In 1964 Pope John XXIII invited non-Catholic artists to work alongside the Vatican to create great Christian art.  Inspired by the Pope’s outreach, an Italian filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, an atheist and Marxist who had been sentenced to jail for blasphemy only the year before, accepted the papal challenge.  Studying all four gospels with the intention of bringing one to the screen, Pasolini determined that “John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental.”  He chose Matthew, the only Gospel that chronicles Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, a choice that would thoroughly infuse his film, exalting the triune God as the supreme protector of children.

Defying the pomp and risk-aversion of Hollywood remakes with a risk-taking, stripped-down style, The Gospel According to Matthew conveys Pasolini’s desire to inflict discomfort on the comfortable adult world.  Using only Gospel language and elevating amateur actors to lead roles, the dissident director proclaimed power and glory by way of lowliness and poverty.  Art is made perfect in simplicity.  To Pasolini only the poor could achieve such spiritual heights.  So he placed them front-and-center of a Biblical epic, and his gambit paid off.  Once Christ arrives on the scene, played by 19-year-old non-actor Enrique Irazoqui, past-and-future celluloid depictions of the Savior of the World are eviscerated.  Strikingly younger than his disciples, this Son of God bristles with the contempt of a petulant teenager.  Sporting a prodigious unibrow and an ample forehead, he’s not Hollywood handsome. But Enrique Irazoqui as Jesus is enormously attractive and persuasive as a Messiah who is both irascible and holy, evoking Isaiah 53:2 “There was in him no stately bearing, nor appearance that would attract us to him.”

Beauty is not forsaken in The Gospel According to Matthew.  The opening sequence includes a montage of iconic shots of the Virgin Mary that resemble frescos from the Italian Renaissance.  Our Lady of the Grotto.  The Virgin of the Rocks.  Mother and Child.  In splendid isolation, the Mother of God ponders her fate, comforted in secret by her Holy Child.  Employing jump cuts as religious iconography, Pasolini offers an Eternal Virgin as inaccessible as his Messiah, who is wise and wondrous and anything but derivative.  Like the casting of Christ, 14-year-old Margherita Caruso as Mary is unsurpassed in the history of movie Madonnas, not because she’s a trained actress but because Pasolini venerates each frame in a fashion that invites Marian devotion.  Coming to the same conclusion as the long tradition of Italian masters before him, he confirms Mary’s place as the most important person other than God himself ever to walk the earth.  The former Marxist didn’t accept Pope John’s challenge to overturn tradition, but to fulfill it. 

Full disclosure here.  I was born in Naples and grew up surrounded by shrines to the Eternal Virgin. My Neapolitan mama never attended school past the 2^nd grade and practiced a grudging form of faith that might be called pre-Catholic.  Pasolini’s primitive landscapes and harsh judgments suit me.  His deference to the poor and uneducated, too.  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus proclaims his guardianship over the young with menace. He goes full gangster.  Surrounded by a passel of apostles, Irazoqui’s Christ delivers his lines machine-gun style, as the camera lingers over the Italian faces of Pasolini’s unknown actors. “If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for them to have a millstone tied around their neck and be drowned in the sea.” Concrete boots are nothing compared to what Jesus has prepared for transgressors of the innocent. Listening attentively to the invective of Irazoqui’s uncompromising standard bearer, the twelve disciples look like a posse of Coppola’s thugs guarding a beloved paterfamilias.  For the record, my mother hated Pasolini. She said his movies, other than The Gospel According to Matthew, were infamita.  It’s fitting that the poor and lowly of Italy cast their judgment on one of their own and found him wanting.       

Much has been made of Pasolini’s atheism and Marxism, but in press junkets he rebuked political indoctrination. “I did not want to do that, I am not interested in profanations: that is just a fashion I loathe, it is petit bourgeois. I want to consecrate things again, because that is possible, I want to re-mythologize them.”  Dedicating his film “to the dear, joyous, familiar memory of Pope John XXIII" who died prior to the release of the film, Pasolini was an unlikely keeper of tradition. 

Resisting the rules of mainstream moviemaking, Pasolini placed huge bets on his youthful cast’s ability to proclaim the Gospel message simply by their presence.  In crowd scenes children are focus, not filler.  Angels stand watch over gangs of roughhousing boys in the streets of Bethlehem.  Children shadow and pester the wise men as they arrive at the manger.  When Herod’s massacre of the innocents occurs on screen it illuminates an age-old enmity recalling Revelation 12.  “The dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.”  Tyrannical powers are always inimical to those succeeding generations poised to unseat them. On his triumphant donkey ride into Jerusalem, as the crowd presses Him from every side, the Savior of the World casually cups the brow of a blond-haired baby in subtle blessing. If you blink you’ll miss it.  Many reach for Jesus. Only an innocent babe obtains his unconditional approval. It’s a glancing no-look gesture that prioritizes the primacy of children in Pasolini’s Gospel rendering.

Despite the family-friendly feeling, approachability is not the point of the film. Staged like terrifying works of art there are shots of the Son of God that agitate and appall.  Waiting for Satan in an alien landscape Christ prays so profoundly it looks as if he’s kneeling at the bottom of the sea. Palms skyward his posture projects an unexpected vibe -- aggression -- as he anticipates the arrival of an already defeated foe.  When the Devil finally appears, he’s a thick-tongued lightweight compared to Irazoqui’s vigorous, thin-skinned Christ.  Walking on the Sea of Galilee takes the form of a horror show without special effects.  Draped in shadow, Christ advances across the water toward the open boat like an angel of death. Frightened at the approaching phantom, his disciples scramble for safety, but Pasolini affords them no quarter.  Perhaps, the atheist director was familiar with Philippians 2:12 “When you contemplate your salvation do it in fear and trembling.” 

Playing his protagonist like a stranger on the edge of town, a small-town boy with no place to rest his head, Pasolini gives us the Jesus the Sanhedrin wanted dead.  Irazoqui’s Messiah is not a high-minded philosopher with his head in the clouds.  He’s a fault-finding firebrand spitting nails in the street. Because of the daring of a director with pronounced personal flaws, we have been gifted with an unlikely screen Gospel that will never be duplicated.  Big studio Hollywood can’t bow low enough.  Despite the bottom-up nature of the Jesus revolution The Gospel According to Matthew clings to the hierarchical qualities of righteousness and judgment, refusing to sacrifice the life of Christ at the altar of accessibility. 

Image: Picryl