D. J. Caruso's Mary opens with a man riding a horse...in slow motion. This is followed by the shot of this man and a woman looking at the camera directly. A voiceover, meanwhile, assures us that we don't really know this woman's story. We quickly realize that the man on the horse is Joseph (Ido Tako), and the woman holding a baby is Mary (Noa Cohen). These opening scenes, with their "arty aesthetics," crack you up unintentionally, making it impossible for you to take anything seriously. When Mary's father, Joachim (Ori Pfeffer), wanders in the desert asking for a child, your first reaction turns out to be, "Did he try having sex with his wife?" The movie inadvertently becomes a comedy. Its solemn, sober mood encourages us to crack jokes at the scenes because Caruso drains all the fun, and all the intrigue out of this story. He is a literal-minded director, who points the camera towards the actors, and the scenery and then lets the editor mine "poetry" from his scenes through superficial embellishments like slow motion and abrupt cutting. When Joseph notices Satan (Eamon Farren) taking away Mary, he grabs a soldier's sword, runs towards the devil (slowly), and stabs him (Satan is bad because you hear him hissing). The movie then cuts to the next scene, in which Mary gives birth to Jesus, the miracle child. How did Joseph handle the previous situation involving the sword and the soldier? Caruso doesn't say anything. He merely shows us Mary suddenly waking up from her sleep to give the whole situation a dream sequence quality or something. Who cares? Certainly not the people who made this film.
The actors are all bland and do little more than pose in their costumes, either sadly or angrily. Joseph sees Mary and immediately decides to make her his wife. It's love at first sight. Joseph tells Joachim that he saw a girl "dancing in the wind." We, however, don't view the moment so romantically. Mary just looks like an ordinary kid playing with her scarf in the wind. But the movie insists that Mary is special, and its conviction stems from the fact that she is... Mary. Almost everyone in the film knows how great her kid would be. When Mary tells Joseph that she will call the boy Jesus, we feel as if she is winking at us with the knowledge regarding all the miracles her son will perform in his lifetime. This Mary seems to have read the Bible. She also knows that Jesus will eventually be worshiped by many. Caruso tells the story plainly, unremarkably. His target audience is Christians, and he expects them to praise this film sentimentally and enthusiastically simply because it's about Mary. But even they will probably be turned off by Caruso's pallid, unimaginative style and will declare the movie "Christianity for Dummies."
Connect the events of Mary to our contemporary society, and you will find people like King Herod (Anthony Hopkins) occupying influential positions in the realm of politics. Such connections, however, further put the film in a bad light. According to Mary, you need to wait for the Chosen One to save you from great suffering. By placing your fate in the hands of a savior, you choose the path of laziness and cowardice because you consider yourself weak. You never think that you have the power to change yourself or society. Such people become zombies and continue rotting in hell instead of doing something about their lives. You don't need Jesus or any "miracle child" to bring yourself out of agony. Wake up, take the initiative, and end tyranny.
Final Score- [2/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times