Christmastime is here, meaning that Netflix queues everywhere are going to be populated with festive staples like Love Actually, Elf, Home Alone, and A Christmas Story. Those who prefer to ground their Christmas tales in history, however, might opt for flicks like The Passion of the Christ and other such narratives born from Jesus’ origin story; technically, they count as Christmas movies.
Mary — one of the Netflix‘s latest in-house features — would fall under this umbrella, even if it’s less about Jesus and more about the family that he came from. That, however, is only insofar as this movie can claim to be about anything; an infraction that’s hardly unique among streaming exclusives, but still worrying to see on a charting film.
Per FlixPatrol, Mary sits atop the worldwide Netflix film charts in first place at the time of writing, winning the viewership race against a double-pronged effort from the Grinch (The Grinch and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, occupying third and 10th place, respectively), and the Melissa McCarthy-led Spy (sixth place), which the rather strained spy comedy genre owes a heaping pile of debt to.
Mary stars Noa Cohen as the eponymous Mary, a young woman from Nazareth who is charged by the angel Gabriel to become the mother of Jesus. All the while, the reign of Herod (Anthony Hopkins), the corrupt king of Judea, is becoming more and more unjust and oppressive with every passing day, culminating in his ordering of a violent massacre when he hears about the imminent arrival of the infant King of the Jews.
One of the more fascinating realms of storytelling is the number of ways that the Bible can be cinematically interpreted and transformed, and so there’s resting merit in the prospect of a film depicting the journey of Jesus’ mother. Unfortunately, in the case of Mary, the buck stops at beautifully furnished costumes and Anthony Hopkins acting circles around the production as King Herod.
To make matters even worse, Mary‘s failure as a film isn’t even interesting. It’s one thing to accidentally kill your momentum with an unforced error that the films of tomorrow can then learn from, but Mary‘s woeful script never jumpstarts any momentum in the first place. Add that to the fact that it can’t claim to own the story it’s trying to tell, and there’s not much of anything for us viewers to grab onto.
The film meanders through its scenes and character dynamics with Wikipedia-coded dialogue, hardly ever pivoting from characters making sterile observations about themselves and each other (“I am…,” “you are…,” “we have to…,” “this will…”), and even when it does, it’s rendered so woodenly and unnaturally that it paints the entire picture with a heavy lack of self-confidence.
There’s a xerox of an argument to be made about this dialogue working as a riff on the Bible’s more assertive gospels, but there’s no active invitation from any part of the film to partake in such a metatextual reading. Even if there was, you’d be hard-pressed to justify the prioritization of that story over the countless other directions you could have taken the mother of Jesus.