A filmmaker known primarily for his perceptive melodramas about women, from “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her” to “Mother and Child,” now turns his attention to a primal tale of fathers and sons — including the Son of Man himself — in “Last Days in the Desert,” a quietly captivating and remarkably beautiful account of Jesus’ time in the wilderness before the beginning of his ministry. Deliberately paced, sparely imagined and suffused with mystery, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia’s seventh feature is nonetheless quite lucid and accessible in its themes of empathy, compassion and sacrifice, and grounded by a Christ/Satan dual performance by Ewan McGregor that plays vastly better onscreen than it sounds on paper.
Certain to elicit the full range of reactions from the faithful and the skeptical alike, “Last Days in the Desert” approaches the figure of Christ — or Yeshua, as he’s referred to here — with tremendous care and tact, yet also with a scrupulous focus on his humanity rather than his divinity. Some may well discern a connection with “The Last Temptation of Christ,” though there’s nothing here that even remotely approaches that film’s controversy-stirring elements. This is a hushed, austere and surpassingly gentle treatment of a brief chapter of Jesus’ life — probably too subdued and speculative for those inclined to find profundity in the self-glorifying “realism” of “The Passion of the Christ,” but a vastly more considered and spiritually probing picture in every respect.
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We first encounter Yeshua (McGregor), his face grubby and his robes tattered, kneeling before a craggy expanse of desert that he has presumably wandered for nearly 40 days. “Father, where are you?” he utters softly, perhaps raising initial fears that Garcia’s script will borrow liberally from the collected whispers of Terrence Malick. But while there is some shared talent with “The Tree of Life” — an actor, Tye Sheridan, and a cinematographer, the great Emmanuel Lubezki — the dialogue here remains relatively sparse, even after Yeshua happens upon a father (Ciaran Hinds), his wife (Ayelet Zurer) and son (Sheridan) living in a small, isolated encampment. Accepting water from them but declining food, “the holy man,” as the father calls him, prepares to take his leave, but feels oddly compelled to stay behind — due to his innate love for humanity, one gathers, but also perhaps due to some intangible sense that all is not quite well.
The stakes escalate further when Yeshua is visited by a man identified in the credits as “the Demon,” who happens to be his exact mirror image. Similar to the childlike manifestation of the Almighty in the recent “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” the Demon is visible to no one but the seer, and whether that makes him a figment of a tortured imagination or a genuinely supernatural being is left very much open to debate. Yet the decision to have McGregor play both roles — which he does superbly, with sometimes only the subtlest quiver of the brow to delineate between the two — turns out to be an inspired stroke, effectively capturing the war raging within Yeshua, as well as the notion that the self, with its wants and desires, can be one’s own greatest enemy.
Departing from the gospel accounts of Satan tempting Jesus by luring him into an overt display of his power and authority, the Demon invites Yeshua to see if he can “untangle the knot” at the core of this troubled family, resolving their tension to the satisfaction of all three. As Yeshua goes about helping the father and the son with their work — hauling buckets of water, chiseling blocks of stone — he listens to their stories in private and begins to comprehend the nature of the emotional distance between them.
That the relationship between the Hinds and Sheridan characters is meant to hold up an earthly mirror to Yeshua’s own sense of abandonment is clear enough, though it’s only one resonant point in an eloquent discussion that ranges from the seeming futility of all existence to the indescribable joy (and agony) of being in God’s presence.
Despite the restrained presentation and the occasional touch of lyrical abstraction, Garcia’s conception of this material is strikingly simple and intuitive. The character details are kept purposefully understated, but thanks to the actors — particularly the magnificent Hinds, his careworn face riven with lines of suffering and regret — we have an almost immediate sense of who they are and the lives of earthly extremity they’ve endured.
After resolving the family drama with an emotional force that may catch some off-guard, “Last Days in the Desert” arguably goes too far in the final stretch, orchestrating two significant leaps forward in time. The apparent purpose of this is to provide the audience with the traditional satisfactions of a Christ narrative, but also to ensure, somewhat needlessly, that we grasp the lessons of patience, forgiveness, love and endurance already laid out in the preceding 90 minutes.
Yet Garcia has touched upon something stirring and true here, and he’s risen to the occasion with perhaps the most singularly gorgeous piece of filmmaking of his career.
“Last Days in the Desert” — 3 stars
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some disturbing images and bried partial nudity)
Running time: 1:39
Opens: Friday
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