It was the end of the Old Testament era and the dawning of what we now call "Anno Domini", or AD, the year of the Lord, the time of the Good News, when the prophecies would be fulfilled. King Herod was a busy man. About a year before Jesus' birth, Herod was renovating his palace in Masada, worrying about an insurrection from his son, Antipas, trying to keep the Roman occupiers at bay, and fretting over the constant and irritating rumors of a messiah who would save the people from all this oppressive governance.
Three scholars and astrologers from a land to the east study the Hebrew prophecies and the stars to determine the date of the birth of the messiah. The three friends, Melchior, Balthazar and Gaspar, after some bickering, set out to follow a star that will lead them to the one foretold.
In Jerusalem, Zechariah offers incense in the temple. When an angel tells him his wife is to have a child in her old age, his faith wavers, and he can no longer speak. He tears his priestly garments as he exits the temple, and his wife, Elizabeth and other family members wonder in fear at what this means.
Eighty miles away, in a small village called Nazareth, a young girl named Mary enjoys time with her friends, works in the fields and with her parents making goat cheese. Herod's soldiers arrive to collect taxes from people who are already poor, and harass them into compliance. Soon, Joachim and Anna decide it is time for their daughter to marry because they are so poor and the future so uncertain. Mary and Joseph are betrothed.
This is the first of a series of unexpected events for Mary and she is unhappy. Then one afternoon, while resting from her labors, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her that she has been chosen to be the mother of the messiah. She asks how this can be because she is a virgin and Gabriel responds that the power of the most high God will overshadow her. She utters her "fiat" --- "Let it be done to me as you have said" --- and it becomes the archetype of surrender to God that resounds through two thousand years of Christianity. Young Mary, now concerned about what this seemingly inexplicable pregnancy will mean since she was to have remained a virgin for a year, asks to go visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is with child.
A Completely New Experience
The infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke seem so familiar to us that it is easy to wonder why a new movie about Christmas would make any difference in the Biblical genre or to audiences, or better yet, to a major Hollywood studio that would entice them decide to invest in such a venture.
Yet they did, and now audiences around the world will have a completely new cinematic experience to transport us back 2,000 years to the way it might have been, to know these familiar characters fleshed out and multi-dimensional. The Nativity Story is an interpretation of the Scriptures about the real people and the real story of the year leading up to Jesus' birth, to the slaughter of the innocents and Mary and Joseph fleeing with the baby into Egypt for safety.
The Nativity Story, written by Mike Rich (Finding Forrester; The Rookie) is the first major motion picture ever to focus on the year that bridged the Old Testament times and those of the New, highlight these marvelous events by giving us visual close-ups of Mary, Joseph, Anna, Joachim, Elizabeth, the magi and the shepherds and insights into what they might have really been like, how they might have felt, what they may have said in unguarded moments, and how they may have felt when everything they believed about God seemed to crumble into contradiction.
Playing Mary and Joseph
Keisha Castle-Hughes, the youngest female ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Whale Rider, told a group of Catholic and Protestant journalists from a variety of outlets on the set in Matera, Italy in May (I was privileged to have been there) that she did not really understand the role she had accepted to play until she was writing in her journal on the plane from New Zealand to Italy where much of the principal photography was shot (the rest was in Morocco.)
"I told myself, 'I can't believe I am playing the part of Mary,'" the 16-year-old actress recalled. "We don't really know a lot about these people: who they were or what they looked like. Yet now we have to become them for people all over the world.
"You never think about it, but Mary was 13 when she had a child. I mean, she was just a girl, playing with her friends, and then suddenly she has this huge responsibility --- to become the mother of the world."
Oscar Isaac, who plays Joseph in the film, was born in Guatemala, grew up in Miami in a devoutly Christian home, and studied drama at the Julliard in New York. He told journalists on Nov. 12 that he "had no clue how to play Joseph, a 'righteous' man. What do you do? Stand up straighter?"
As he studied and prepared for the role, he realized that Joseph "loved God so fully, loved his wife, Mary, so fully --- and had to share her with God. Joseph wanted to have children with this woman, to build a life with her, and it all changed" with the Annunciation.
Isaac said he had to go deep inside himself for resources for his on-camera emotions, and had "to attack a scene in every way possible. How do you make these iconic characters three dimensional? And Joseph, a person who really lived?"
He admitted that the experience of making the film made him ask, "What is Biblical about love? What is the power of humility to an ostracized and oppressed people? Yet, this is how God came to earth."
During the month he spent preparing for his role, Isaac learned the tradecrafts of Joseph's time, and even made the staff he uses in the film. "My hands were key to this role," he said. "I had actor's hands and so I worked with first century tools so my hands would become those of a laborer."
Isaac acknowledged that Joseph, more than any of the other characters in the film, had to react a lot because Joseph's emotions, more than Mary's would have had to have been more volatile. Yes, Mary agreed to be the mother of God, but "Joseph had to make every defining decision. When he decides not to accuse her, he opens himself to the action of God."
Screenwriter Mike Rich told journalists that he started at the end moments of the film and worked backward to develop the characters. "The character of Joseph evolved more than any of the others. Matthew and Luke left little hints for us" to flesh out regarding all the characters in the film. "Joseph's dream and how he responded gives us a hint at how he would keep the promises he made to Mary."
Elizabeth
For me, Academy Award-nominated actress Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog; 24) as Elizabeth, is remarkable. Born in Iran, she grew up reading a copy of the Bible that her grandmother had in Farsi.
"I felt a huge responsibility," she told journalists, "to portray Elizabeth as she would have been. I am a method actor and I researched the Bible and made lists of adjectives that would have described Elizabeth, words for her character: selfless, giving, a heart filled with compassion for humanity, humility, so kind. And then I realized, 'This is my grandmother!'
"So I brought the two together to create the character of Elizabeth. I brought her character from within myself, and created who she was and what she felt on my face."
In her trailer, when it was 130 degrees outside, or when the sand had penetrated her eyes, ears and hair, she would reflect on the torture Jesus endured, to help bring her through this experience. "I kept thinking that this film will be seen every Christmas forever, and that gave me the courage to keep going."
Aghdashloo imagined the pure love that Joseph had for Mary, and that their journey was a spiritual one. She admitted that the film made her think that "God is light, working in the darkness" and that it was a meaningful role for her, "significant, educational and illuminating."
On a personal level, Aghdashloo is looking for happiness in life, especially for her daughter. "On this planet there is enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed. I am content with what I have." She has always celebrated Christmas since leaving Iran and collects angels, all kinds of them, "especially fat ones!"
From Script to Film
Mike Rich began writing the script during Advent of 2004 after seeing cover stories about the nativity appear on the covers of Newsweek and Time magazines. "I did not want to preach," he admits. "The dialogue in the Gospels and in the film is sparse; I wanted the power of the story to come through the acting."
In addition to consulting Christian and Hebrew scholars for the film, Rich told journalists that though the film is "built on the bedrock of the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke," Raymond E. Brown's 1977 work, "The Birth of the Messiah," was the most influential resource for the film.
In January 2006 New Line Cinema bought the script. Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, The Lords of Dogtown) joined the project as director and teamed with producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey to make the film a reality in less than a year. "For all the people involved in making the film," Hardwicke said, "it was important that the characters be portrayed authentically, with a reverence for Judaism and to be true to [the Gospels] of Matthew and Luke."
The director, who grew up a "Texas Presbyterian," said she prayed during the making of the film. "In Morocco, when we had to fly out to a location and we only had a small time frame; the sand was 135 degrees; the donkey would not move. I sent word around to all the crew, that no matter their language or religion, to please pray for that donkey to move so we could finish filming the sequence. And sure enough, he did."
The Film
The Nativity Story is not a Bible epic filled with grand scenes and extravagant costumes. Instead, it recreates what the infancy narratives suggest: these people who lived in poverty and under the dominance of an oppressive government, lived poorly and simply.
The earth tones of the cinematography make us feel the poverty, the threat of death, the peril in which these brave people lived their hard lives in hope. The blends of classic hymns, beginning with O Come, O Come Emmanuel with contemporary melodies, as well as the film's musical theme by Mychael Danna, evoke an emotional response that engages and inspires.
The Vatican certainly thought the filmmakers, did an excellent job of telling the story. On Nov. 26, The Nativity Story had its world premiere at the Vatican's Pope Paul VI Audience Hall, the first Hollywood film to ever premiere there.
Director Hardwicke has elicited deeply nuanced performances from these young actors and we can believe that their relationship would have indeed been one of mutual reverence and the intimacy of friends who lived the unknown in wonder at God's action in their lives.
Except for a somewhat Christmas-card approach to the Bethlehem scenes, I cannot imagine a better film about Christmas.
Themes
The major theme in The Nativity Story is that of journey, the physical as metaphor for the spiritual, both very real, as experienced by the characters. Or. as screenwriter Rich put it, "I want to write about ordinary people who do extraordinary things, and Mary and Joseph exemplify this" in the journeys they make in the film.
The only ones who do not go anywhere, spiritually, or physically, are Herod and his son, Antipas. They are not open to new experiences, to learning, to the life of the spirit and thus they exemplify what St. Augustine was later to write: "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."
The Nativity Story is also about seekers, people who sought to make meaning out of life from the Scriptures as well as the sufferings imposed on them by the socio-political milieu in which they were immersed. The seekers who have faith and hope in the promises of God, and those who tread around the edges of belief, using faith for earthly power and status, are strongly contrasted in the film.
The portrayal of the shepherds as seekers touched me the most. It made me believe that The Nativity Story will assure every child who will ever have a part in a Christmas play that no role is insignificant.
As the story progresses, Mary recalls the "still small voice" (1 Kings 19) of the way God communicates his presence in Scriptural prayer. She also reminds us that God has indeed favored the lowliest of the low with his love and salvation.
Lines from Mary's Canticle of Praise, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), make this aspect of the film especially appealing to Christians who pray this canticle daily in Christian Prayer: The Liturgy of the Hours, or at other times. The Hail Mary is a prayer that only took on its present form in the 16th century; it wonderfully integrates the scriptures and prayer of the Church and resonates throughout as the film's spiritual landscape.
The values and virtues in the film are many because the film shows how divine grace transforms the characters --- from Mary and Joseph to Joachim, the magi and the shepherds. Honor, patience, truth, empathy, compassion, faith and hope are but a few that can guide conversations about the film, in addition to God's intervention in the lives of the Jewish people who are struggling against immense odds.
In one touching scene on the way to Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph wonder how they will teach Jesus anything, but the film has already foreshadowed the values that Mary and Joseph will pass on to the child: reverence for the Temple, charity, self-sacrifice, service, as when Mary washes the feet of Joseph as he lies sleeping along a river where they rest for the night.
The Nativity Story has various characters say throughout the film that God has come for the lowest of men to the highest, and as the film ends, Mary's voice prays, "he has cast the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly."
The Nativity Story is for all ages and all times, an instant classic that will enrich every Advent season and make Christmas morning truly meaningful for the entire family. Daughter of St. Paul Sister Rose Pacatte is director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Culver City. She wrote "The Nativity Story: A Film Study Guide for Catholics" (for personal and group use, as well as for whole community catechesis) and edited "The Nativity Story: Contemplating Mary's Journeys of Faith," a collection of 11 essays by women including three from the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Both books are available from the Pauline Book & Media Center, 3908 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City, 310-397-8676 and from www.pauline.org . |