**/****
starring Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Marion Cotillard
screenplay by Simone Lageoles, Abel Ferrara, Mario Isabella
directed by Abel Ferrara
by Bill Chambers There are really three-tiers to Abel Ferrara's output, as indicated by his choice of avatar. Arguably the most commercial, at least until New Rose Hotel, his Christopher Walken movies have also been the director's most meticulously crafted, while his Harvey Keitel movies resonate as Ferrara's most personal, with Dangerous Game probably the closest he's ever come to a roman à clef. Then there is Matthew Modine, star of The Blackout and now Mary–relatively minor films seemingly motivated by an urge to commit abstract concepts to celluloid before sobriety kicks in. Juliette Binoche toplines an eclectic cast as Marie Palesi, an actress playing Mary Magdalene in a biblical epic directed by and starring (as Christ) Tony Childress (Modine). After production has wrapped, Marie finds herself shuttled at regular intervals between the present and Magdalene's time, and she elects to embrace this Billy Pilgrim affliction by staying behind in Israel. Meanwhile, on the promotional circuit for the film back in New York (perhaps the screen's most gleamingly modernistic since the one Michael Almereyda gave us in Hamlet), Childress crosses paths with Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker), the host of a popular talk show focused on Christianity; in making an apparently Faustian bargain to publicly support the smarmy Childress, Younger, who's cheating on his pregnant wife (Heather Graham) with Marie's sister (Marion Cotillard), psychically tethers his unborn child to Marie's religious epiphanies. Because it all resolves in a lampoon of Mel Gibson's Jesus movie, Mary can't be said to have anything but honourable intentions, though as a caricature Childress doesn't land with any particular impact. As demonstrated by the nutty casting of Whitaker and Graham as marrieds, it doesn't matter how solid Ferrara's theology is if he doesn't read the trades. PROGRAMME: Visions
