More Top Picks Mulch
player ready...If the Virgin Mary looks vaguely familiar, you can thank George Lucas, who cast Pernilla August as Anakin Sywalker’s devoted-but-incredibly-unselfish mother in “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.”
Thrust into the same desertlike milieu for “Mary, Mother of Jesus,” August reprises her “Phantom Menace” look for the two-hour telefilm premiering at 8 p.m. Sunday on NBC-Ch. 5. Come to think of it, the roles themselves are similar, especially if one accepts the messianic interpretation of Anakin’s being “chosen” to lead his people out of slavery.
The only real difference is that August’s role in “Phantom Menace” was a supporting one, which she handled capably. In “Mary, Mother of Jesus,” she has the lead role, and again her performance is solid, if somewhat restrained. The problem, as in most Bible-based films, lies in character development. There simply isn’t enough. The title might be “Mary, Mother of Jesus,” but the effect is Mary, we hardly knew ye.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her eldest son, Bobby, produced the film so we might see, in Eunice Shriver’s words, “an interesting story about an extraordinary woman” and come to regard Mary as “a mother, a teacher and a revolutionary rather than as the beautiful but rather placid and not very passionate woman depicted in the Middle Ages.”
Placed against those expectations, director Kevin Connor’s film fails grandly. The viewer hardly gets to know Mary beyond the goody-two-shoes cardboard cutout that even the most unchurched or un-Christian among us would expect to be the film’s starting point, not its conclusion.
This isn’t August’s fault. In a film whose running time, not counting commercials, is about 90 minutes, August doesn’t appear until the 39th minute, leaving her little time to make an impression.
Before August’s appearance, at a point in the film when Jesus is 12 years old, young Mary is played by Melinda Kinnaman. As it happens, Kinnaman resembles August, and the two actresses actually have appeared together as daughter and mother on the Swedish stage. But having them share the lead role was an ill-advised decision that splits the film into disparate one-act mini-plays that don’t add up to a satisfactory whole.
Kinnaman’s Mary is naive, unsure of the plan God has for her. August’s Mary is self-assured, as comfortable as a mother can be in the knowledge that her son’s fate isn’t something she, or even He, will be able to control. The circumstances that lead to such personal growth would make for a terrific movie, but “Mary, Mother of Jesus” misses them completely.
The dearth of material on Mary’s life is no doubt partly to blame. Lacking hard data, Connor relies on re-enactments of New Testament stories, such as the wedding feast at Cana — scene of Jesus’ first miracle — and his triumphant ride into Jerusalem, which focuses not on Mary but on her son and his impending demise.
Despite some artistic license that gives Mary Magdalene (Simone Bendix) a larger role than the Bible intimates, the film is unwilling to assume too much about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Instead, the producers retell Bible stories in a sort of Sunday school recitation that lacks depth and breadth, and they deliver another hunkalicious adult Jesus (Christian Bale) that hardly advances the image fostered for decades in Hollywood.
If ever a production needed a deus-ex-machina rescue, it is this film. But not even the clout of a Kennedy can get heaven to save “Mary, Mother of Jesus” from TV-movie mediocrity. Instead of a movie, what we have here are good intentions that never evolved beyond a movie outline.