The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

The scandal of The Last Temptation of Christ is that it takes the creed at its word: fully God, and also fully a man.

Martin Scorsese spent about fifteen years trying to get this made. This is a movie by a man who once studied for the priesthood, and it plays like a confession rather than a provocation.

I’m an atheist, and I walked out baffled by the outrage. The film opens with a title card saying it isn’t based on the Gospels, yet it felt closer to the Jesus I remember from them than most Bible movies get. The Gospels give you a man who weeps, who begs in Gethsemane for the cup to pass from him, who cries out on the cross that God has forsaken him. Willem Dafoe plays that man. His Jesus is frightened and unsure whether the voice in his head belongs to God or to madness, and he is still lit up by something nobody around him can see. He carries the divine around in a body that gets tired and hungry and wants things, and Dafoe never lets either half swallow the other.

The wanting is what got people.

In the long final stretch, Satan offers Jesus a way down off the cross: a wife, children, an ordinary life with all its small comforts. It’s the tenderest part of the movie, and apparently the least forgivable. I think the protesters understood exactly what it was saying. A temptation only counts if it tempts you, and Scorsese insists that a quiet life with Mary Magdalene would have tempted Jesus, which is the only way the sacrifice costs him anything.

I didn’t love it. At 164 minutes it drags, and that closing was hard for me to sit through.

Still, I believe Scorsese needed to make this, and I’m glad he did.

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