Years before Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (79) sparked a U.K. culture war over the censorship of “video nasties,” the Bronx-born director enraged America’s religious right with his feature-length debut, the hardcore porno 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (76). In one of the film’s, uh, vignettes, a Bible-thumping patriarch (played by Ferrara himself) recites the Old Testament story of Lot to his ample-bosomed offspring. Lot had narrowly escaped the destruction of Sodom, he explains, only to find himself a widower with two unmarried daughters; his girls, fearful lest the family line should die off, wait for their father to fall asleep and then impregnate themselves with his seed. Ferrara expresses his hope that the moral of the story has been perfectly clear and then promptly passes out—let’s just say that the rest of the scene writes itself.
So when this aging bad boy announced in 2005 that Mary would tackle the New Testament’s most controversial figure, it’s no surprise that cinephile circles were abuzz with speculation. As biblical scholars have increasingly suggested that the eponymous Mary Magdalene may have been Jesus’ lover, it seemed likely that Ferrara was set to push some people’s buttons. Just remember how apoplectic Christian fundamentalists had gotten over The Last Temptation of Christ¬¬, a picture helmed by a former seminary student and directed with a classical restraint of which Ferrara himself would seem incapable. But as a filmmaker consistently dismissed as a poor man’s Scorsese, Last Temptation must have induced some anxiety of influence in Ferrara. The unexpected conceptual coup of Mary was to turn all these speculations back on themselves: a film-within-a-film structure (meta!) explores the personal and public fallout from the production of a revisionist biblical epic.
Call it post-Scorsesean, if you must, but no amount of category-crunching could rescue this film from its own mediocrity. Forest Whitaker plays Ted Younger, host of a TV talk show that examines the life of Jesus from an ecumenical perspective. Younger’s interest is piqued by the egomaniacal filmmaker Tony Childress (Matthew Modine) whose latest production, This Is My Blood, breaks with Christian orthodoxy by portraying Mary Magdalene as the 13th apostle, on the same footing as Peter or Paul. As Younger prepares for Childress’s appearance on the show, he begins to investigate the fate of Marie Palesi (Juliette Binoche), the actress who portrayed Mary but has since disappeared into the Holy Land. Palesi claims to have discovered God through the making of the film, but the movie floats the hilarious idea that her devotion may be a case of Method acting gone terribly awry. (“When you’re an actor, sometimes it’s really hard to get back out,” her friend explains.) Stateside, Childress hypes the controversial film in advance of its release. “Why did you play Jesus?” shouts a heckler at a press screening, to which a straight-faced Childress responds, “Because I’m a really good actor and there isn’t anybody better to play the part.” Ah, satire. Meanwhile, the near-fatal miscarriage of Younger’s wife Elizabeth (Heather Graham) provokes a spiritual crisis in Younger whose torments can be allayed only through a series of painfully awkward monologues. (Are you there God? It’s me, Forest.) The talk-show host is spiritually reborn just in time for Childress’s guest spot, at which point he puts the SOB in his place: “Jesus represents love!” he barks angrily, in a moment whose irony may or may not be apparent to Ferrara. As Mary builds towards the climactic premiere, right-wing protests steadily escalate in volume and violence, and much mechanical crosscutting between rioting in the streets of New York and mayhem in the Middle East suggests that we are all living in a globalized Jerusalem. Or something.
Produced less than a year after Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ, Ferrara’s film was nothing if not topical, but what makes Mary such a strange work of cultural commentary is that its characters seem to exist in a completely parallel universe. Younger’s relatively new talk show is supposed to be a ratings bonanza and his palatial Manhattan apartment suggests a salary in the high six-figure range. But the program’s format—one-on-one discussions with biblical scholars of various religious persuasions—is too dryly intellectual for network television, and the audience share would preclude cable or PBS. What exactly does Ferrara think today’s infotainment landscape consists of?
The characterization of Childress—at once obvious and obscure—also falls flat as satire. On the one hand, he is presented as a shallow, self-serving scumbag whose interest in the Bible is purely opportunistic (“That Mel Gibson movie made like a billion dollars!”). As a parody of Hollywood’s values-free venality, this is shooting fish in a barrel. Yet Ferrara also presents sequences from Childress’s film as if they were the genuine revelations of a spiritual visionary. Lit in the flickering chiaroscuro of a Caravaggio and infused with mystery by the slightly dissonant ambience of Francis Kuipers’s score, the excerpts from This Is My Blood are presented as dreamlike snatches from Marie/Mary’s sincere spiritual quest. Ferrara is trying to have his cake and eat it too; any attempt at a coherent critique of Childress’s exploitative approach falls by the wayside.
But if the film is obscure as cultural commentary, it’s banal and overly familiar as a tale of spiritual redemption. In a retread of Harvey Keitel’s performance in the superior Bad Lieutenant, Forest Whitaker is the lying, cheating husband who must hit rock bottom in order to be spiritually reborn through God. But Bad Lieutenant managed to compel because its bottom-up vision of New York felt grittily authentic, despite its sensationalized aspects. Since that film was produced, however, the urban underworld that Ferrara loved was effectively swept off stage by the Giuliani administration. And so the New York portrayed in Mary is alienatingly sterile, a series of corporate skyscrapers seen exclusively through the windows of luxury cabs. These passages play beautifully as abstract city symphonies—rectilinear planes awash in neon hues that recall Ferrara’s work in the Eighties, when his exploitation films played like poverty-row exercises in Michael Mann stylistics—but the way these montages telegraph modern alienation and urban anomie is almost laughably clichéd. When Whittaker is confronted in the hospital by not one but two pillowy-lipped nurses with unplaceable European accents, the truly bizarro nature of this parallel New York universe becomes all too clear.
If you’re feeling disappointed that the film doesn’t deliver a fraction of the titillation that the early descriptions had seemed to promise, never mind: Ferrara’s follow-up effort Go Go Tales (07) is as sexploitative as your heart (or other organs) could desire. Otherwise you’ll just have to wait for Paul Verhoeven’s still unrealized take on the life of Jesus, a decades-in-the-making passion project which is shaping up to become his Big Red One. If that film doesn’t deliver sexed-up Mary Magdalene, I’ll eat my rosary beads.
