The Carpenter's Son

by Mike McGranaghan

When the 1999 horror movie Stigmata dared to deal with the so-called “lost gospels of Jesus,” it was met in certain quarters with accusations of blasphemy. When I found out The Carpenter’s Son was also going to deal with these gospels, I felt an undeniable twinge of excitement. It’s been a while since we’ve had a religious movie stir up major controversy. In this day and age, there’s definitely room for a film that gets us to explore faith more deeply. Writer/director Lotfy Nathan’s story isn’t bold enough to be scandalous, though, nor is it substantive enough to evoke thought.

Although the name Jesus Christ is never spoken, it’s obvious who the story is about. “The Boy” (Noah Jupe) is a sullen teenager kept hidden from the world by his father, “The Carpenter” (Nicolas Cage), due to fears that his nature as a divine child will lead to him being hunted. The Boy can perform miracles, like reviving a dead grasshopper and healing lepers. “The Mother” (pop singer FKA Twigs) often feels her husband is being overprotective with the teen. His biggest threat is actually “The Stranger” (Isla Johnston), i.e. Satan in the guise of a teenage girl. It’s bizarre that the word Satan is pronounced here as “Sat-ON,” a quirk that immediately makes one think of Bill Hader’s Stefon character on SNL.

The Bible of course omits any accounting of Christ’s adolescent years, making that formidable period a mystery. The Carpenter’s Son could have hypothesized about the events of the time and how they spurred young Jesus to accept his status as the Son of God. Instead, we get a lot of generic father/son bickering, a couple of chintzy miracle scenes, and a dopey sequence where a CGI snake is pulled out of a woman’s mouth.

Exactly none of this makes you ponder Christ’s upbringing, and it certainly offers nothing that could genuinely be called scandalous. Okay, the big finale does entail a violent fistfight between The Boy and The Stranger. Still, if Nathan wanted to be shocking, he should have embraced the spirit of Ken Russell’s The Devils. Go big or go home, man.

Underlining the weird timidity is flat-out poor filmmaking. Visually, it looks like the actors were placed in front of a bunch of generic rocks. There is no production design to put us in the time period. The story’s pace is incredibly slow, and the dialogue is so inane that it provokes disbelief. Poor FKA Twigs is saddled with delivering the following monologue, something not even Meryl Streep could make work: “If I had sinned and you concealed it, you would have fought Harod’s law. But if you’d exposed me to the sons of Israel as guilty whilst my child was from angels, you would have given up its holy blood to the doom of death!”

Twigs and Jupe give weak performances, but in fairness, the material provides them little to work with. As for Cage, he’s insanely miscast as The Carpenter. The actor turns in one of those shrill, over-the-top performances that he’s occasionally known for, especially during a sequence where he maniacally screams at The Mother, “My faith has been shattered because of you!” Hearing him repeatedly yell the phrase “From whence did he come?” in his modern American accent is similarly disconcerting.

The bottom line is that, in tackling the unknown period of Jesus’s life, The Carpenter’s Son should either inspire or offend. Instead, it simply bores.

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