gospels (i.e., combining the Matthew and Luke stories into a single story). Each story has important points it is making. It is vital that each be allowed to have its say, rather than blending two divergent lessons into one. It only muddles the ideas being presented. Certainly the film has some strange ways to fitting the chronologies of the two together. Of course, starting with “A.D. 1” is its own chronological problem, since Herod died about 4 BCE.

Here the two gospel stories are combined with the stories from the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, a second (or later) century work that is the source of many of the traditions about Mary that have become widespread. In fact, it seems to me that the film relies more on the stories from the Protoevangelium than it does the canonical accounts.

One aspect I find missing entirely from the film is the importance of the story. Why does any of this matter? God seems to be doing a lot to make this happen (and it doesn’t even include the things God is doing in the birth of John the Baptist which Luke includes before Jesus’s birth). If Mary’s child is the savior, what does that mean? Saved from what? The Romans (and their puppet Herod)? How does that matter today?

The Nativity stories are both powerful stories that we should revisit as we approach the festival of Christmas. They remind us that God has acted in a way that has changed the world. The biblical stories serve as prologue to the two gospels that include them. They are insights into what is to come in the gospels. This film tells us that God is at work in the story, but not what it will means to us.

Mary is available on Netflix on Friday, December 6th, 2024.

Photos courtesy of Netflix.