While searching for a DVD at the video store to bring home for evening wife time, I ran across Paul the Apostle, which listed itself as part of The Bible Collection. My curiosity was raised, but not enough to get it then. I'm usually skeptical of screen adaptations of Scripture (remember Lot's pirate ship attackin Noah's ark?), so I decided to find out the details. As it so happened, a regular visit to Christianity Today turned up a link to a review of the movie. It sounds like the bells of suspicion that went off in my head were well warranted:
Unfortunately, Paul the Apostle is one of the weakest entries in the series. Directed by Roger Young (who also directed Joseph and Jesus) from a script by Gareth Jones (Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace) and Gianmario Pagano (The Apocalypse), the film dilutes its biblical source material with much more fictitious material than any of the films that came before it.
For example, the film spends an incredible amount of time on a completely made-up Sadducee character named Reuben (Thomas Lockyer), who turns against Paul (Johannes Brandrup) when Paul becomes a Christian, and whose giggly wife Dinah (Barbora Bobulova) converts to Christianity....
But the life and mission of Paul himself are given very short shrift. Indeed, the film has a very odd structure overall; it stretches the early chapters of Acts and pads them with plenty of unnecessary material, while the actual travels of Paul are compressed to a few slight montages. Paul does not appear in the Scriptures until the end of Acts 7, and Part One of this two-part film ends with Paul's escape from Damascus, as described in the middle of Acts 9. By the time we are two-and-a-half-hours into this three-hour film, we have still gotten no further than the break-up of Paul and Barnabas (G.W. Bailey) in Acts 15. But when the film ends just half an hour later, Paul is arriving in Rome, as per Acts 28.
Now why, oh why, do people do this? Apparently the quite good movie "Joseph" from about a decade ago is part of this series. They got that right. And I understand that when you dramatize Scripture one will need at times to fill-in with dialogue and scenes that make the narrative cohesive. But most of the time we find people who imagine they can somehow improve on the Biblical account. I understand some reworking might make a more Hollywood appealing movie, but that's not what this is supposed to be about. If you don't like the story you've decided to adapt, then go write Ben-Hur. At least don't pretend it's Scripture.
Of course, we've seen the wonderful example of what can be done on screen with Mel Gibson's "The Passion". And a good friend of mine highly recommends "The Gospel of John", released to much less fanfare.
Maybe, just maybe, filmmakers can learn from their success.
2 comments:
As I understand it, The Gospel of John is a literal, word-for-word portrayal of the book--good for accuracy, but that's rarely going to be good movie-making. Just as far as story-telling is concerned, what works on the page may not work on the screen. Besides not being written in a ways that lend themselves to dramatic adaptation, the gospels' chief character, Jesus Christ, was a man unlike any other that has ever or will ever live--so how can an actor possibly portray His depth?
Well, I've not actually seen the Gospel of John adaptation at this point, but it has received quite positive reviews on the whole. And as I concede above, I understand narrative fill-in when it comes to making a movie of Scripture. The problem comes when substantive changes or additions are made.
And I agree, no one could accurately portray the depth of the Son of Man. I thought Jim Caviezel gave it a good shot, however.
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