The Nativity Story

My family went out to see this on Saturday night, in the first few (liturgical) hours of Advent. I'm certainly no movie critic, but I was very pleased with the movie. It's not your standard Christmas pagent, but I think that is the best part- it draws the sparse narrative we have from the gospels and the details we have from tradition and secular history into a cohesive picture of the event, and goes beyond the facts to really develop the characters. That is tricky business, for sure. It seems hard to put together exactly how a sinless woman would look and act and think, in the daily grind of life. It is easy to imagine her as stained glass, but not very inspiring or helpful. It's also hard to imagine what her marriage would look like in daily life, since they certainly did more than stand together holding Christ and posing for our lovely Holy Family statues. For the last 8 years or so I've been wishing that someone would make a good movie that mostly focused on the interactions of Our Lady and St. Joseph. This might be it.
Of course, the writer and the director are no more privy to the real personalities of our mother and her chaste husband than we, but they did a believable job of it. Some caveats may be in order: St. Joseph is not protrayed as the elderly man he is sometimes pictured; several details about Mary known to Catholics are only slightly implied -understandable since it was made by non-catholics- but these are not denied either. At the beginning of the movie, she seems to be caught up in a bit of a "bad attitude" but this soon gives way to a more clear expression of sorrow. I think that is one thing the movie does quite well, portraying her as the Mother of Sorrows. I have seen that some secular reviews disliked it for that reason, calling the movie "glum" and saying that it's Mary had a severe case of post-partum depression. But cross seems folly to the world, anyhow.
I can't wait to get it on DVD. I don't think I've ever said that before of any movie besides SupaSeo.

Pax Christi,
A.D.A.