Reeling Backward: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Attacked relentlessly as heretical at its release, Martin Scorsese's fictional rumination on Jesus' inner life is actually a fairly staid interpretation -- and barely less bloody than Mel Gibson's.

I didn’t see “The Last Temptation of Christ” when it came out, but it was hard to avoid the brouhaha over it. Martin Scorsese’s fictional rumination on the inner life of Jesus, based on the 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, was relentlessly attacked as heretical, at a time when Christian faith held a much more powerful sway over daily life.

Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, no dummies, were well aware of the controversial nature of the material. Their movie opens with a quotation on the dual nature of Christ, both a human being and a divine one, and then offers this mea culpa: “This film is not based on the Gospels, but upon the fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict.”

Problem is, it’s OK for a bunch of theologians to debate this stuff in a dusty seminary school. It’s a very different thing to make a flickershow depicting Jesus getting it on with Mary Magdalene, and later bedding another woman and even sharing his seed with her sister.

Reaction was widespread and swift, including protests, death threats against Scorsese, banning in a number of countries and an arson attack on a Paris theater playing it.

(Pretty rough stuff, though to anyone carping about Christian extremism I’d invite to attempt their own portrayal of that Muhammad fellow and see how they fare. Thank goodness for Buddhists — you can depict their deity as a fat slob and they don’t seem to mind.)

“Christ” was still a modest critical and commercial success, and Scorsese received an Oscar nomination for his direction. Barbara Hershey earned a Golden Globes nod for supporting actress as Mary Magdalene, as did Peter Gabriel for his subtle, lovely score employing Middle Eastern musical motifs.

Willem Dafoe, despite a solid performance as Jesus, was ignored, and Harvey Keitel as Judas was the subject of much criticism and even ridicule, including a Golden Raspberry Award nomination. Personally, I don’t think he’s that bad but the casting of a New York City tough guy, with little attempt by Keitel to conceal his accent, seems a bit off.

The quite obvious “Jew nose” prosthetic doesn’t help.

So finally catching up nearly four decades later, I have to say the controversy seems a bit overblown now. If anything, this interpretation of Jesus seems rather staid to me, a standard-issue demythologizing of a historical/religious figure the audience can relate to. Jesus may have been the Son of God but he was also a man and therefore subject to self-doubt, fear, arrogance, lust, etc.

Plus, I have to say the depiction of Christ’s torture and crucifixion is only marginally less bloody than Mel Gibson’s, criticized at the time for its scourging of flesh.

The story plays out pretty closely to the narrative bones of the Gospels, but with plenty of fanciful fleshing out by Scorsese and Schrader. Anyone raised in the faith, as I was, knows the Bible tends to use flat prose that spares the details, inviting the reader to fill it in themselves.

Jesus still goes out into the desert, is tempted by Satan as a column of fire, is recognized as the Messiah by John the Baptist, raises Lazarus from the dead, performs miracles, ousts the money-changers at the temple, is betrayed by Judas, and all the rest.

But the book and movie propose a number of interesting departures. For example, as the story opens Jesus is reviled as the only Jew carpenter willing to make crosses for the Romans to crucify renegades. He even carries the cross-beam portion up the hill himself, in a foreshadowing of his own death march.

(This is probably historically accurate, the Romans using existing trees or available wood for the vertical portion. Thus rendering obsolete multitudinous depictions of the Station of the Cross showing Jesus hauling a big ol’ T-shaped thingee.)

Judas, posited as a member of the Jewish Zealots fighting the Romans, is sent to kill Jesus as a traitor but winds up joining him as his first, and strongest apostle. Indeed, all the rest are depicted as a squad of toadying, squabbling fools who are following Jesus more out of a sense of opportunity than faith.

They complain incessantly about how much they’re losing by giving up their fishing, sheep and farming. Oy vey!

As to Judas’ betrayal, much debated over the centuries, in this depiction it is made explicitly clear that he turns him over to the Roman soldiers at Jesus’ orders, as he has embraced crucifixion as his only tool for the salvation of mankind.

John the Baptist (Andre Gregory) is shown as a raving madman, a cult-like precursor to Jesus himself who shouts about the coming Messiah while anointing his followers with water. This includes seemingly stoned people slinking and parading about in various states of undress.

The movie also embraces the entirely suppositional but common assertion that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, and indeed here they are depicted as having known each other since childhood. Hershey wears Henna-style tattoos on her hands, feet and face marking her profession. She bears Jesus great enmity, apparently for having refused the possibility of romance when they were still youths.

(We tend to think of Jesus dying very young at 33, but that was about life expectancy two millennia ago.)

Of course, the longest and most important departure from scripture is the last act, comprising about a half-hour of the film’s 163-minute running time, from which derives the title. After demanding of his Father, “Why have you forsaken me?”, Jesus is rescued by a fair-haired girl (Juliette Caton) who claims to be his guardian angel sent by God to spare his pain and humiliation.

“He said let him die in a dream, but let him live his life,” the angel soothes.

She takes him away from the cross, invisible to all the mourners and mockers, and brings him to his own wedding ceremony to Mary Magdalene. They consummate their marriage and enjoy some time together, though God later takes her life away.

The angel then encourages Jesus to take Lazarus’ sibling Mary of Bethany (Randy Danson) as the mother of his children, and throws in some polygamy with her sister, Martha (Peggy Gormley), claiming ‘there is only one woman in the world with many faces.’ They basically wind up as their own little hippie commune with a passel of children. Jesus professes this is the happiest he has ever been.

Of course it’s all a lie, and the angel is actually Satan throwing out his last, and grandest temptation. Jesus, now quite aged and taunted by Judas and his remaining apostles, renounces this false salvation and demands God let him be crucified. Returned to the penultimate moment of his death on the cross, he shouts out, “It is accomplished!”

I know this stuff raised a lot of hackles at the time, but I found it all rather insipid and predictable. As storytelling goes, it relies on the hackiest of bad writer tricks: “It was all just a dream!” My 7th grade creative writing teacher wrote off my own attempts at this sort of thing as uninspired.

To me, the most compelling aspect of the movie is the quiet parts where Jesus, often alone, struggles with his faith and identity. He at first resists God’s calling, dubbing himself a coward, and continues for the rest of his life to deal with the accusation — dealt from without and within — that he’s a charlatan magician. Even after healing a blind man or raising the dead, part of him doubts he’s the real McCoy.

When the angel lies to him and tell him he is not truly the Messiah, Jesus is relieved. I found Dafoe’s performance consistently authentic and moving.

This may seem a strange comparison, but I thought of Oliver Stone’s “JFK” while watching “Christ.” It is another ambitious movie tackling mythology and attempting to pierce the veil. “JFK” painstakingly tears down the official version of the Kennedy assassination, and then proceeds to offer its own, equally unlikely and fanciful interpretation.

“The Last Temptation of Christ” goes the other way, employing its own musings on how Jesus might have really felt to lead stray sheep thoughts back to the flock. Despite its condemnation, the film is actually a reaffirmation of faith through interrogation of it.