I don’t think I’ll have seen this since I was about 16 so maybe it makes sense just how much of it felt new to me this time around, not to mention how I couldn’t have hoped to understand it that first time watching. All I really recalled, and even that only partially, was the last 20 minutes or so, the “last temptation” itself – when the movie really deviates and, I guess, causes offense to some. But while this movie even opens with a scroll disclaiming any direct association with the Gospels (and, you’ve gotta give it kudos, warning that it will be more a discussion than a storytelling session), it’s pretty amazing how faithful it is to the big story, right down to details like the guard’s ear in Gethsemene, stuff that’s cut out of other retellings so often that I’d forgotten it entirely since whatever Sunday school type affair taught it to me lol Take that last temptation as a dream sequence, which is I think a perfectly valid interpretation of it, and I really don’t see the offense at all.

For a late Eighties production, it’s gotta be said up front, the production values are beyond astounding. One of the things that struck me most about it this time around is how for some unknown reason it never once feels like by rights it should – that is, not to sound condescending or anything, but, like a bunch of Americans doing the Crucifixion story, lol. It almost wouldn’t have felt out of place if Robert De Niro had shown up in a key role here. There’s just something about the way Scorsese pulls it all together, Peter Gabriel’s score over the top, I don’t know. I don’t know if the fact that even David Bowie makes a better Pontius Pilate here than James Nesbitt in the recent BBC production is indicative of just how awful that Beeb casting was (like we need more proof – I was thinking just this afternoon how the only way they could possibly have made their production original would be to finally have a black Jesus …) or again of how surprisingly well this production falls together considering the elements.

At the center of that “bunch of Americans” is Willem Dafoe, and I think in him I may have found my personal favourite movie Jesus. I believe him, to a frightening extent. I’ve always said that I’m more a fan of the musical versions of this story, but this version quite literally overwhelmed me at times. It’s the way in which it brings logic to the table with almost insane calculation – he was a carpenter, we’ve heard, but this suggests he may have built the very crosses he and his fellow Jews were crucified on; when he preaches to a crowd, this version gives him dissenters, not unanimous adulation; when he carries the cross, it’s only part of the cross, when he’s crucified, he’s bone naked; even when it comes to those last ethereal 20 minutes or so, the logic applied takes my breath away … that God would kill Mary, that Saul/Paul would invent the Jesus we know of even if he had fallen to that last temptation. This production has the kind of issues behind it that all religious movies should have – it’s the questioning we all have for it all. It shows what, perhaps, Jesus really sacrificed up there on the cross.

I know that last sentence makes me sound way too much like the kind of religious nut I can’t stand; the weird thing of all this is that I don’t consider myself religious in the slightest – like Jesus says here, “God is not an Israelite!” and too many people claim him for themselves, and that’s my problem so I just say there’s a Higher Power and that’s that, you don’t need to run around doing anything for it, just know that it’s there and try to work in its favour etc. That said, and I think I’ve said it before and will say it again, when the Jesus stories are done well, I can really get involved with it all. When he speaks of love here, for instance, I get it. When the people run from him to kill the people he has said are wrong and he yells after them, “Not death! I said love!” I get it. It really makes me wonder if we’re reaching a similar point now when so few people are willing to love in lieu of cynicism and suspicion. Is anyone gonna stand up at the 11th hour and risk making an ass of themselves to save us? It’s a movie I know that now it’s really in me – I almost don’t even count that first viewing as a teenager as really seeing it – is going to haunt me as long as my brain’s ticking.