Risen

Bible stories have been on the silver screen for as long as there has been a silver screen. Some of the very earliest silent films in the teens and twenties were passion plays and other stories from the new and old testaments. The genre hit its zenith in the 1950s with big screen epics like The Ten Commandments, The Robe, and Ben-Hur. One of the most profitable films in history was Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ which made over 600 million dollars on a 30 million dollar budget and showed that even in our more secular times, there’s still a huge audience for filmed adaptations of Biblical stories. More recently, even the Coen brothers have gotten into the act with Hail Caesar, a movie about making a movie about a Roman soldier who becomes converted at Christ’s crucifixion. 

 The most recent entry in the genre is Kevin Reynolds’ Risen starring Joseph Fiennes.  Fiennes plays Clavius, a respected Roman soldier assigned to Jerusalem and whose job it is to keep the peace in that obscure yet turbulent part of the empire. Early on in the film, he’s called on to supervise a few crucifixions, including that of a rabble rousing rebel named Yeshua. Clavius looks into the man’s eyes, sees that he is dead, and then moves on with his day. 

 The problems really begin, of course, when Yeshua’s body disappears from a sealed and guarded tomb and all the local leaders are upset because clearly the man’s followers stole the body in order to promote the ridiculous and blasphemous stories Yeshua told about himself and to further the civil and religious unrest in the area. Clavius is assigned by Pilate to track down the body and put an end to the crazy cultists who would do a thing like that.

So the film becomes a really low-tech Bible-based episode of Law and Order, with the seen-it-all solider trying to solve a grisly whodunit. He interrogates witnesses, he exhumes bodies, and we are constantly reminded that in the heat of ancient Jerusalem, he only has a couple of days before the body is completely unrecognizable.

A very bulked up Joseph Fiennes plays Clavius with a laconic world-weariness that borders on sleepwalking. We get that he’s supposed to be a good man who is sometimes worn down by the violent acts he has to commit in the name of duty, but for the first half of the film, he looks like he can barely keep his eyes open. His squinty cynicism comes across as either boredom or sleep deprivation.

 Much more interesting is Cliff Curtis’s portrayal of Yeshua or Jesus. You will probably recognize Curtis. He’s a prolific character actor, a New Zealander of Maori descent and has been called upon to play an impressive array of ethnicities in his career. In Risen, Curtis’s version of Jesus is a far cry from the pale, pasty, somnambulant Christs of most big budget adaptations. He plays Jesus as playful and winking – almost jolly. It’s clear he and the filmmakers were striving for a warm, approachable Jesus and not some lofty, untouchable super being.

Speaking of the filmmakers, Risen was directed by Kevin Reynolds who has two claims to fame. Number one, he directed the very successful 1991 Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and number two, he directed the spectacularly unsuccessful 1995 Kevin Costner film Waterworld, a movie that is synonymous with excess and failure.  Appropriately enough, Reynolds finds some redemption in Risen. He directs the film with a low-to-the-ground workman-like style that’s not fancy, but it gets the job done.

There’s nothing controversial or doctrinally challenging about Risen. It’s a traditional Easter story told from a slightly different point of view. You could take your mom or your older kids and have a nice, uplifting time. If you don’t like it, don’t worry. There will always be more Bible stories at the movies.