Shrouded in painterly dimness, Lotfy Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son opens with a scene of the Nativity, wrought with bleak naturalism: a boy is born to the presence of an ethereal light, while in the distance a bonfire is filled by the shrieks of infant boys, doomed to the wrath of the Judean king Herod. The agonized mother (played by English singer-songwriter FKA twigs) and her husband (Nicolas Cage) flee on a mule with their baby in tow, miraculously escaping the incoming slaughter and settling in a small village, possibly — to quote traditional accounts — in Galilee. But this is not the most conventional of stories, neither in content nor in provenance. It is adapted from the bewildering and bewitching Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a second-century textual apocryphon purporting to recount the young days of He who would spread His faith and ministry as Jesus Christ.
This would normally constitute an easy charge of heresy, but Nathan fairly circumvents the temptations to shock and disarm. If anything, The Carpenter’s Son displays a remarkable sincerity to its source text, enacting its visions of unearthly sobriety amid a barren and hostile landscape. Lensed in coarse 35mm by Simon Beaufils, the film announces Jesus (Noah Jupe), whom we only acknowledge as the Boy, as a divine presence discovering his divinity through a mix of everyday encounters and more pointed ones. While his father finds work carving pagan idols, he appraises the common, venereal suffering all around, coming into contact with an ominous, androgynous-looking girl (Isla Johnston) who reveals herself — to no one’s surprise — as the Devil. As she strives to mislead the Boy and goad him into blasphemy, the film gradually grants us a sliver of his interiority, marginalizing the oblique solemnity hitherto grafted onto his visage and foregrounding instead a remonstrating and morally stricken form.
Yet this form somehow doesn’t stick the landing in an earnest, if also frequently inconstant parable of spiritual awakening. Though it mirrors the haphazard authorship of the Gospel, The Carpenter’s Son fails to translate the latter’s penetrating awe, settling for a wobbly and literal showdown between the accuser of light and its holy anointer. Anachronisms aside, Nathan’s casting of a (here) considerably subdued Cage still overwhelms and takes center stage, with the perpetually exasperated father prone to channeling the actor’s trademark memetic exclamations despite all emotional displays to the contrary. The film’s choice to steep its characters in symbolism (by eschewing their proper names) and identify Jesus as a nominal extension of his paternal subject admirably seeks to invert scriptural transcendence into its worldlier version; too bad a contrasting tendency to proselytize is at play, weaving the forbidding strands of gnosticism into a tapestry of heightened realism that just falls short of magical. Jesus Christ Superstar, this is not. But the makings of a traditional, heroic savior are apparent in this grim yet goofy flick, an aberrant mess that’s, somehow, mostly inoffensive.
DIRECTOR: Lofty Nathan; CAST: Nicolas Cage, FKA Twigs, Noah Jupe, Souhelia Yacoub; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: November 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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