The Book of Clarence — the world premiere round-up!
The film, which comes to theatres in January, made its debut at the BFI London Film Festival this week.
The Book of Clarence had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival this week, and the reviews have started trickling in.
Director Jeymes Samuel—known in the music world as The Bullitts—also gave a few interviews to promote the film, which stars LaKeith Stanfield as a resident of first-century Jerusalem who starts his own messianic movement to rival Jesus’s.
So, let’s round up some of the stories coming out of that premiere!
There are three basic parts to this post: first, some new details we’ve learned about the film; second, some key comments the director has made in recent interviews; and third, some key excerpts from some of the earliest reviews of the film.
First, the new details we have learned about the film.
Chief among these is who some of the actors are playing. We already knew who a few of them were playing, but we now know a lot more. A quick rundown:
LaKeith Stanfield is playing identical twins, i.e. the titular Clarence and the apostle Thomas.
The name ‘Thomas’ comes from the Aramaic word for ‘twin’.
Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any other film that has played on the fact that Thomas’s name means “twin”.
If Thomas has that name because he is a literal twin, then why is his brother called Clarence? Shouldn’t Clarence have a twin-themed name too?
Other biblical characters who appear in the film include:
Omar Sy as Barabbas.
Nicholas Pinnock as Jesus.
Pinnock played a Zealot named Arik in 2015’s A.D. The Bible Continues.
David Oyelowo as John the Baptist.
Oyelowo played Joseph of Arimathea in 2008’s The Passion.
Micheal Ward as Judas Iscariot.
Teyana Taylor as Mary Magdalene.
James McAvoy as Pontius Pilate.
Alfre Woodard as Jesus’ mother Mary.
Brian Bovell as, apparently, Joseph.
Presumably fictitious characters include:
Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Clarence & Thomas’s mother.
Eric Kofi Abrefa as a local gang leader named Jedediah the Terrible.
Anna Diop as Jedediah’s sister Varinia, a possible love interest for Clarence.
Varinia was the name of Jean Simmons’ character in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, so I assume that’s an intentional homage…?
RJ Cyler as Clarence’s friend Elijah.
Caleb McLaughlin as Clarence’s friend Zeke.
Babs Olusanmokun as a local slaver who is apparently Barabbas’s master.
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as a centurion.
Tom Glynn-Carney as “a cocky young man”.
Benedict Cumberbatch as a beggar.
One thought on that cast list: Most of these actors were announced ten months ago—the only actor announced last year whose character I don’t know yet is 13-year-old Chase Dillon—and it’s striking to me that the only apostles identified so far in the reviews I’ve read are Thomas and Judas. If Peter, James, or John are in this film, to say nothing of all the other disciples, they are evidently played by actors further down the cast list, which suggests they don’t have a whole lot to do in this film.
One other thing we learn from the reviews that went up this week: the film is divided into three acts, or “books”, with title cards—and critics seem to agree that the first two acts are the funniest, while the third act shifts gears and is a lot more serious. My sense is that most critics prefer the funnier bits, but at least one does not.
Second, the interviews that director Jeymes Samuel has done.
The BFI has posted a video of Samuel’s introduction at one of the film’s screenings:
Deadline has a 16-minute video interview with Samuel conducted by Baz Bamigboye, which also includes a two-minute clip of a chariot race between Clarence and Mary Magdalene; Deadline also ran an article based, in part, on this interview.
A couple quick thoughts about the clip from the film:
It’s striking to me how everyone seems to expect Bible films to begin with chariot races these days; think of 1998’s The Prince of Egypt, for example, or the 2016 version of Ben-Hur, which went much further than the earlier versions in making horses and races central to its aesthetic right from its opening frames.
Speaking of which, some of the shots in The Book of Clarence’s chariot race remind me of the GoPro camera shots in the 2016 version of Ben-Hur.
A few key quotes from Samuel’s interview(s) with Deadline, with a few notes by me:
Samuel watched a lot of Bible movies on TV when he was growing up but he was particularly drawn to movies that were “Bible adjacent, so not necessarily the ones about the Bible, but where the Bible was running alongside them, like Ben-Hur.”
Commenting on his film’s mostly-black cast, Samuel says, “150 years of images and you’ve never seen people who look like this in this era.”
Samuel seems to be saying that there have never been black actors in a Bible movie before, but that’s not exactly true; just within this film, the actors playing Jesus and John the Baptist are Bible-movie veterans, and the movies they appeared in were presented as historically “realistic” on some level, without the deliberate anachronisms of Samuel’s film. There have been quite a few other black actors in Bible movies, too; I listed some of them here.
Samuel wanted to “throw everything” into the film because it was his “first foray into the Bible era. . . . I wanted to throw in chariot races, I wanted gladiator fights, I wanted to throw a nightclub scene. The hoods are in the building having a party.”
The fact that Mary Magdalene is one of the chariot racers was inspired, in part, by “a girl called Chantelle” who was “the fastest person in the hood” when Samuel was growing up: “She was the fastest driver. She was a getaway driver.”
Samuel cast LaKeith Stanfield in the lead role because he’s a “regular guy from the hood” and not a “Hollywood hero” like Charlton Heston or Kirk Douglas.
Interestingly, Samuel says his favorite actor is Charles Laughton—who doesn’t resemble Stanfield on any level!—because “he looked like a regular guy around the corner.” As it happens, though, whenever Laughton appeared in a Bible film, it was always as a figure of royalty, not as a regular guy from that era; he played Nero in 1932’s Sign of the Cross and Herod in 1953’s Salome. (He also played the senator Gracchus in 1960’s Spartacus, which is not a Bible movie but is definitely set in the ancient Roman world.)
On the question of “biblical accuracy”, Samuel admits to “taking liberties” with some things but says, “Like, there’s no history of Mary Magdalene riding a chariot, but we know Mary Magdalene lived in the hood. We know she was looked upon with scorn by the villagers…and Jesus washed her of her sins. So while the overall story is original, there’s a lot of historical accuracy in the film.”
Um, is Samuel referring to the western tradition—not shared by the eastern churches or found anywhere in the Bible—that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute? Recent films and shows like 2013’s The Bible and 2018’s Mary Magdalene have been pushing away from that trope precisely because it isn’t historically accurate. Even The Chosen has hedged its bets.
The Hollywood Reporter also spoke to Samuel. A few quick notes about that:
Samuel started “formulating” the film in 2003 or 2004 and turned it into a script in 2017, and he apparently started working on the music then, too.
Samuel’s previous film, the all-black Western The Harder They Fall, made a point of focusing on real-life black cowboys and cowgirls who had been ignored, for the most part, by the movies… but The Book of Clarence is less about “correcting” our view of the past and more about projecting modern life onto the past.
As Samuel puts it, “I just wanted to make a Biblical movie at least resembling the environment I grew up in. . . . I never really think of the color that any of these characters were in real life. And that’s not a statement that I wanted to make with this movie. I just really want to show kids a Biblical era that kind of resembles the world we live in and the people that are around you growing up.”
In this, the movie might be similar to other recent efforts to make the Bible “relatable”, however anachronistically, like The Chosen.
Then again, based on the reviews that are already out there, it would appear this film does comment on the whitewashing of Jesus to some degree.
Asked if Monty Python’s Life of Brian was an influence, he says no, though he does say Life of Brian “isn’t just one of my favorite films of all time, it’s one of the greatest movies ever made. But that wasn’t so much as an inspiration as Ben Hur, Spartacus, Samson and Delilah, the sword and sandals type of movies.”
And finally, some pull-quotes from the reviews.
Guy Lodge at Variety:
It’ll certainly prove a hard sell to the U.S. audience that conventionally turns up for faith-based fare — people who tend to prefer their Bible stories without four-letter words, disco dance interludes and atheistic, weed-smoking heroes. Whether “The Book of Clarence” can woo a younger, hipper, more secular crowd will depend on viewers’ receptiveness to its peculiar tonal lurches: As its eponymous protagonist gradually finds faith, Samuel’s film increasingly ping-pongs between the puckish and the pious, though the rugged confidence of the filmmaking is a constant. . . .
“The Book of Clarence” is at its most lively and enjoyable when Clarence — played by Stanfield with an easy, raffish charm that lightens the film’s more contrived subversions — is bluffing his way to divine status, and the denizens of Jerusalem resemble the rogues of Damon Runyon’s New York, sackcloth robes notwithstanding. Samuel is evidently enamored of this ahistorical world he’s built, making ample time for leisurely, incidental comic explorations within it: a hookah café where patrons, high on exotic but very familiar-looking “lingonweed,” literally float on air, or an indoor nightclub where hips collectively shimmy to The Jones Girls’ “Nights Over Egypt.” . . .
Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian:
The followup [to Samuel’s previous film] is a wacky counter-gospel action adventure about a little-known rival to Jesus, an alternative, dope-dealing Chosen One called Clarence; all taking place in the Holy Land at the time of Christ’s crucifixion. It’s a sort of stoner-spaghetti eastern, with some nice gags, sprightly cameos, monolithic Bible-movie credits, chariot races, gladiator contests, Roman soldiers in silly uniforms and holy men with long straggly hair.
Samuel pays explicit tribute to Monty Python’s Life of Brian with a bit of a dialogue riff on the first syllable in the word “messiah”, but in the end The Book of Clarence has something Life of Brian didn’t have – a fear of giving offence. In the end, there is a weird solemnity and piety to the film, which appears somewhere along the way to lose the courage of its satirical and sceptical convictions.
Josh Slater-Williams at IndieWire:
Accompanied by faithful friends Elijah (RJ Cyler) and Zeke (Caleb McLaughlin), Clarence is dispatched to free all of the gladiators kept under the watch of a local slaver (Babs Olusanmokun). Instead of killing him on the spot, the slaver offers freedom for one man, as long as Clarence can best the gladiator in combat. In the first of the film’s various miracles in the face of death, Clarence does manage to defeat the hulking Barabbas the Immortal who, as played by Omar Sy, is the film’s most entertaining recurring character: he believes he cannot die, based on the number of times he’s survived sword wounds that would have killed anyone else. . . .
If all this sounds a tad convoluted, it absolutely is, and this is just a taste of the first act. The admirably ambitious, though undeniably messy film is divided into three chapters, or “books,” the first being “The 13th Apostle” and the second “The New Messiah.” The third book’s title will not be spoiled here, but the film lays out its cards regarding Clarence’s fate in its very first shot, zooming into his face in such a way that you half expect to hear a record scratch, with Stanfield as narrator saying, “Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.” While peppering comedy and satirical jabs throughout, Samuel’s film is too earnest to dare employ such a glib mission statement upfront. . . .
There’s a palpable love for such biblical or bible-adjacent films as “The Ten Commandments,” “The Robe,” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” running throughout “The Book of Clarence.” Largely filmed in and around Matera in Italy, substituting for Jerusalem, Samuel’s film — with cinematographer Rob Hardy’s assistance — manages to recall some of the framing and scale of those films, with the locations feeling genuinely populated with actual people and not CGI extras. The film’s title and chapter card design is also straight out of a 1950s religious blockbuster.
There are attempts to modernize and not just recreate, however. Samuel wrote the majority of the short songs scattered throughout the film, which lend the proceedings a musical feel, though just one funky dance sequence in Jedediah’s club ever explicitly flirts with that genre’s visual formulas. Elsewhere, moments displaying the abilities of Pinnock’s true Messiah — halting thrown stones mid-air, healing wounds through touch — play like a superhero origin story movie. . . .
Alistair Ryder at The Film Stage:
Clarence’s opening chapter, “The 13th Apostle,” is by far its weakest. Opening credits announce Samuel is responsible for the film’s music, and you can tell: nearly every sequence of this early stretch is scored to one of his compositions (many of which, the end credits highlight, feature his own vocal work), and it often feels like watching a “visual album” rather than a narrative film. The style-over-substance charges leveled at his prior effort will likely resurface here, especially when he half-heartedly introduces some surreal visuals into proceedings––a group of weed smokers beginning to levitate, or a lightbulb reappearing on top of Clarence’s head every time he thinks up a new scheme. It’s immediately noticeable that his attempts at modernizing a genre that was at its cultural peak in the 1950s largely comes down to making everything play like a music video; it never plays more incoherent than in this opening stretch. . . .
There remain shortcomings to the religious satire; after the laughs settle, an ingenious gag about how Jesus came to be mostly portrayed as white for centuries falls apart when you consider this film’s all-around lack of Arab actors. Placing Black performers at the center of this whitewashed genre doesn’t fully reckon with the extent of whitewashing that has taken place prior.
Neil Smith at Total Film:
But around the midway point, though, anarchic gusto gives way to po-faced reverence as Clarence gains both a conscience and, confusingly, preternatural powers. A Da Vinci-esque Last Supper is milked for laughs, while a mass crucifixion is played bloodily straight – a puzzling tonal blend that may well make viewers query the cohesion of the film’s intentions.
There are more reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, where the film is currently 92% “fresh”.
And, that about does it for now. I may add more reviews later.
The Book of Clarence comes to regular theatres January 12, 2024.
Past posts on The Book of Clarence:
‘Jeymes Samuel and LaKeith Stanfield are going to make a Bible movie’ (May 16, 2022)
‘The Book of Clarence gets a production company and a new co-star’ (October 22, 2022)
‘Pins and Needles (formerly The Book of Clarence) now filming in Italy’ (November 25, 2022)
‘The Book of Clarence: a lot of new actors, and a few new plot details’ (December 6, 2022)
‘The Book of Clarence gets a release date’ (March 4, 2023)
‘The Book of Clarence gets a test screening’ (June 5, 2023)
‘The Book of Clarence is now coming out in January’ (August 16, 2023)
‘Watch: The first trailer for The Book of Clarence’ (August 29, 2023)
‘October release-date news: The Book of Clarence gets a world premiere, Taylor Swift scares off Angels and demons’ (September 2, 2023)