The Nativity Story Grade:
B

Cast:
Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Shohreh Aghdashloo

Director: Catherine
Hardwicke

Rating:
PG for adult themes, mild violence

Running time:
101 minutes For people who believe that every generation gets the Christmas movie it deserves, 2006 is a complicated year indeed.
   What to make of the fact that this season offers up, in the way of filmed entertainments, Deck the Halls and The Nativity Story? One is about a man on earth who uses incandescence to gain notice by the heavens, the other has the heavens saying we'll do the lighting and you'll do the noticing, thank you very much.
   Really?
   Happy-Holidays people and Merry-Christmas people each get their own movie? What's the world coming to?
   Imagine there's no culture war. It's easy if you try.
   But a cease-fire in the war doesn't mean there are no fires to put out. Never mind getting what one deserves: In the genre of movies drawing from Christian values and beliefs, the audience has a long tradition of getting less, frankly, than their In-God-We-Trust-emblazoned dollars ought to be buying. (No, Sandi Patty, those Bible cartoons you hawk on Christian television do not have mainstream-caliber animation, no matter what your infomercial script beseeches you to say, and, sorry, Kirk Cameron, your spiritual simpatico with the makers of the Left Behind movies isn't the only thing yoking your career to direct-to-DVD releases.)
   Then along comes Mary. (Actually, along came Mel, with The Passion of the Christ, but that's another story.) Pondering the humanity of the teenage mother of Christ, as The Nativity Story aims to do, isn't exactly a novel concept -- there's already a notbad modern Christmas song, "Mary, Did You Know?" exploring the idea, written in an apparent fugue of sober poeticism by the otherwise flibbertigibbet Christian comedian Mark Lowry and recorded by a succession of country artists.
   So, not only is director Catherine Hardwicke going where even the better angels of filmdom fear to tread, she's going where Wynonna Judd already trod.
   But the fact that Hardwicke, director of 2003's difficult but indispensable death-of-girlhood drama Thirteen, got there at all can be read as a major offensive in the culture-war-within-a-culture-war we'll call the insurgency : The notion that Christian-theme entertainment no longer gets an artistic free pass because the creators' hearts are in the right place, even if their technique is in the break-room and their imagination is out getting its nails done.
   The Nativity Story has other bona fides going for it besides Hardwicke: Mike Rich, the screenwriter, is a veteran of The Rookie and Finding Forrester, and the film's Mary, Keisha Castle-Hughes, received an Academy Award nomination for her preteen performance in The Whale Rider. But creative credentials without creative integrity can be as empty as faith without works.
   The Nativity Story, which had a pope-less premiere last week at the Vatican, isn't empty of creative reason for being, but nor is the project brimming with it. On the whole, the scripturally faithful will find little to object to, and film purists will find little to love.
   Of course, little isn't nothing. The film tracks Mary from her role as a playful, flirtatious field worker to that of a new mother, ever mindful of the fact that she and her husband, Joseph, will spend their parental lives walking on eggshells while their son walks on water. "Do you wonder when we'll know? That he's more than just a child?" an anxious Joseph, played with star-making sensitivity by newcomer Oscar Isaac, quizzes his bride along the bumpy road to Bethlehem.
   The movie's arc blends elements of love story as well as belief story -- based on circumstances out of their control, Mary and Joseph must fall into both -- with the sociopolitical intrigue wrought by King Herod's Donald Trump levels of paranoia and narcissism, as well as a little light comedy as the three squabbling, high-maintenance Magi embark across the desert on their own minimovie: City Slickers B.C.
   Hardwicke balances all these tones with a modicum of obvious studio meddling: It could not have been her choice, for example, to amp up the Christmas-card-come-to-life quality of the finale by synching it to the strains of "Silent Night." The director exercises an admirably light touch in staging touchstone moments of supernaturalism, which multiplies the tingle they inspire -- John the Baptist leaping in his mother Elizabeth's womb at the sound of Mary's voice is announced by nothing more than the quick jolt that surges across the face of Elizabeth's portrayer, the excellent Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog, TV's 24). And the specter of a prophesying angel can be made diffuse as quickly as it appears, spooked by a flutter of bird wings.
   That Hardwicke lags slightly in accomplishing her main directorial objective -- a documentary of Mary's maturation -- seems not entirely her fault. The expressive range of Castle-Hughes, who ought to be the emotional center of the story, is limited to curling her lip and darting her eyes, habits that serve her well in scenes of searching for answers but not so well when she is called on to accept them. (Voice-over narration can often signal a director's desperation over not having filmed as comprehensive a performance as hoped for, and here Mary's final narration seems an overly broad act of thematic ribbon-tying.)
   Using an artist's mission statement against her can be an unseemly bit of business, but here goes: Hardwicke has said she wanted to infuse The Nativity Story with an "epic intimacy," and, for the first two acts, as a chaste Mary and Joseph try to square the immutability of prophecy with the indignity of village gossip, she does. But in the end, by the time that star in the east beams on the manger scene with the creepy precision of a Google Earth directive, what we have is epic epicness unto epic-uity -- our little Mary-and-Joseph art movie suddenly realizes it's the Greatest Story Ever Told, which we suppose is a growth spurt with an immutability all its own. Boy, do they grow up fast.
   As Advent season begins and the old year ends, it's becoming clear the fall of 2006 has hurtled us toward the divorce of the words "common" and "man," the differences being that the parties were never reconcilable to begin with. From fans' embrace of the open-hearted moral heroics of Kentuckians David and Mary on The Amazing Race to the empathy for Borat's mercilessly targeted innkeepers and dinner-party hosts to the backlash against Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip's can't-live-with- 'em-can't-stayon-the-air-without- 'em patronization of religious viewers, the faith-minded audience has finally been given credit for being finicky not just about family values but also production value.
   At the risk of looking myrrh in the mouth, The Nativity Story will be a fine, if not great, yearly tradition for families seeking to modernize their yearly reading of the Gospel account of Christ's birth with -- oy -- something more visual and briskly edited. It might not be the film this underserved segment of the moviegoing population deserves, but it's a start. Prepare ye the way.

This story was published Friday, December 01, 2006