What Netflix Gets Right and Wrong in Its New Movie ‘Mary’

I enjoyed the new Netflix movie Mary starring Anthony Hopkins as King Herod. I share the worry many people have about Bible movies in general, though, as I shared at the Catholic Film Club episode on the movie here at Media & Culture.

To watch the Benedictine College Catholic Film Club episode on Netflix’s Mary click here.

I will get to some reservations about the movie, but let’s start by what it gets right.

First and foremost, I love the figure of Mary this movie presents. 

The movie’s director, D.J. Caruso in heartfelt interviews like the great one with Aleteia has said that he wanted people to know Mary better so that they could love Jesus more. His plan, he said, was to “humanize [Mary] and make her accessible to more people.”

I greatly support that goal. You don’t understand Mary at all if you see her as a plaster statue that can move and talk. You know her better if you see her as a tough-as-nails Jewish mother with a calming, luminous presence. You get a sense of her from Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who was incandescent with holiness, but unstoppably stubborn.

That’s a tall order for an actress to portray, but Noa Cohen in the Netflix film does as good a job as can be expected — albeit only portraying youthful Mary. The movie ends at the flight into Egypt.

But sometimes the film’s “humanization” goes too far. At the Annunciation, for instance, instead of her “Fiat” submitting to God’s action, the movie gives Mary words that claim a sort of status to herself. That gets it exactly wrong.

Whenever a movie is made about Mary, Catholics have a series of questions. I like this movie’s answers.

A “Catholic FAQ” for the Netflix Mary might go like this:

Q: Is Mary depicted as sinless?

A: I think so. The Immaculate Conception is suggested by the special way she enters the lives of her parents, associated with the angel Gabriel. She is an energetic and good-naturedly mischievous child, but she doesn’t do anything that amounts to sin. This is despite the film’s sometimes careless attitude toward sin: Both St. Joachim and St. Joseph tell lies to avoid trouble in this movie,  but the worst things Mary does  are the kind of things over-eager job interviewees say are their greatest weaknesses. Mary gets in trouble for “working too hard” and for “giving too much.”

Q: Does Mary get presented in the Temple, as Catholics celebrate each November 21?

A: Yes! This isn’t depicted in the Gospels, but you can infer it in Luke from Mary’s ability to make a hasty trip to the Temple area and by her familiarity with “Temple people”: Zacariah, Joachim, and Anne. And fans of Catholic art will be delighted with the way Mary enters the Temple in the movie, climbing stairs, just as in famous paintings. I love the Presentation of Mary and was thrilled to see it depicted.

Q: Does Mary vow to be a lifelong virgin?

A: She does! This is vigorously portrayed, through her utter incomprehension and worry when she is told she will be married and, later, that she will be a mother.

Q: Does she suffer pain at childbirth?

A: Very much so. There are two schools of thought on this question: Pain at childbirth is, famously, given to Eve as her punishment for the Fall, so, Catholics ask, wouldn’t Mary be spared this? In fact, the miraculous character of the virgin birth is doctrine and Fathers of the Church, perhaps following Isaiah 66:7, portray the Virgin Birth as miraculously bloodless. But there is also a tradition of the sorrowing mother, perhaps following Revelation 12:2, that would suggest that she didn’t shy away from pain but entered fully into it as her Son would. This is what both Franco Zefferelli’s Jesus of Nazareth and Netflix’s Mary depict.

There are a few portrayals in the movie I like a lot less than Mary’s portrayal, though.

At Fatima, after seeing both Mary and an angel, the shepherd seer Lucia dos Santos said that both brought feelings of “intimate happiness, peace and joy,” but that the angel also brought an awe that she described ominously as “annihilation in the divine presence.” The angel Gabriel in the movie certainly brings that feeling of unease, but, alas, without the concomitant happiness, peace and joy.

But I did appreciate the movie’s Satan, who makes unexpected appearances in which he appears friendly in a deceitful way, but chilling.

Anthony Hopkins also does a great job with his larger-than-life role as Herod the Great. The ancient self-proclaimed “King of the Jews” was certainly a monster and the movie shows us this through his casual violence. Herod’s interactions with the wise men and his soldiers are all intense, dark scenes lit by torchlight and that’s a cinematically fun way show the villainy of the would-be tyrant jealous of any challenge to his phony honor and petty power.

Unfortunately, though, the character of Joseph in the film has the same proficiency with violence as Herod, which sends a confusing message. So let’s talk about him.

I loved Joseph the doting husband early in Mary — but not Joseph the action hero later in the film.

It’s great that Mary’s Joseph is young and embraces Mary’s vow of celibacy.  It’s not so great that he has to ask Mary what to name the child — in the Bible Gabriel told him the name and put him in charge of naming Jesus.

But one mistake movies make about the human person is what I call the “Violence Is Awesome” mistake. In real life, violent situations are overwhelming and traumatic. But in Marvel and other movies “good guy” characters effortlessly meet force with force, teaching the lesson that violence solves problems without significant consequences. That is a lie. When we face violence, we typically retreat into a flight or freeze response. If we join in the violence, our actions haunt us for a lifetime.

But Joseph is way too prone to the “fight” response in the movie. When men taunt Joseph because his wife is pregnant, he lashes out with his fists. Later, to protect her, he commits casual acts of increasingly grisly violence.

In the Gospel story, Joseph didn’t lash out, but protected through sacrifice — in much the way his son would one day.

Catholics will also have questions about the way the Rosary mysteries come across in the movie.

I know I did. Here’s a quick run-down:

The Annunciation: This scene is done in big dramatic fashion, and suffers because of it. A quiet moment of loving obedience becomes a thunderous moment of self assertion, and it is even harder to focus on the beauty of the event while the Gabriel in the dark hood lurks on the screen.

The Visitation: This is sweetly portrayed, as Elizabeth invites Mary to feel the unborn John the Baptist leaping for joy.

The Nativity: After the painful childbirth scenes, the movie goes on to get a number of things wrong, including the magi coming while the baby is outside instead of later, in a house, as Matthew has it.

The Presentation: This begins with Mary and Joseph entering the Temple under threat from Herod with a Mary-as-Jedi moment that reminded me of Obi-Wan Kenobi saying “these are not the drones you are looking for.” It is well done overall, though, with Simeon faithfully delivering his lines from Luke while St. Anne looks on, beaming.

The Finding in the Temple: The story ends well before this mystery, alas

I do love that the movie has dropped in the middle of the “Mary Did You Know?” debating season.

When Catholics denounce the song Mary Did You Know, I  always want to leap to its defense. The series of questions it proposes are meant to cause us to ponder prayerfully, rather than answer definitively, which I think is very much in the spirit of Mary herself, who “pondered these things in her heart.”

And some who denounce the song seem to posit a vision of Mary as a proto-Aquinas who understood theology in all its doctrinal detail. Mary wasn’t that — she was something much greater: A woman who trusted God implicitly, and had to learn what was expected of her as it happened in real time.

The Mary script does a good job of positioning Mary as someone who knew a lot about what was going on but remained in a place of acceptance seeking understanding, for instance saying at one point, “I don’t know why, but I was chosen for this.”

And, last, the final words of the movie are were beautiful.

Mary is given the last word in the story, and tells Joseph, and us: “Love will cost you dearly. It will pierce your heart. But in the end, love will save the world.”

Amen. That’s a great message for Advent.

Click here for the Benedictine College Catholic Film Club epidosde “Netflix Mary and the Problem with Bible Movies (Spoilers)”.

A version of this appeared at Aleteia.

By Tom Hoopes