Not Gladiator II
Second Thoughts on Two Films
It’s the summer of 2024 and Gladiator II was released in the cinemas about six weeks ago. Unfortunately, I do not make it to the cinemas as much as I would like and I have not been able to see the film yet. I do recall what it was like, nearly 25 years ago now, to see the first Gladiator film. It was epic, and I think what my young self enjoyed about the film were the performances of the two lead actors, Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix.
I am an Australian, and back at the turn of the millennium, it was not so common to see one of our homegrown stars in a Hollywood blockbuster. Though technically a New Zealander, Crowe made his name acting in Australia, so we claim him. Now, a quarter of a decade later, it seems you can’t have a hit without an Australian in the cast. The times have changed.
This piece is not actually about either Gladiator movie, but the setting of the Roman Empire and the first film's two leads prompted me to reflect on two of the better “biblical” movies I have seen in recent years, and both are worth watching. The first has Crowe as the title character in Noah, and the second has Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus in Mary Magdalene.
I noted in the series introduction that movies that try to be “Christian” can often fall flat. As far as I know, I don’t think either of these films was trying to be religious or were necessarily made by people with a faith-based agenda, and for me, at least, they didn’t fall flat either. Given that both movies are essentially well-known Bible stories, any spoilers come down to the details.
Details matter. A few years ago, I was in a Christology class, and the tutor used a couple of movies to demonstrate a point. Both films depicted Jesus giving the famous Sermon on the Mount. The first was an old epic with an orchestral soundtrack, but the second was Martin Scorsese’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, where Willem Dafoe portrayed Jesus as someone who was not entirely sure of himself. The tutor then asked the class to consider the details of both depictions and reflect on how they spoke to Jesus’ divinity and humanity differently. Although not nearly as controversial as Scorsese’s 1988 film, both Noah and Mary Magdalene have details that I found intriguing, but I am sure plenty would find unsettling or even objectionable.
The Noah story is not strictly the biblical account, and it drew plenty of inspiration from the Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish text not considered canonical by most Christians. Some of those aspects I had some awareness of and, at least for me, contributed some dimensions to the story that were enjoyable. This included the way that the Watchers were included in the story; these were stars in the heavens that fell to the earth and became some kind of rock monsters. In the film, Methuselah, the world’s oldest man, also happens to have supernatural god-like powers that serve as a means of getting Anthony Hopkins into the film. Some aspects of the biblical account were missing, and I found the ending a little strange. That being so, one of the key themes related to the biblical story came through strongly for me: the lack of mercy in the character of Noah. The film depicts Noah as someone not really keen on saving anyone; actually, he was quite keen to see the whole human race die out.
The Zohar is a medieval Jewish text that includes mystical commentary on Genesis and the Flood account. In the Zohar, it is observed that Noah was a righteous man, but not the most righteous.1 When given foreknowledge of coming destruction, other key biblical characters demonstrated mercy, such as Abraham bargaining with God to avoid the destruction of Sodom and Moses interceding for the Israelites when they built a golden calf. In the biblical account, Noah is silent until he utters the words cursing his grandson at the end of the story. As the cursing of Canaan doesn’t appear in the film, if they had stuck to the Bible, it would have left Crowe with no lines at all. Once you know this aspect of the Genesis story, it’s hard to ignore it. If you were told the world would be destroyed, would you at least ask if there is another way to deal with the situation?
Mary Magdalene, however, is presented as a woman of great mercy in the movie that bears her name. Her story in the film takes the liberty of filling out the details, which are mostly scant in the biblical gospels. Whilst I would have preferred to see some of the biblical details we do have present in the film, such as the fact she was one of the women of means who supported Jesus’ ministry, overall, I think the film did a good job of rescuing the character from the unfair representations of history. You may believe that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute or had a secret romance with Jesus; those ideas are problematic and unfaithful to the true Mary, as best as I can tell. The film presents her as the most faithful of Jesus’ disciples, which may have been so, even if she wasn’t the only female disciple travelling around with the twelve. In what may have been the most potent scene of the film, Mary and Simon-Peter are sent out on a mission where you may have expected them to be performing miracles, but they end up holding the dying, living out the mercy that their ancient forefather lacked.
There was another scene in the film that I have been unable to forget. In Mary Magdalene, you will find a unique portrayal of Jesus by Joaquin Phoenix. The talented actor gives a performance that will make many uncomfortable, myself included. His Jesus is dirty and rough, a particularly real-world and human Jesus. I have observed a trend in recent years to emphasise the humanity of Jesus, an emphasis I think is important.2 However, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw it take out of Jesus to raise his friend Lazarus from the dead. I knew this was the scene where Jesus wept, something an impassible God cannot do. I also knew at other times that Jesus got tired, needed to sleep, and got hungry and that he could feel it when power went out from him. In this film adaptation, the director presented the raising of Lazarus as an event that took something out of Jesus, almost as if the raising of the man back to life brought the God-man to the point of death. It took me back to that Christology class and the students’ discomfort with Dafoe’s Jesus. I’m not sure people take Jesus's humanity seriously; I’m not sure that I do. Whilst I have strong doubts that the raising of Lazarus went down as depicted in the film, it was a reminder to me that truth can often be true in another sense: the way that it cuts to the heart in a truing manner, confronting us with uncomfortable questions.
Right from the jump, remembering Jesus was a man, born of a woman and crucified by a Roman governor has been a core commitment for Christians; it seems we can’t forget the Roman Empire, not just because of Gladiator movies.
Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, ‘The Compassionate God of Traditional Jewish and Christian Exegesis’, Tyndale Bulletin 58, no. 2 (1 November 2007), https://doi.org/10.53751/001c.29236.
Kurt Willems’ 2021 book Echoing Hope: How the Humanity of Jesus Redeems Our Pain is an example of this.