Film Review: Mary Magdelane

Note: review tickets provided by Transmission Films. Review contains mild spoilers.


I have to start this review by saying I am not religious. I may have missed the meaning of some scenes/themes as I know very little about religious stories and figures, but I was interested in how they would reimagine such an old story, e.g. Jesus’s crucifixion, in what’s being lauded as a feminist version.

Basically, Mary Magdalene is a fictional story set around the time Jesus is rocking about performing miracles and being crucified, mainly from the perspective of Mary Magdalene.

Before researching for this review, I thought Mary was a repentant sex worker, but this is apparently false, and the movie goes to lengths to tell us that this rumour was started and perpetuated by the church. That a woman, or woman figure, was slandered (at least in the eyes of those at the time) and revisionist history minimised her role and relegated her to the sidelines does not exactly surprise me but here we are.

We start with Mary (Rooney Mara) being the emotional rock for a woman, possibly her sister, who has to be "ripped open" during childbirth, setting the tone for the entire movie.

Mary lives in a small fishing village and her family see her as a walking womb, ready be married off so she can pump out some sons. Mary’s disturbed by the idea she’ll be forced to fill a role she’s uncomfortable with, and when she mentions she’s not up for being married and having babies her father tries to expel the demons he believes are inside her by almost drowning her in the sea.

When she gets sick, either depressed or sick from almost being drowned in the sea, her family send for a healer that’s in town: Jesus.

Mary hangs around wide-eyed while Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix) pontificates to the villagers about real purpose and a new world and, overcome by watching Jesus and his apostles gently and joyously baptise people in the sea she was almost drowned in, decides to join the apostles who follow him and find a greater purpose for herself.

Her sister follows her escape in the early morning and plants the seed that the church will later sow: that if she travels around with Jesus’s crew, she’ll bring shame on the family and no man will ever want her because of assumed misdeeds. Mary basically gives that a big old whatever and defies her expected gender role by stoically walking away to become a revolutionary with Jesus and his crew.

Mary becomes Jesus’s confidante over a few hillside deep and meaningfuls where Mara and Phoenix stare wistfully over the (beautiful) scenery. The other apostles are either wary of Mary breaking up the band Yoko Ono-style or jealous of her, especially as she grows closer to Jesus.

As they grow closer, Mary counsels Jesus to include women in his sermons and he listens. Ignoring his apostles who want to take him to the temple in Cana to preach to men, he talks to a group of women doing washing. As an aside, all the women we see in this movie are doing manual labour, either bearing babies, putting out meals, fixing nets, doing laundry, while the men aren’t doing much of anything and I’m sure that wasn’t a careless choice.

But in this awareness of women’s roles at the time is where the movie stumbles with a feminist message. Jesus’s sermons of humility, tolerance and forgiveness seem to fall flat when juxtaposed with harsh reality. A washer woman angrily tells a story of female subjugation, in which one of their friends, a woman, was raped and then drowned as punishment for having an affair. Jesus says, paraphrasing: "you’ve got to let that shit go if you want to be happy, don’t carry hate with you". Which, is fine, I guess, but a part of me knows that angry women who don’t let shit go are the ones that started the chain of revolutions that allow me to live as I do. Angry women free us. Jobless Jesus sitting down telling working women to be kind and forgive their oppressors is a blind alley. Tolerance of subjugation is not exactly an empowering message; however there may be a message of religious importance that I’m not keen enough to grasp.

This movie pushes the idea that Mary gets it, that she among the apostles is really truly in tune with Jesus. She’s special. She’s the first to decipher his beliefs after his crucifixion, she humbly stands her ground when the other apostles try to force her to their beliefs and I welcome that.

But In trying to reinterpret Mary from what’s she’s been relegated to in history, a "reformed prostitute", the movie may have fallen into the trap of promoting the idea of the gentle woman stereotype, the heart of the group, who acts as an emotional sounding board for the hero on his quest. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with that type of character, it’s just not anything new.

The idea is there: she’s a woman who rebels against the ideals of the time she was born to. But the story never really seems like it’s her story, but maybe that’s not the point of it. Maybe it was just to rework the figure of Mary from sex worker to confidante, a slightly emboldened accessory to the bigger story of Jesus’s crucifixion. If that was the goal, I say it achieved it.

Mary Magdalene releases on March 22nd 2018.

By: Tee Linden