FCC Rating: TV-14
USCCB Rating: Not rated at the time of this review
Reel Rating: 1/2 reel out of 5 reels
When I first heard that famed televangelist Joel Osteen was making a movie about the Mother of God, I thought it was from The Babylon Bee (“Fake News You Can Trust”). But the news was real. Osteen is the producer of the Netflix film Mary, and he has stated, “This is MARY like you’ve never seen her before.”
Still, as the release date approached, I became more optimistic. It film was directed by DJ Caruso, whose 2022 Shut In was the ninth best film of that year. It was also filmed in the Holy Land with a largely Israeli cast, including Sir Anthony Hopkins as King Herod. But as the release date approached, the firestorm got more intense. Conservatives wondered if it would deny the Immaculate Conception or Perpetual Virginity. Progressives had a problem with a Jewish woman portraying…a Jewish woman?
As it turns out, the film is indeed bad, though perhaps not in the way many expected.
The fantastic first scene should be in a much better film. Joachim (Ori Pfeffer), old and childless, goes into the desert to fast and pray. He meets the archangel Gabriel (Dudley O’Shaughnessy) who tells Joachim that he will have a child. He then reunites with Anne (Hilla Vidor), and they celebrate God’s intervention in their lives. Mary (Noa Cohen) is born and immediately dedicated to God as a worker in the temple, like the young Samuel in the Old Testament. Throughout her childhood, she delights her superiors with her dedication but frustrates them with her independence and sharp wit. Led by Gabriel, Joseph (Ido Tako) finds Mary washing clothes by a river and immediately falls in love with her. Assuming this is God’s will (he correctly described Gabriel’s outfit), Mary’s parents insist she wed this man she just met, breaking her vow in the process.
Of course, Mary’s nuptials are complicated by the return of Gabriel, who announces she will give birth to the Messiah. Strangely enough, not only does everyone in Nazareth discover she is pregnant, but several vying factions come to believe that this unborn child is indeed the future King of Israel. Herod, who murders his wife in his first scene, not only gives the order to massacre the innocents but to “bring the Son of Mary to me alive.” Thus begins the final act where Mary, Joseph, and a Navy Seal style team of zealots make a bloody retreat to Egypt, always under the threat of imminent attack.
Mary is a classic example of script by committee. The producers, in the marketing of the film, proudly announced that they “consulted many experts including Christians, Muslims, and Jews.” Apparently, they didn’t leave anything on the cutting room floor, because this movie is filled with weird concepts, some apparently drawn from gnostic texts. The priests wear bizarre hats, and there certainly wasn’t a female religious order devoted to temple cleaning. Also strange is how everyone–seemingly all Judea–knows Jesus is the future Messiah, answering Michael English’s age old question.
Furthermore, there’s no mention of a census, the Roman Empire is absent completely, and Herod appears on screen more than any other character. Oh, and Satan also attempts to seduce and kill Mary—but is stopped in a face-off with Gabriel.
The biggest question Catholics on social media pondered was whether anything in the film would contradict basic doctrines about Mary. Fortunately, there is nothing that goes overtly against the fundamental beliefs about the Blessed Mother (virginity, original sin, etc.). Yet there are plenty of historical errors and is very little in the way of theological insight or social commentary. One could interpret Herod’s bloodlust for infants as a pro-life, but it’s unfocused. Oddly enough, the film’s greatest moral significance came from an attempted boycott from left-wing radicals because the lead actress was Israeli. As Caruso pointed out in an interview, people are still attacking Mary for geo-political reasons that have nothing to do with her. This is yet another sorrow that the Blessed Virgin bears for the world.
Mary seems to have been created with good intentions. Cohen portrays the Madonna as a brave and loyal mother who would do anything to protect her child and the future of the world. Caruso does his best to make the narrative exciting. And there is Hopkins, who alone makes any film watchable.
Yet the story is so strange, haphazard, and poorly written that any profundity and meaning are easily lost. As Amy Welborn notes, it “is a highly selective mashup of the Gospels, the noncanonical ‘Protoevangelium of James,’ [a] survival thriller, and a Joel Osteen sermon.” There are already better movies about Mary on Netflix right now. Mary should have been a film about the real Mary, as depicted in Scripture and understood within and through the tradition of the Church. Turns out, we don’t need a film about a Mary “like you’ve never seen her before.”
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Is Joel Osteen the “Prosperity Gospel” man? I am wary of that.
Yes. You should be.
We read: “Mary is a classic example of script by committee. The producers, in the marketing of the film, proudly announced that they ‘consulted many experts including Christians, Muslims, and Jews’.”
About Islamic apologetics, well, at least the polyglot script committee left out the part where the Qur’an presents the Christian Trinity as a pagan-like triad, among the Father and the Son–and Mary! No Holy Spirit, since the Islamic reinterpretation is that Christ foretold not the coming of the Holy Spirit, but the coming of Muhammad.
The makers of the film consulted Muslims? As scholar of Islam R. Ibrahim observes, an authoritative Islam teaches that Muhammad marries Mary (and other important Biblical women…) in Paradise. Ibrahim writes:
“For example, far from being the Eternal Virgin, as 1.5 billion Catholic and Orthodox revere her to be, Islam presents Mary as being “married” to Muhammad in paradise — a claim that would seem to sever rather than build “bridges.”
In a hadith that was deemed reliable enough to be included in the corpus of the renowned Ibn Kathir (1300 – 1373), Muhammad declared that “Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran,” whom Muslims identify with Jesus’s mother.
Nor is this just some random, obscure hadith. Dr. Salem Abdul Galil — previously deputy minister of Egypt’s religious endowments for preaching — affirmed its canonicity in 2017 during a live televised Arabic-language program. Among other biblical women (Moses’s sister and Pharaoh’s wife), “our prophet Muhammad … will be married to Mary in paradise,” Galil enthusiastically proclaimed.
If few Christians today know about this Islamic claim, medieval Christians living in Muslim-occupied nations were certainly aware of it. There, spiteful Muslims regularly threw it in the face of Catholic and Orthodox Christians who venerated Mary as the “Eternal Virgin.” Thus, Eulogius of Cordoba, an indigenous Christian of Spain under Islamic rule, once wrote, “I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her.”
See R. Ibrahim article here:
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2024/09/23/is-mary-a-bridge-between-islam-and-christianity/
Mr. Olszyk,
Did you grow up a Mistie? MST3K?
Why would anyone who calls themself Catholic watch, read, or listen to anything produced or written by Protestants? It endangers the virtue of faith and is a sin against the First Commandment. The Church has taught consistently since its founding that we must safeguard our faith, never endanger it. Here again the “Spirit of Vatican II” aka Satan is leading people to Hell. As the Apostle says, NOW is the time to wake up and put on the armor of light.
I read quite a lot written by Protestants, atheists, Muslims, etc. If you restrict yourself to reading only Catholic authors you will miss out on a whole world of experience, and some interesting perspectives. As for “listen to,” my life has been immeasurably enriched by the music of JS Bach, even his most Lutheran works.
Yes, you make a good point, but on the other hand how are we to still draw the line between a “world of experience,” and only experience of the world?
The obscured point, interreligiously, might be the difference between religious experience and expression versus fidelity to the supernatural self-disclosure (!) of the Triune God. More than any “experience” or expression on our part. About which, one of the Muslim “interesting perspectives” is the replacement of the Holy Spirit with Muhammad. Here’s how that works…
…As more of a natural religion, Islam remains closed to the singular event of the real and concrete Incarnation within human history…Even Christ’s reference to the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete and the Comforter (Jn 14:15-17, 14:26, and 16:12, 13, 17), is understood by Muslim scholars as referring, instead, to the coming of the “final prophet” Muhammad. Christ is reduced to a prophet pointing to a later and final prophet for an inscrutable and distant Allah. The Greek term “Paraclete” (Holy Spirit) is substituted by Muslim commentators with their presumably correct “Periclyte,” the Greek form of Ahmad or Muhammad. (See Abdullah Yusuf Ali, “The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary;” Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1983/1938, Qur’an surah 7:157, fn. 1127 on p. 388).
How different history would be if Arianism–rejected at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.–had not then mutated into Nestorianism (Mary as less than Theotokos) and Monophysitism, two heresies that then made their way into the watering holes of Arabia and the mental horizon of mega-tribal Muhammad.
QUESTION: Is today’s globally interreligious standoff (now 1.8 Billion Muslims) traceable to grab-bag accidents in Muhammad’s religious “experience”? Just one more big thing to think about while also possibly half-reading lots of stuff in the wind.
So, you don’t read stop signs while you drive? They were probably installed by Protestants. Ditto with the directions on the medicine you buy.
St. Thomas Aquinas was willing to read even pagans like Aristotle, to say nothing of Muslim and Jewish commentaries on Aristotle. Who knew he was sinning against the First Commandment? It’s a good thing we have you to put this Doctor of the Church in his place.
OR … how about we back off a bit and test the spirits, as someone once recommended. St. Paul was willing to use Greek myth and poetry to evangelize the Greeks WITHOUT ACCEPTING IT AS UNVARNISHED TRUTH. That’s a good habit, by the way. Not everything said by every POPE should be accepted as unvarnished truth.
What rubbish, are not other Christians allowed to share their understanding of Mary?
There are many lessons you can glean from Protestants, and many of our ancestors were the same, in my case traditional Methodists.
Billy Graham has his simple casket made by prisoners, if I remember correctly. The Bishop or Orange? was friends with Schuler and ended up saving the Crystal Cathedral from going to a commercial usage.
If a traditional Protestant has a good idea on how to stop the slaughtering of the unborn innocents, I’ll gladly read it.
Even from a strict traditional Catholic perspective I think you may read Protestant works as a way to understand and respond to them. That it can aid purposes of evangelizing to know what they think or value.
For me I just never found Protestantism at all tempting so I don’t see the harm in reading their writing.
Osteen has always been a false preacher. It’s obvious that God dedicated very little ink in the bible about Mary so people like him and other faiths wouldn’t make Mary bigger than life. Scripture from start to finish is focused on God creating a people to Himself (vessels of honorable use} and also the unregenerate (vessels of dishonorable use) for His purposes and glory.
Goodness Father, I’ve enjoyed quite a lot that’s been written & produced by Protestants, C.S. Lewis for one example. And I’ve been blessed by it.
I try to avoid most biblical films though. They tend to be more about theatre than history. But even those that are flawed at least expose folks to the Bible. I was speaking with some young people a few years ago who were completely unaware of who the Three Kings were. They’d never even heard the story about Bethlehem. We are living in a time when fewer & fewer people have any scriptural literacy whatsoever.
I agree, with the caveats that obviously not everything Lewis wrote is entirely reliable and that this movie is not on par with Lewis’s writings.
Perhaps a better example would be the 1959 movie Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. (I have been told the book is even better, but I have not read it yet.) We see only glimpses of Christ in the movie — including a Nativity scene with St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin — and we never see His face, but it does a fantastic job of really BEING “A Tale of the Christ”, not of Ben-Hur. We see Christ in His effect on Ben-Hur and others, just as we see the sun in the light it shines on earthly objects like grass and trees — we cannot stare at the sun. Yet the movie is based on a book that was written by a man who, apparently, never belonged to any church whatsoever.
Thank you for sharing that. I love the 1950s Ben Hur movie and always appreciated that they only gave a small glimpse of Our Lord without revealing His face. I think that worked much better.
Have you watched the series “The Chosen”? Its about the life of Jesus and the Apostles. The director is an evangelical and the man who portrays Jesus is a devout Catholic. The actors who play the Apostles are a mixture of faiths including Jewish and Hindu.Its is a fantastic series and airs on out local Catholic channel. Season 5 will be released in the Spring. If anyone reading here has not seen it, you are missing something special. Its available on their website, appears on some streaming sites. For a time you could watch scenes of it being aired at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. Google “The Chosen” to find the web site.
For the record, I read all sorts of things but not because I have doubts about my Catholic faith. I am always looking for inspiration to bring me closer to God. As you say, I have been blessed by some of it.
This movie sounds something like one of Aku’s fairy tales from Samurai Jack. I’ll imagine it as portraying the Blessed Virgin with “great FLAMING eyebrows!”
“The devil attacked the Virgin Mary … not knowing that the Virgin Mary had laser eyebeams, GREAT combat skills, and a powerful uppercut that freed St. Theophilus of Adana from the evil bowels of the devil. And so, the Virgin Mary was VICTORIOUS!” https://youtu.be/li51rwMrLCI?t=122
You know, I would totally watch that.
“There’s no mention of a census.” But there is. Mary wants to know if Bethlehem is horribly crowded because of the census. Joseph says there must be something else going on. When he is turned away by yet another innkeeper she tells him that everywhere is full because the Messiah is going to be born in Bethlehem. I thought that was rather amusing. Mary caused the crowding herself.
The strange convent boarding school for girls in the Temple at Jerusalem does seem rather unlikely for such a misogynistic religion. And I do wish that some day a film about Mary would include the Magnificat.
But, still, it was rather nice watching a film where the chosen one is a woman. I am not a Christian though and I don’t know if a Christian would see it that way.
Although I am a recovering Catholic, ai occasionally read their take on things like this. I am a liberal, progressive and am fine with them choosing to cast a Jewish woman to play a Jewish woman. Duh! I do feel that Mary, the mother of Jesus probably played a larger role in this little story from the Bible but as usual it is diminished by men telling the story. I played Mary in the Christmas play in first grade at my Catholic school. My mom was so proud although I had done nothing to deserve it. At 62,I have come to the conclusion that Mary’s story was and is I’m sure far more interesting than what man portrays. I no longer practice many Catholic rituals, but I still carry a rosary with me every day and when asked to pray for someone, I say the rosary. That being said, the story of Mary has stayed with me even though everything else as fallen away. Maybe it’s because she was a mom like I’m a mom and we love our children no matter what.
“… as usual it is diminished by men telling the story.”
Tell me you’ve not read Scripture without telling me you’ve not read Scripture.
good point
Valerie, You should pop into a church one day and give it another shot. I left the church for many years following the death of someone I loved. Came back because of a chance remark by someone I respected. Didnt expect much when I turned up at that Mass,and discovered once there that I had been starving to come back. Like I found a puzzle piece inside myself I didnt realize I had been missing.If you still carry and occasionally say a rosary, a part of you is still there.Think about coming back.I started by visiting the church to pray at mid-day when it was likely empty.(Except for Jesus). Good luck to you.
Well, as described here, the film is a complete denial of Christian belief. Comfort for non-believers, boring for believers. Next page please.
How much were you paid to write this? Anyone’s criticism of the actress being Israeli is because Mary is Queen of Palestine. She is a Palestinian Jew. You know, that land that has been occupied for over 70 years whose people are being eradicated in a genocide. Also… she has distinct labour pains and birth pains in the film. Which goes against biblical teachings that she was without original sin (therefore no child birth pains).
If the actress portraying Mary in the film is native to Israel how does she differ from Our Lady in that?