Review of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) by Blake B — 14 Jul 2009

The Last Temptation of Christ is a really weird movie. The subject matter is extremely compelling, but there is a very uneven quality to this Scorsese film. I admit I have not read the book that the movie is based on, but I've heard Scorsese discuss it when he talks about his adaptation. It's kind of funny how bent out of shape people apparently got over the subject matter, despite plenty of evidence and admissions that this was NOT adapted from the Bible, but from a self-proclaimed fictional interpretation of Jesus' rise and fall. I've heard a lot about Last Temptation, but I only recently was able to get around to seeing it. It has to be regarded as one of Scorsese's lesser works.

While I found the subject matter extremely interesting (basically interpreting Christ's life as a HUMAN, as it was and how he MIGHT have wanted it to be if he were free to be less than God intended), I was surprised to see two wildly successful actors perform so unevenly. Willem Dafoe and Harvey Keitel are great actors, but I really didn't care enough for their performances in Last Temptation. I similarly didn't care for a lot of the supporting acting as well. Sometimes it came off as what you might see on one of those religious TV stations when they do made-for-Christian-TV movies that are grainy and poorly-acted. Perhaps people who loved Dafoe's performance haven't seen enough of the bad Jesus actors to understand that he could have done so much better. Don't get me wrong, he's a very capable Jesus, I just expected something a little more daring, especially considering some of the elements that Scorsese used to set the movie apart from other Christ adaptations (sex, nudity, unhidden blood, an honest-to-man Christ that is capable of anger and regret and despair, Christ married with children, etc.).

And here again is where things get uneven. A lot of the dialogue is clumsy, weaving from fictional lines into Bible quotes back to fiction. Some of the parables are fictional and Biblical. Scorsese himself has said time and again his goal was not to make a Bible-story, but an adaptation of the fictional book. So I think his mission would have been more successful if he hadn't gone back and forth so much. I liked how some of the stories played out fictionally from an actual Bible story (the scene where the man that Jesus raises from the dead is killed by conspirators trying to snuff out Christ's accomplishments), which is very daring and not what most people would expect. But often these stories didn't deviate, and I was often left wondering if some aspect of the story was going to go somewhere like the last one, only nothing would happen.

I like to watch a movie before I check how long it is, because this says a lot about the movie. If it's very short, but feels like an eternity, it's probably a terrible movie. If it's very long, and feels like it was very short, it's probably very efficient and gripping enough to make the time pass quickly. If it's very long, and feels very, very long, there's something wrong. The Last Temptation could have done with a lot of editing--basically focusing more on the fictional aspects of Christ's human life rather than leaning on the Bible-Christ all too much. I was so looking forward to seeing how Christ would imagine his life if he had been able to marry and live the way he wanted instead of for God. But by the time that aspect of the story came around, I was fatigued from the rest of the movie, and I couldn't entirely enjoy that part because I was hoping for the movie to end soon. This is a movie that dragged on longer than it needed to in order to get its point across.

While I loved the idea of seeing Christ as a human being and not the supernatural being that the Bible makes him out to be, The Last Temptation of Christ could have been shorter and more efficient. The uneven acting performances and dialogue make the movie feel longer than it really is. This is a highly ambitious movie, and it's the sort of movie that Scorsese would justly be referred to as the only man who would be able to get away with it, but it's sadly one of his lesser works and could have used more focus. I can't downgrade it, because it can be so interesting if the little things don't distract the viewer, and it's always refreshing to see Christ portrayed in a non-Biblical light.