Review of The Nativity Story (2006) by Markbayer — 12 Jan 2007

Filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke's relentlessly supercharged, passionate work on Thirteen, the downbeat but compelling story of a teenager's drug- and peer-pressure-fueled downward spiral, not only prevented it from potentially becoming this generation's answer to Reefer Madness but made it the most excitingly directed film of 2003.

Unfortunately, Hardwicke then tried to repeat the jump-cut magic in 2005's Lords of Dogtown; the result was an instantly outdated disaster which at best made hundreds of moviegoers want to e-mail 1970s skateboarding wunderkind Stacy Peralta suggesting that he quit dwelling in the past and get a life already.

Clearly Hardwicke needed to make a stylistic change, and I suspect that she took on The Nativity Story partially as a professional challenge: how could she tell the simplest, best-known--and to many, many people, the greatest--story of all time, employing the restraint it demands and yet still making it compelling? Very successfully, it turns out: Hardwicke's retelling of the birth of Jesus Christ isn't flashy at all, but it's extremely enjoyable, and all her moves are right on the money: her production designer's eye for the visual and dramatic value of rocky terrain, which makes this a consistently terrific-looking film (especially given its mid-size budget); her charming and tasteful use of the Three Wise Men as light comic relief, and especially her acknowledgement of what over half the globe already knows: that Jesus' earthly parents (and fellow townspeople) had complexions that were somewhat darker than the color of a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.

And given that we all know how the story ends, it's truly surprising how much suspense and dramatic tension Hardwicke brings to its climax: when you realize the urgency with which Mary and Joseph needed to find an inn, a stable or someplace else so that Mary could not only have the baby but HAVE! THE! BABY! NOW!! you know that this is a movie that not only had to have been made by a woman, but by a mom.

All of this should've made The Nativity Story a sure thing for believer, neophyte and secularist moviegoers alike, so why did it disappoint at the box office? My guess is that New Line was too limited in its marketing approach, relying too heavily on a Karl Rove "go for your base" strategy rather than employing Howard Dean's recently triumphant "50 states" one.

Leaving aside those cheesy $1.98 mini-epics dealing with the end of this world and the beginning of the next one that conservative reviewers are always trying to convince us ended up more in the black than Star Wars did, the reality is that faith-based movie hits are born, not made.

The two unqualified smashes of this relatively new genre over the last few years did well because, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur in earlier generations, they skewed across the board: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ benefited from lots of pre-release buzz owing to its sensationalistic subject matter and controversial treatment, while Disney's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while not ignoring the Christian subtext, was first and foremost an engaging, skillfully told adaptation of a beloved children's classic.

At least I'd rather buy into that theory than believe that droves of churchgoers stayed away from Nativity because its Mary, Whale Rider's Keisha Castle-Hughes, identified a little too closely for some tastes to her role by getting pregnant at a very tender age.