Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018)
The story covers Paul, portrayed by Faulkner, going
from the most infamous persecutor of Christians to Jesus Christ's most
influential apostle.
Director:
Andrew HyattStars:
The life of the crucial evangelist Paul
has everything needed for a powerful film, but the filmmakers picked the
wrong part of his life to dramatize in Paul, Apostle of Christ, a
soupy, conjectural take on how the widely traveled proselytizer came to
produce his account of spreading Jesus' word throughout the
Mediterranean world.
Fourteen years after The Passion of the Christ, Jim
Caviezel here returns to scriptural film fare, not as Paul, but as
Luke, a younger Christian who tracks the older man to a prison in Rome
and spurs him to tell his tale. Glossy and prettified enough to almost
pass as Sunday school fare, this modestly budgeted Sony project has
clearly been tailored to faith-based American audiences, who will decide
for themselves whether to widely support this pre-Easter release.
The life story of Paul, formerly Saul,
contains enough epic drama, significant characters, exceptional incident
and theological magnitude for a multiple-hour miniseries. Instead of
dramatizing his driven and adventurous life, the film mostly shows him
in confinement in an amazingly immaculate, nicely lit and spacious
dungeon.
Saul was well-educated, a Jew as well as a
Roman citizen, a man who never met Jesus but, while the latter was
still alive, aggressively hunted and arrested his followers. Saul's
dramatic conversion to the new religion upon encountering the
just-resurrected Jesus (a world-changing event weakly enacted here in
flashback) spurred years of perilous journeying, and it's unlikely that
Christian beliefs would have taken root to nearly the extent they did,
or at least in the same way or as quickly, without his restless
evangelizing throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Paul on display here is an old man
scapegoated, along with others of his faith, for allegedly having set
fire to Nero's Rome. But while other prisoners are lathered up to become
human torches, Paul suffers quietly at the Mamertine prison under the
watchful eye of prison chief Mauritius Gallas (Olivier Martinez,
striking an amusing succession of brooding Marlon Brando poses). A
disgraced army officer, Mauritius detests his posting here and hopes to
regain Nero's good graces by providing “proof” that the Christians were
behind the blaze.
One of the primary axioms of drama is to show rather than tell, and it's here that Paul commits
its cardinal sin, with Luke coaxing Paul through his extraordinary
first-hand story. In and of themselves, the conversations between the
two men are passably interesting and capably enacted by Caviezel and
James Faulkner, the latter a very fit-looking prisoner. There's a
half-hearted attempt to create suspense by having Mauritius confiscate
the manuscript of the narrative, and yet more manufactured melodrama
when the magistrate's young daughter becomes deathly ill and brilliant
physician Luke steps in to save her after Roman doctors have thrown up
their hands.
But all this Italian-set melodrama feels
hokey, cooked up and, in the end, not what we want to be seeing. Much
more compelling would have been a gritty and gutsy presentation of key
episodes of Paul's epic journeys that changed the religious face of the
world — his frustrations and triumphs, the adversity, the breakthroughs
and Paul's undeterred compulsion to spread the word. It's hard to
believe that such a version of the story would not have had a
significantly greater effect on the target audience for this kind of
faith-based fare; such a telling, if well done, could conceivably have
carried enough dramatic and historical import to appeal even to a
portion of the lay audience.
Instead, we have a monotonous conjectural
melodrama for the faith-based crowd that does nothing to reach out to
others. It does indicate how a very important seed was planted for the
blossoming of Christianity, but is banal where it needed to be charged
with passion and a palpable religious compulsion of its own.
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