A fresh perspective on the Nativity
By Steve Beard

Theporcelain figurines surrounding the crèche scene are usually spaced around the baby Jesus so that all the pieces can fit on the coffee table in the living room. Widely credited as an invention of St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), believers have been setting out little nativity scenes at Christmas ever since.

With the doe-eyed wonder of Precious Moments statuettes, Mary and Joseph look on as their haloed infant gazes up from his itchy bed of straw. There is usually an ox, a donkey, and other animals such as sheep so that the shepherds don’t look out of place and camels so that the Magi don’t look like they rode the bus to Bethlehem with their trunks of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. By the time you add in an angel or two, as well as the Star, you’ve got a full house.

Catherine Hardwicke knows a thing or two about nativity scenes. She grew up in a Presbyterian home on the border of Mexico in McAllen, Texas. As a child, her Sunday school made nacimientos—ornate and elaborate manger scenes that are popular in Mexico. “The traditional way they do it in Mexico is to take brown paper sacks and color on them with chalk and build a hillside and put little figures on it,” she told Good News. “At the top, you have the cave with Mary and Joseph and all the animals and other biblical scenes. You see the shepherd looking over for his lost sheep. You almost incorporate all the Bible stories into the nacimiento. They are kind of amazing, beautiful sculptures.”

As the director of The Nativity Story, Hardwicke took her childhood experience with nacimientos and leveraged it into a big screen epic for New Line Cinema to be released on December 1.


Flesh and blood
“Christmas was a beautiful holiday and I always loved it, but I don’t think that I ever thought deeply about the real people that went through it. I never thought that Mary was a real person,” Hardwicke said with grin. “I never thought of the humanity of the holiday.”

That is one of the key elements that will distinguish Nativity from every Christmas pageant you’ve seen in church with shepherds wearing bathrobes, the Three Wisemen wearing silk kimonos, and the Virgin Mary lugging around a Cabbage Patch doll.

“You normally think of Mary as this beautiful figurine or this special, amazing person,” Hardwicke says. “But I really try to get into the flesh and blood. What was she like? How would I feel if it happened to me? Would I have enough faith?”

Screenwriter Mick Rich (Finding Forester, The Rookie, Radio) was well aware of the potential pitfalls in writing a fully-orbed Christmas story with such limited source material. “The challenge is being willing to take that step of writing a majority of scenes that are completely speculative,” he told Good News. “I wanted to look inside these two individuals characters—Joseph and Mary—and to explore the doubts and fear and faith that drove them on this journey that extends far beyond the end of our movie. For me, it was the excitement of exploring some of these characters.”

When we spoke last May on the Nativity set in Matera, Italy, I asked Rich if he felt undue pressure to get this story right—especially under the gaze of heaven and the great cloud of witnesses who actually lived through what he was writing about. “Was I concerned about it? I was aware of it. I felt a real responsibility,” he responded. “You remember the old saying, ‘What would Jesus do?’ For me it was more like, ‘What would Luke write?’ It had to be consistent with the tone and tenor of both what Matthew and Luke had written.”

Rich did his homework. He logged 11 months of intense research with scholars before sitting down and writing the script in a month. As an evangelical Christian, he felt so strongly about the story that he embraced a more hands-on role with the film as executive producer.

Faithful to the spirit of orthodox Christianity, his script is an intense and beautiful love story and worthy of the subject matter. It is rich with character development that will engage the imaginations of viewers, and inspire faith.

“It wasn’t really biblical [to me] when I read it,” confesses Keisha Castle-Hughes, a 2004 Oscar nominee at the young age of 12 for her role in Whale Rider, who plays Mary in Nativity. “It was very human. But somewhere in the back of my mind, it was, like, ‘Wow, this is biblical.’ But you realize, oh, wow, she was just a girl. That was what appealed to me—that it was so human.”

Nativity delves into the intrinsic drama related to Mary and Joseph’s relationship, as well as the reactions of parents and relatives. It’s all there: the angel Gabriel's visit, Joseph’s dream, and the young couple’s arduous journey to Bethlehem. Elizabeth and Zechariah spring to life on screen. The Three Wisemen—Balthasar, Gaspar, and Melchior—have fascinating personalities and perspectives. Herod is displayed in all of his paranoid dementia.


Hollywood biblical epic
It has been fifty years since a major Hollywood studio has bankrolled a biblical epic. When I asked co-producer Wyck Godfrey why an extensive film of the birth of Christ had not previously been done, he responded, “When you grow up in the church you can objectify the story. You don’t ever tell it from Mary’s story or Joseph’s story. You sit back in the audience and it seems like a story without much conflict because everything turns out pretty wonderfully.”

Nativity, on the other hand, comes at it with drama in both fists. For example, what would it really be like to be told by an angel that you were carrying the son of God? Furthermore, what would it be like to be a man and have your betrothed come to you and say, “I’m pregnant, but I have not been with anyone else?” In reality, it is difficult to downplay the seemingly raw scandal involved with the birth of Christ; but somehow we have managed. Perhaps we have anesthetized the story’s sting since it took place long ago and far away.

At Christmas, we rightfully celebrate Christ’s birth. What we don’t dwell on is the Christmas conflict. No matter how elaborate our nativity scenes may be, they seem to have the antiseptic cleanliness of the crosses that we wear as necklaces. Just like you don’t see blood stains on sterling silver jewelry, you don’t really get a sense of how tense, unsanitized, and vile the manger scene would have been.

I got a little whiff of that while visiting the set. No matter what preconception you have of sheep, let’s be honest: sheep stink. Unless you were raised on a farm, there are activities and aromas that one must get used to when dealing with lots of animals. Although it is sage advice to avoid making films with children or animals, Nativity had no choice.

“I never knew how difficult it would be to get a cow to lie down or a sheep to be quiet or behave,” Hardwicke said. “Sheep don’t really care if they’re in a movie.” She was giggling about it when I spoke to her in post-production, but she was not laughing while we were in Italy. During my day on the set, Joseph (Oscar Isaac) was leading a donkey carrying Mary over a hill as shepherds were attempting to guide a herd of sheep across their path. It was unmitigated chaos that demanded numerous retakes.

Despite the fact that there were real-life shepherds and a host of other highly-skilled animal trainers, reproducing the manger scene was a royal challenge with temperamental beasts. “You read the script and it looks all easy and sweet and nice and then every scene has an animal or a baby,” confessed Hardwicke. “Yeah, it’s a little more difficult than it seems.”


Slithering in the manger
As we were checking out the cave-like location where they would be filming the manger scene, a five-foot black snake slithered through as though he owned the place. As shocking as it seemed, it should not have been terribly alarming. Matera is an ancient Italian city known for its neighborhoods that have been carved out of the rock. It would be an ideal place for slinky, slithering, and creepy animals of all varieties—perhaps a little like Bethlehem.

“Whatever you do,” shouted Mike Rich, “don’t tell Keisha. She’s terrified of snakes.” Judging from the eeks and gasps from some of my fellow journalists in our small group, Keisha would have not been the only one terrified of snakes. Looking back on it, however, I found the snake’s appearance to be strangely fitting to the incarnational reality of Christmas. After all, at the precipice of hope, evil lingers and looks for a way to corrupt.

At Christmas time, we really don’t think about Herod ordering the slaughter of all male children who were two years old and under after hearing the Magi ask if he knew where the new king of the Jews would be born. When we read the biblical text, however, Christmas ends up being as gruesome as Good Friday. While the angels were announcing good news to the shepherds, mothers and fathers were screaming out in agony as their sons were dying under the order of a paranoid politician.

At Christmas time, we really don’t think about Joseph’s dilemma in discovering that his betrothed was pregnant. Would he divorce her? Would she be stoned, as was the common practice? According to the code of the era, he would have been within his rights since they were betrothed. What’s a “righteous” man to do?

At Christmas time, we really don’t think about a young, unmarried teenage girl who has been told that she will carry the son of God in her womb. How on earth would she explain that to her family? Why was she chosen? How could such a young woman respond with such maturity as to simply say, “Let it be done to me according to Thy will.”

“We wanted to make a movie about a girl whose faith is rewarded. That’s what the movie is about,” said Wyck Godfrey, the co-producer. “She could have chosen to have never come back from Elizabeth’s. She could have chosen not to go to Bethlehem with Joseph. All of these things she is doing in hope that she is following the right plan, following God’s plan. She is hoping that it will all come together. When you see it in church, you just go, ‘Oh, Mary is perfect. She was always a saint. She’s flawless.’ But you have to ask what it would have been like to be in her place at her age.”

For Catherine Hardwicke, Nativity is her third teenage coming-of-age film. In Thirteen, she explored a teenage girl’s destructive delinquency. In Lords of Dogtown, she profiled the skateboarding creativity of a gang of teenage boys. Nativity offers yet a different perspective—faithful obedience and devotion.

Directing Nativity was a whirlwind of challenge and reward. In the midst of it all, there were the moments where she saw an age-old biblical story with fresh eyes. After she had finished filming, I asked her what scene helped her see the Christmas story differently than she had through her childhood nacimiento. “When the magi approached the manger and saw that their expectations had been completely inverted,” she responded. “They were looking for a king and they found a humble situation, a baby born with animals. It’s an overwhelming notion that God chose this manner of sending his son. It really struck me for the first time on a deep level how amazing that was, why the story is so enduring, why it moves people so much, and why it is so inspiring.

“God did not go to a king,” she concluded. “He did not go to a palace. He went to humanity. I guess that sounds silly, but it was amazing to me.”

Steve Beard is the editor of Good News.



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