JOURNEY TO BETHLEHEM - Mark Reviews Movies

Journey to Bethlehem, Affirm Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 9, 2023

Co-writer/composer/director Adam Anders' Journey to Bethlehem is an odd interpretation of what the movie proclaims to be "the greatest story ever told." It's an alternately silly and sincere version of the nativity tale of Jesus of Nazareth, born to Mary and her husband Joseph but, in religious tradition, conceived by way of divine intervention.

Watching this musical variation, one might stop to consider the more practical and earthly possibility of this story, wherein a teenage girl becomes pregnant, is ostracized, and finds comfort and support in the man to whom she was arranged to be married. Obviously, Anders and co-screenwriter Peter Barsocchini don't take that approach to the material.

This is a faith-based movie in every possible way, sticking to the Biblical accounts, the presence of the divine, and the idea of the fulfillment of an age-old prophecy. When it does focus on the utter insecurity and doubt and fear of Mary (Fiona Palomo), though, a genuine sense of humanity emerges from this tonally disparate and, unfortunately, too-cheesy rendition of one of the founding stories of Christianity.

That it's a musical is fine in theory. After all, what religious service doesn't incorporate music in some fashion, and what Christian church could get away with abandoning the annual Christmas pageant of kids re-enacting this story with plenty of hymns and carols in between the dramatic beats? This one opens with the three wise Magi from the East, detecting the emergence of a particular star in the sky, pronouncing to them the imminent arrival of a long-prophesized king for all humanity. Their assistant begins singing "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," and the immediate sense is of one of those traditional pageants—filled with sincerity and passion.

Once it comes to the movie's original songs, though, things take a downward slide. Anders and his musical collaborators skirt tradition and arrive at modernity. The songs here are pure pop—overproduced examples of it, too—and, when it comes to the villainous King Herod (an admirably hammy, despite or because of how evil his character will inevitably become, Antonio Banderas), rock-infused versions of that contemporary music style.

When the lyrics aren't clunky enough, the melodies, made with a lot of percussion and synthetic-sounding instrumentation, feel desperate. This isn't your stale, old-fashioned Nativity tale, as the movie seems to be aurally pummeling us with, and it's a point that could have been made with much, much more subtlety than the filmmakers are willing to attempt here.

That's too bad, because some of it does work, although a lot it comes down to Palomo's understated performance—except when she's singing and, in one key number, bringing a lot of desperate energy to Mary's lost-in-the-desert ballad of uncertainty. As Joseph, Milo Manheim is capable, too. The filmmakers, though, go out of their way to undercut the character's own hesitations and doubts by giving him a literal musical battle with himself—the part wants to love Mary, regardless of her circumstances, dressed in white and the one that thinks abandoning his betrothed is the right decision donning a black cloak.

The starting of their relationship, in which they meet-cute at a local market, gets at another significant issue here: The material doesn't even trust its own genuine intentions. Much of this is played for comedy, whether that be the awkward courtship of our main couple, including Joseph's trouble of getting on the good side of Mary's trusty donkey, or the goofball nature of so many of the story's supporting players.

There's Banderas' Herod as a prime example, although the portrayal of that character is at least justified by his existence as an over-the-top antagonist. Those three wise men (played by Omid Djalili, Rizwan Manji, and Geno Segers), though, are purely comic relief—and awkwardly transparent versions of it, too. Even the angel Gabriel (Lecrae) is played for laughs in his big scene, rehearsing how he'll tell Mary that she's pregnant by supernatural means and bumping his head on a door frame. Just as with the music, the attempts at comedy here come across as desperately trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible—likely the younger members of it, for that matter (It's unintentional, to be sure, but somewhat fitting that the one time we hear the name of Herod's son, played by Joel Smallbone, it sounds more like the name of a famous literary wizard than Antipater).

Certainly, the movie's intentions can't be and probably aren't as cynical as these descriptions and critiques might suggest. Yes, Journey to Bethlehem is unnecessarily silly (The choreography of certain numbers, especially when Roman soldiers are involved, accidentally looks that way), and its musical ambitions are limited, predictable, and blatantly attempting to appeal to a wide—and certain—audience, without, well, trying to be ambitious on any real level. At its heart, though, seems to be a genuine desire to tell this story in a meaningful and, on occasion, very human way. The movie's execution repeatedly stops that attempt in its tracks.

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