A Critic's Contrarian View

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sunday school may have taught them the words of the Gospels, but for millions of children, Hollywood provided the pictures. They were pretty pictures: stained glass in motion, from the First Church of DeMille. Handsome men -- their beards neatly curled and trimmed, their robes immaculate -- trod on tiptoe through a Judaea as verdant and manicured as Forest Lawn. They may have represented Israelites of two millenniums past, but they often looked Nordic; God must have had blue eyes. And they spoke the King's English: King James', with an assist from any screenwriter willing to gussy up his fustian. In these prim tones, the heart's revolution that Jesus preached became an Oxford don's lecture, and his ghastly, redemptive death a tableau painted on velvet.

Martin Scorsese's first achievement in The Last Temptation of Christ is to strip the biblical epic of its encrusted sanctimony and show biz. He has re- created -- in Morocco, and on a pinchpenny budget of $6.5 million -- a Palestine of sere deserts and balding meadows. It takes hard men to work this holy land, men who labor under the twin burdens of poverty and occupying oppression. Their clothes are dirt-dry and sweat-drenched. Their faces, most of them, boast Semitic heritage; their voices hold the raspy, urgent cadences of Brooklyn, Appalachia and other frontier outposts of working-class America. (Only Satan and the Romans speak with British accents.) By jolting the viewer to reconsider Hollywood's calcified stereotypes of the New Testament, Scorsese wants to restore the immediacy of that time, the stern wonder of that land, the thrilling threat of meeting the Messiah on the mean streets of Jerusalem.

Scorsese is America's most gifted, most daring moviemaker. His style is impatient, intimate, conspiratorial, the camera scurrying ever closer to the heart of the matter -- X rays of souls in stress. His films are also, thematically, the same film. In Mean Streets and Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and The Color of Money, he has made his own kind of buddy movie. Two men are bound by love or hate; one must betray the other and thereby help certify his mission. In the Nikos Kazantzakis novel and Paul Schrader's script, Scorsese has found a story vibrant with melodrama and metaphor. This Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is not God born as man. He is a man who discovers -- or invents -- his own divinity. And he is both tormented and excited by the revelation. This Judas (Harvey Keitel) is a strong, loving activist. He wants to overthrow the Roman occupiers, while Jesus wants freedom for the soul. To fulfill his covenant, Judas must betray not Jesus but his own ideal of revolution. He must hand the man he most loves over to the Romans.

Any Jesus film with sex and violence is bound to roil the faithful. For Scorsese, though, these elements are bold colors on the canvas, images of the life Jesus must renounce and redeem. The sex scene (in which Barbara Hershey's Mary Magdalene entertains some customers) exposes a strong woman's degradation more than it does her flesh. And the film's carnage is emetic, not exploitative. The crowning with thorns, the scourging at the pillar, the agonized trudge up Calvary show what Jesus suffered and why. Dafoe's spiky, ferocious, nearly heroic performance is a perfect servant to the role. He finds sense in Jesus' agonies; he finds passion in the parables.

This is not a movie for all believers -- or for all moviegoers. But it is, nonetheless, a believer's movie. Scorsese believes in the power of Jesus' message. He believes in the power of cinema to rethink traditions, to make Jesus live in a skeptical age. And those willing to accompany Scorsese on his dangerous ride through the Gospels may believe he has created his masterpiece.