The Gospel According to St. Matthew

The Gospel According to St. Matthew has been extravagantly hailed as the best film ever made about Christ, possibly one of the best films ever made. Nothing in my experience of De Mille-school blockbusters discourages the first label, but I think that a few pitfalls have stopped Matthew short of the summit. A silent film, Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, might serve as a standard to measure Matthew against, since it steered its religious theme around some of those same pitfalls on its way to greatness.

First, though, let me emphasize the virtues of Pier Paolo Pasolini's work, for it is surely the best new movie to arrive in Boston this year; defects appear only when it is compared to the master-pieces of its genre.

Matthew is told with starling simplicity. Character is left as inscrutable as it is in the Bible's objective narrative: we learn men's motives only through their words, and all Matthew's dialogue is taken verbatim from the New Testament--no interpolations by studio hacks. Costumes and settings too are properly stark, refreshing to anyone smothered by blockbuster tradition.

Technically, however, Matthew is not so stark. Just as the Bible makes poetry out of repititions which we might find intolerable in a secular epic, so this film establishes, and uses powerfully, three devices that might elsewhere seem annoying mannerisms.

First, like Dreyer's Joan the film is built largely in close-ups: faces or eyes alone filling entire frames. Often such close-ups are held long on stylized expressions of transcendence.

Second, Pasolini often pans across a blurred background, following the face of a running man. The emotional impact of such images underlines what I take to be the dominant image of the film: Christ walking through Israel, tracked from behind.

Third, Pasolini has used the "zoom" lens both ostentatiously and successfully--an unprecedented combination. Somehow a "zoom" shot always seems a portent of Revelation--which is what Pasolini uses it to depict.

These near-mannerisms are gambles that Pasolini wins, elements of style he succeeds in establishing. Still, the film is rough-hewn, no work of perfectionism. Other gambles he loses.

The amateur casting works in general. We avoid the disruptive inongruities we'd get if we recognized, say, Mastroianni as Christ, or Gassman as John the Baptist. Still, one's preconceptions about these familiar characters persist, and mine labelled miscast the Angel of the Lord, Salome, the old Mary, and Judas.

Pasolini's nervous, mobile camera scores great triumphs in crowd scenes, where it permits us a fascinating sense of participation, as in documentary. But it has its liabilities too. Just after Jesus is tried we see one of the disciples on an empty street, crouching against a wall. The street is still, he is still, he is alone; it is illogical and disturbing that our image of him jerks up and down.

Such problems were simpler for Dreyer to deal with. Joan's characters were neither so numerous nor so challenged by our preconceived images. And as a "trial story," Dreyer's film was better suited to objective, formal set-ups, which are less risky than Matthew's hand-held tracking shots.

The worst problem in Matthew was one which no film of Joan's era had to deal with--the sound track. Pasolini gambled again, trying to match the implicit emotional values of his music to those of his images. He has permitted himself to range from Bach to Mozart to Prokoviev to Odetta to the Missa Luba to Leadbelly. Running head-on against our various stock responses, he inevitably creates image-sound discords. For me such discords arose between the healing of a leper and a cotton-field blues moan, between the infant Jesus and Odetta's annoyingly mannered "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

In general, however, Matthew is a masterpiece of restraint. I am grateful, however, for the one somewhat pyrotechnical sequence in it, which some reviews have objected to. This is the Sermon on the Mount, which is abridged, but still of a length that could not be managed visually without some staging extravagance. The alternation of day and night, good weather and bad, is what Pasolini has directed, brilliantly, I think.