Review of Last Days in the Desert (2016) by Davey M — 01 Feb 2015

"Last Days in the Desert" is not a Bible movie, it's a midrash movie, recounting an untold episode in Jesus' 40 days in the desert as he meets a family on his way back to Jerusalem and prepares for his calling as Savior--and wrestles with what that even means. The film begins with Yeshua (Ewan McGregor) in isolation, seeking his Father, plagued by insecurities, and haunted by Satan (also Ewan McGregor--a sort of shadow extension of Yeshua's doubts and confusion and inadequacies), who challenges him to untangle the complicated knot of conflicting and competing wants and needs in the small family Yeshua encounters. It's sort of a trial run, which begs the question, "Can anyone really redeem the sins and problems of all mankind when the problems of just one family seem so completely, impossibly insolvable?" Yeshua approaches the problems--which include sickness, (possible) sin, temptation, and just plain, ordinary conflicts of interest--tentatively, not sure where to step back and where to intercede, while Satan continues with the temptations to sin, to reject his calling, to be too proud or else too timid, to think himself an all-powerful God or to think himself just a man, every answer feels like the wrong answer, but meanwhile, a slow, gradual, quiet revelation is taking place: Jesus sees himself in both the father and the son (and, of course, as both the Father and the Son), he finds love and compassion for the mother, and, ultimately, he realizes that to love God is to love others, to love God is to love life, that to love life is to accept death, that it's not just Satan who's in there wrestling inside him, but also the God he's been seeking.

I love this movie. I love what it's saying and I love the way it says it. Lubezki's desert cinematography is just gorgeous, and the minimal, string-based score by Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi is some of the finest movie music in recent years, complimenting and enhancing the images and helping establish the quiet, contemplative, meditative, mysterious mood that makes the movie such a beautiful experience. It's a movie that's like going into a church in all the best ways--it creates a context in which to meditate on the experience of being alive, the nature of God and Jesus, the ways in which we love and serve others, the process through which we find God in ourselves and in others and in the land around us--everywhere we turn, in fact, is the God who always seems to evade our grasp. It's a mystical gospel of abundance and imminence, a Jesus movie for today that also feels ancient, and one of the best religious movies in years.