Adhering loosely to Scripture, Netflix’s "Mary" is beautiful but is not Our Lady
In the Netflix movie "Mary," the title role is played by Noa Cohen. (Christopher Raphael/Netflix)
Netflix’s “Mary” is Catholic director D.J. Caruso and Protestant producer Mary Aloe’s depiction of the Mother of Our Lord in a fresh and modern way. “You may think you know my story. Trust me. You don’t,” Mary (Noa Cohen) says at the beginning. It is beautiful. It is well acted. It’s exciting. It’s just too bad it’s biblically inaccurate.
Caruso’s intention was to “create a film that presents Mary as someone we can all relate to.” Though the film starts out strong depicting Joachim’s fasting and Anne’s mourning for a child, following the protoevangelium of St. James (a second-century apocryphal infancy gospel, it falls into its own narrative for the remainder of the film.
Ecumenical by design, elements of Mary that the Church holds dogmatic fall between the cracks in favor of presenting the saint as an ordinary yet chosen teenage girl who rises to the occasion of her role, a much more Protestant perspective towards Our Lady.
Mary tells little lies to the temple sages, likens her betrothal to being “sold off” as a “prized steed” (contrary to the culture), and regards consecrated life with a secular attitude (“How can I do anything important if I’m stuck in here?” she asks).
She’s not the Mother of God Catholics know her to be, let alone a character desirable to emulate.
What has happened in this film is that scriptural dialogue has been gently reworded just enough to represent secular attitudes while still appearing as a religious film.
The Annunciation scene is short and disappointing: Gabriel leaves before she can assent, after which she only quietly says, “let it be me,” emphasizing herself instead of God’s will (Luke 1:38). And dodging the tricky subject of her perpetual virginity, Mary instead states twice in the film that she “can’t have a child,” which could be misinterpreted as if she were physically unable.
Mary’s discussions of her pregnancy with Joachim and Joseph sound like one-hour network dramas, with little to no mention of the coming Messiah.
If Christ sounds obscured in favor of focusing on Mary’s problem pregnancy in any of these scenes, He is.
Joseph (Ido Tako) is amiably goofy in his courting of Mary, and his admiration of her is not lost on screen. He gets a good amount of action defending Mary, and his devotion is unflinching. But in a way that appears cut from the film, some of the most significant parts of Joseph’s life are omitted, most notably Gabriel’s appearance in his dreams (Matthew 1:20-25, 2:19-23).
While the film’s focus is admittedly Mary, eliminating Joseph’s dreams cause his character to blindly follow Mary without knowing the purposes of his actions, draining them of merit: “I just don’t understand all of this,” he tells her after their marriage. “Why me?”
He even has to ask Mary Jesus’ name. Joseph’s knowledge and willful assent are just as important as Mary’s, and they are missing.
It gets weirder
Similar to “The Passion of Christ,” Satan appears to tempt Mary throughout, something that likely would have been mentioned in Scripture had it happened. Liberties taken with his appearances reach an apex of outlandishness when Satan briefly kidnaps Mary, and Joseph stabs him. It’s untrue, it’s fabricated action for the sake of action, and it’s bewildering enough to make you spit your coffee across the living room. I almost did.
Now, one of the most advertised aspects of “Mary” is Sir Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of King Herod the Great, and his performance is worthy of the attention he is getting. He aptly portrays a paranoid megalomaniac convicted of his own perfection.
Caruso utilizes him fully and intersperses his story with the Holy Family’s as much as possible. But Herod’s character is shown to the film’s maximum capacity, and jumping between scenes of characters who never directly interact steadily begins to feel like two movies spliced together.
Certain anomalies may be explained as misguided. Mary’s desire to “do even more good outside the temple” may be an attempt to foreshadow her role as Mother of God. Gabriel’s calling of Lucifer as “brother” may be referencing Satan’s state before the fall. Herod’s surrounding himself with babies in the palace, though it makes little sense, may show the height of his madness. However, there are so many individual peculiarities cumulatively that the film departs subtly and carefully from being a biblical rendition.
Final verdict
Ultimately, Mary is not depicted with the qualities that truly make Our Lady special — a saint, and our loving Mother.
Yes, her depiction gives away bread to beggars, but she does little beyond that to draw us to her as unique, which is precisely the Protestant vision of Our Lady: simply a girl who was by chance chosen.
But the biggest problem with this film is that the infant Jesus is not presented as profound or revered by the characters until He is taken to the temple. Caruso does not visually communicate His importance, not making Him a focus of any of the frames He is in. His presence is easily overlooked, being swaddled into obscurity in many of the scenes, dangerously communicating to secular viewers a nonchalance about our Lord and Savior.
Fortunately, the film is too violent for younger audiences, which reduces the number of impressionable audience members who could walk away with false ideas of events that didn’t happen.
Catholics need to be careful of this kind of mass-produced retellings of Biblical accounts. The story on the surface appears faithfully told, but it’s the details that betray the entire production as Netflix’s attempt to re-invent our beloved saints into modern day, secular people.
We should pray that widely distributed films like this get non-Christians curious about the faith. God can work through any vessel to do so. As a result of this movie, we don’t know how many people will start to open Bibles. It’s just too bad that doing so didn’t seem to occur to the filmmakers.