This week we are regaled with two movies that are very much Christmas movies — but very different kinds of Christmas movies.
One, The Nativity Story, has a self-explanatory title. This is, indeed, the tale of the events leading up to the birth of Jesus, more-or-less as told in the Bible. But director Catherine Hardwicke (with the help of scriptwriter Mark Rich, and especially production designer Stefano Ortolani) has tried to make the familiar narrative as realistic and plausible as possible.
That means a lot of homespun garments and rough stonework, which do contribute to the sense of authenticity. The mengelmoes of accents to be heard, strangely, adds to that effect. I’m not sure what the accent is supposed to be — who knows what a bunch of first-century-BC Judaeans would have sounded like if they had spoken to each other in English? Still, for some odd reason, it works to defamiliarise the old story and make it feel fresh.
So does the casting of actors such as Keisha Castle-Hughes (the lead in Whale Rider) as Mary and the dark-curled Omar Isaac as Joseph. They are certainly not going to have a son who will grow up to be the blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus of old Christian cliché. The cast in general is multi-national, with lots of apparently Muslim names. Irishman Ciarán Hinds makes a great King Herod — cold where Peter Ustinov’s Herod, in Jesus of Nazareth, was blustering, yet no less paranoid. The three wise men, in a slight lapse of tonal coherence, provide the comic relief.
We start with a flash-forward to what Catholics call the Massacre of the Innocents. Then we kick off properly with Zachariah, father-to-be of John the Baptist-to-be receiving a holy vision (or, rather, a holy voice-over) prophesying that he will soon have a son, despite his and his wife Elizabeth’s advanced age. We see life in the village of Nazareth — with a cohort of brutal Romans collecting taxes — and move through young Mary’s betrothal to hard-working carpenter Joseph, to the Annunciation of a divinely conceived birth, and through the birth itself up to Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus’s narrow escape from Bethlehem as Herod’s infanticidal troops descend.
Of course realism is relative, and Hardwicke and Rich have to get some miraculous events into the storyÂline if they are to be true to the biblical narrative. Hence the angel who announces that Mary is chosen of God looks rather like a Sicilian peasant, though no less personable for that, and his otherwordly nature is signalled by the flight of a bird rather than overbearing shafts of light. Not quite Peter O’Toole in The Bible: In the Beginning …, but tolerably believable.
Believability is not the issue, though — belief is. The thing about The Nativity Story is that believers will probably see it regardless, though perhaps some of them will be bothered by the dark skins of the protagonists. Those who don’t believe will probably not go to see the film, and they’ll miss out on all that lovely homespun.
In the other Christmas movie, Stormbreaker, believability is not an issue because it’s an out-and-out fantasy. Anthony Horowitz wrote the novel and screenplay of this teen-super-agent yarn, and he has lifted most of it directly from the most fantastical of the old James Bond movies. (Horowitz would appear to be in competition with the new series of young-Bond novels by Charlie Higson.) The villain has one of those lavish lairs staffed by a large number of extras in special suits; it looks like it might have been designed by Ken Adam from beyond the grave. Oh, yes, and there’s the carnivorous octopus in a tank, specially reserved for exotic executions.
If one buys into the fantasy, Stormbreaker is fun in an empty-headed sort of way; but then that’s all it’s meant to be. The fact that there is a gaping hole in the logic of the plot (how do you transmit a biological virus, not a computer virus, over a phone line?) should not distract one from the enjoyable recycling of Bond-movie motifs. Perhaps, by now, all this secret-agent flummery has reached the level of archetype, like the ancient legends of the classical era.
Alex Pettyfer plays Alex Rider, who is, conveniently, an orphan. His guardian (Ewan McGregor) is a bit of an absent uncle, but then he is a busy secret agent. When he’s rubbed out, young Alex is dragooned into the secret service to infiltrate the lair of the villain, Darrius Sayle, a billionaire philanthropist who is acting suspiciously. Mickey Rourke plays the chief baddie with the assistance of an over-the-top outfit, a cane and eyeshadow — always a sign of sinister intent, unless it’s an Almodóvar movie, in which case eyeshadow on a man is a sign of decency. Rourke’s face looks as though he has recently emerged from a bad car accident and had to have much cosmetic surgery, which is true of the real-life Rourke, except the part about the accident.
His opposite number, the M of the tale, is played by Bill Nighy, who appears to have a keen sense of the innate absurdity of it all. He purses his lips, peers through his glasses and speaks with strange staccato phrasing, delivering an hilarious parody of the upper-level British civil servant.
Luckily Alex was trained in martial arts from an early age by his forward-thinking uncle, so he does well at the fast-paced derring-do. There’s a fair amount of combat but no blood, so this will be fine for the kids. When they grow up and are ready to face the truth, they can watch a few movies by Martin Scorsese and see what violence really looks like.