By Preston Wilder
When it comes to the clash between living in Cyprus and watching films from abroad, the marijuana gap is notable (increasingly mainstream in the US, still verboten here) but the Easter gap may be the most unbridgeable. Easter is a big deal in Cyprus, much less so in the States and/or Britain. Even worse, the symbols used to celebrate Easter in those cultures aren’t the same as our own symbols. There was much rejoicing a few years ago when an actual Easter movie came out of Hollywood, just like Christmas brings Christmas movies: Hop, with Russell Brand as the voice of the Easter Bunny. But the Easter Bunny means nothing in Cyprus.
It’s a problem that may be insoluble – because Christmas is about feeling good, hanging tinsel, opening presents, and it’s easy to build heartwarming films on feeling good; Easter, on the other hand, has an inescapable religious element, inescapably involving a dead guy on a cross. (That said, there’s a certain genius to the British rebranding of Easter as an excuse to eat chocolate. Who could possibly object to eating chocolate?) Jesus – not innocuous baby Jesus, but suffering Jesus with nails through his hands – looms over this particular holiday much more conspicuously, and morbidly, than the one in December. That’s not why people go to the multiplex.
Only one recent Easter film has managed to escape the whiff of Sunday school: The Passion of the Christ, which made a lot of money by essentially turning into torture porn. There’s a reason why oldies like The Robe still appear on our Easter TV schedules, because nothing’s come along to supplant them – and Risen takes its cue from The Robe, being another story of a Roman soldier deeply affected by the Crucifixion. Our hero in this case is Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), a clever and ambitious Roman tribune in Judaea circa 33 AD, tasked by Pilate (Peter Firth) to seal and guard Jesus’ tomb so his followers can’t steal his body and claim he was resurrected – then, when the body disappears anyway, to find out what happened.
The idea of playing the Resurrection as a kind of police procedural is ingenious, and surprisingly tense given that we all know the outcome. As Clavius starts to interrogate witnesses, exhume recent corpses and track down disciples, the notion of a higher truth draws closer – and in fact that’s how most great detective stories work, the nuts and bolts of investigation slowly parting to reveal something new and unimagined (think of Chinatown, or an existential thriller/drama like L’Avventura). With the often-hammy Fiennes in surprisingly understated form, Risen is quietly gripping for most of its first hour, despite some clumsy performances and suntanned actors flashing too-perfect teeth.
The film should’ve kept Jesus in the background, giving Clavius just enough sense of the divine to sow seeds of doubt in his battle-hardened Roman heart. “The Nazarene: did you find him different?” asks Pilate early on, somewhat affected by his own encounter with JC; “I found him dead,” replies Clavius flatly, and that kind of no-nonsense tone is perfect for this enterprise. Alas, the film (made by a presumably religious outfit called Affirm Films) can’t resist the urge to proselytise: Clavius doesn’t just get a sense of who Jesus was – he actually sees the Risen Jesus, then hangs out with the disciples watching their master cure lepers and offer reassurance (“Know that I will be with you always”). Though director Kevin Reynolds tries to keep the inner struggle going, Clavius is finished as a character at this point: his only function is to gape in awe, and await conversion.
The last half-hour of Risen fails through being over-literal – which is a shame, especially since the whole ‘joke’ is that the Romans are the ones being too literal, treating a divine miracle as a police matter. Yet the film overall has a lot to recommend it, notably a strong sense of the physical – the actual process of crucifying a person, the weight of a nail and the way every breath becomes painful – tying in with the stark fact of death (“In a few years, that’s us,” sighs Pilate, pointing to the graveyard) and, by extension, the attraction of life after death.
The non-religious might actually find a whole other layer here. “They’re fanatics,” scoffs Pilate, speaking of the Christians and their insistence on the one true God – a reminder, if you care to be reminded, of how we might speak of ISIS today. The Romans in Risen believe in many gods, and choose which ones to pray to (Pilate prays to Minerva for wisdom; Clavius, being a soldier, prays to Mars, the god of war) a kind of religion that seems much more suited to our modern age of consumer choice. Clavius even prays to Yahweh at one point, the Christian God – and offers Him money, so we’re supposed to find it despicable, but in fact a society where one prays to an enemy deity doesn’t seem so bad; imagine how much better the world might be if Islamists didn’t mind praying to God occasionally, and Christians to Allah. Risen is that rare thing, a real Easter movie; yet its greatest lesson may be unintentional.
DIRECTED BY Kevin Reynolds
STARRING Joseph Fiennes, Peter Firth, Cliff Curtis
US 2016 107 mins.
