Review: The Book of Clarence (2023)
The film asks: Is faith a matter of belief, or of knowledge?
The Book of Clarence (2023)
Written and directed by Jeymes Samuel
We open on an illegal race on city streets, where a Black woman named Mary is racing Clarence and Elijah, two impoverished Black dope dealers and con artists. The men lose the race after they venture into territory controlled by a fearsome gang who disable and capture their vehicle. Now they must repay a local crime kingpin (Eric Kofi-Abrefa), who lent them the vehicle and who insists on repayment in 30 days, or death.
This could be the premise of any number of urban comedies. Except this one is set in what is said to be the Holy Land — specifically “Lower Jerusalem,” although the filmmakers do little to disguise the Italian towns and landscape where the movie was filmed — the time is 29 AD, and the vehicles are chariots.
Leaving the kingpin’s villa, the two men encounter yet another gang, calling themselves the Apostles, who main task seems to be running security for, you guessed it — the Messiah. Except there’s not just one messiah running around Lower Jerusalem; there are several. Take your pick.
“The Book of Clarence” is, at first glance, a comic take on sword-and-sandal movies, and on what it meant to claim you were the Messiah — or a messiah — in 29 AD. In this version of a Biblical epic, everyone is Black — except for the Romans, who are all white. Oh, there is one more white guy, in a white robe, with flowing gold-brown hair (Benedict Cumberbatch). He’s not the only one getting crucified by the end.
Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) has a twin brother, Thomas (also played by Stanfield), who treats Clarence like shit, because Thomas (older by 10 minutes) is a member of the Apostles — yes, that Thomas — and is very importantly writing his own account of the Messiah’s works,1 while Clarence is nothing but a thief and a con man. Driven to impress a woman whom he has a crush on, Clarence tries at first to become “the 13th Apostle,” but when he’s rejected, he decides to try this whole messiah business for himself.
So yes, a comedy, one that will be challenging for some viewers. Christians well-educated in the Bible will start saying to themselves (or worse, to their moviegoing partner) “Wait, that’s not right” and correcting the film where its narrative disagrees with the accounts in Scripture. Just fucking don’t! You’re at a comedy, try to enjoy yourself.
After he becomes a self-appointed messiah and starts raking in shekels -- with the help of his sidekick Elijah, who dutifully is healed or raised from the dead on cue -- Clarence is changed. Though he gains enough to repay his debt, instead of giving the money to the crimelord whom he owes, he gives the money to the poor.
There is, during the middle of the film, a period that feels like box-checking. An appearance by John the Baptist (David Oyelowo), check. Judas Iscariot (Michael Ward), check. Barrabas? Like the Bible one, this Barabbas (Omar Sy) is a revolutionary who wants to go to war against the Romans; unlike the Bible character, he becomes Clarence’s bodyguard. No one can defeat him in battle, so the filmmakers, who feel free to mix and match the Bible with other myths and legends, endow Barrabas with Achilles’ heel.
I’m all for it. Even the canonical gospels disagree with each other on details (as do some accounts in the Old Testament of events recounted by different writers). And Jesus himself warned his followers not to be fooled by other people who were claiming to be the Messiah. So who’s to say there wasn’t a thief among them, a con man on the order of today’s swindlers and narcissists?
Like any messiah, Clarence finds himself crucified, along with Jesus and “all the messiahs” that the Romans can round up, en masse. Fortunately, there’s no big reveal that Clarence turns out to be the thief whom the co-crucified Christ forgives from his cross; Jesus is there, but hardly heard from, and that’s a great choice by writer-director Jeymes Samuel. There is a final joke, about some asshole choosing the Cumberbatch messiah as the central figure to paint, thus handing down the mistaken idea that Jesus looked like this:
But the film has turned serious before this, about the time the Romans are rounding up all the messiahs. There’s a scene where Pontius Pilate (James McEvoy) condemns Jesus, but it leaves out the good parts — the crowd yelling “Crucify him!” and releasing Barabbas — because Barabbas is already on the lam. During the overlong period that Clarence sits in prison, both his would-be girlfriend Varinia (Anna Diop) and his brother come to ties up emotional loose ends — but during this sequence, Clarence and Jesus are also shown out of prison and going about their messiah business. There are, confusingly, two Last Supper scenes, one with Clarence and the other with Jesus and the apostles. The latter features an interesting version of how Judas comes to dip his bread in Jesus’s gravy bowl, along with a few of the movie’s last jokes. The scenes where Clarence carries his cross, and the Crucifixion itself, are entirely serious and, for me, surprisingly moving.
They’re moving because of the fantastic performances by LaKeith Standfield as Clarence and RJ Cyler as Elijah. I haven’t said much about Cyler’s character because he’s merely a sidekick, and yet Elijah’s relationship to Clarence — he is the brother that Thomas apparently could never be — is both apparent and believable. When he stumbles across the incident where the crowd is set to stone Mary Magdalen — whom he has loved from afar — he steps in to shield her from the stones, ready to die with her. (Spoiler: as in the Bible, Jesus steps in to save her.) When he shows up at the foot of the cross sobbing, I was swept with emotion.
Stanfield, for his part, is an extremely good actor. He brings a sad-eyed gravitas to comic roles — recall him starring in 2018’s “Sorry to Bother You” — and a range of vocal characterizations and physicality. The only thing stopping him from becoming one of the great leading men of this decade is the reluctance of producers and directors to cast him; in other words, racism. (He would be amazing as Batman or Bond, or better yet, starring in almost any well-budgeted feature.)
I’m trying to imagine the reaction to all this of my father-in-law, who is a semi-retired Episcopal priest. He loved Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” also a Biblical comedy (that came out over 50 years ago), with a similar premise: an ordinary fellow gets mixed up in the messiah business. He was the first to point out to me, decades ago when it was still a scandalous idea, that Jesus was probably dark-skinned, certainly not white. But I’m not certain he’ll be interested in such a black film. Maybe when I tell him that Benedict Cumberbatch is in it.
This is a good joke, because while there is, in Biblical scholarship, a document called the Gospel of Thomas, it is non-canonical.