Movie review: The Last Temptation of Christ
I still don't know what to think of this movie. The target audience seems weird to me: you don't have to be religious (otherwise you'll be reasonably offended by some scenes to the point that you'll hate it) but you have to be interested in the story of the Gospels (otherwise a lot of things will be just plain boring).
I happen to be in that intersection, mainly because I've been reading A History of the Bible (a great book I'll write about after I finish it), so I mostly liked it. Not all of it though: unlike other people, I hated Peter Gabriel's score, and the editing is so bad that it can't be justified by the fact that it's an "old" film. Curiously, the thing that is criticized more often, Keitel's performance, didn't bother me at all. But apparently people were turned off by the strong New York accent, which I didn't notice.
But most of the film is very good. Dafoe's performance is of course great. Many parts are super weird, in a good way, like the John the Baptist scene. And I liked the plot twist, which surprisingly I didn't know in advance.
Two things have stuck with me since I watched it.
One is the fantastic scene where Paul is preaching after his conversion. This happens during the dream/alternate timeline (up to interpretation what that is), after Jesus gets down from the cross. Is the implication here "if Jesus hadn't died and resurrected, nothing would've changed because Paul would've made it up anyway"? I don't know, and I don't know if this was intentional or not, but I loved it anyway.
The other is that the whole ending seems a way to reconcile the "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" of Mark/Matthew with the "It is accomplished" of John. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, but I thought it was one of the most interesting aspects of the film.
(As an aside, most English versions of the Bible translate that sentence as "It is finished". Only the Complete Jewish Bible and the Mounce Reverse Interlinear translate it as "It is accomplished", which is what the film uses.)
Some other random comments:
- Saul/Paul killing Lazarus is such a silly, modern retcon. I loved it.
- The middle part of the film has a lot of randomly connected scenes. In any other film this would be weird/bad, but here it does give you that "weird narrative jumps" Biblical vibe.
- I was curious how old Dafoe was when the film came out. Of course, he was 33 years old.