It’s hardly breaking news that Nicolas Cage has starred in some doozies over his long career. But I’ll fully admit, it’s because an actor of his caliber still takes a chance on doozies that I try to watch everything he shows up in, not matter the budget or nutty premise.
But even I was taken aback at the spectacular swing and miss of The Carpenter’s Son, from Egyptian-born, British-American writer/director Lotfy Nathan (Harka), which gives us an interpretation of the The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a non-biblical gospel about Jesus’s childhood that was said to be written in the mid-to-late second century and is considered by many to be pure fiction since it’s not part of the official scriptures. Stay with me, folks…
The story starts with something familiar to all, especially around this time of year: the birth of Jesus in a filthy manger and a burst of light that led people to him, his mother Mary (played here by FKA twigs), and her considerably older husband Joseph (Cage), who is apparently not the father of this baby. Years later, the family finds itself in a remote Roman-era Egyptian village, and an adolescent Jesus (Noah Jupe) is starting to discover that he has miraculous abilities, especially when it comes to healing people. His abilities begin to gather curiosity seekers around his family, including a mysterious, sinister stranger (Isla Johnston) who occasionally tempts members of the family to perform acts that would go against their faith. This eventually escalates into an all-out spiritual war, with the stranger pulling Jesus to abandon his devout father’s rules (both of his fathers’ rules, actually). Soon it becomes clear that the stranger is some kind of tempting demon and perhaps even the King of Lies himself.
Admittedly, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ covered some of this ground, albeit when Jesus was fully grown, but Nathan turns this story into a full-bore horror movie at times, with violence, unnatural conjurings, and waking nightmares taking up a whole lot of Jesus’s focus. His new playmate laughs as he/she/it muddles the boy’s belief structure to the point of breaking. But Joseph comes in, hoping to save his son and banish the demon forever.
The Carpenter’s Son is not one of these faith-based films that sneak into theaters, make a ton of money (usually), and then vanish a week or two later. But it does feel like it is pulling a bit of its curiosity about Jesus’s upbringing from the filmmaker’s Coptic Christian background, and nothing promotes good discussion on any subject more than curiosity. But this movie is just plain bonkers sometimes, with dueling accents, special effects, and some old-school God-given powers.
I’ve seen a lot of believers call the film blasphemous, but nothing about this movie is taking itself seriously enough to feel like it’s making any real effort to insult anyone’s religion or belief structure—their intelligence? That's another story. And our man Cage walks through the harsh landscape like he’s got glass in his shoes—scowling, uncomfortable, and for one of the rare times in his career, fully out of his element. And if I’m being honest, I felt a bit out of mine as well watching The Carpenter’s Son, which is, at best, an interesting idea followed by a painful execution.
The film begins playing Friday in theaters.
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