‘The Book of Clarence’ Review: Messiahs Wherever You Look

The subject of a Jesus movie is technically Jesus. But every movie based on the biblical account of Jesus — and there are many such movies, stretching back to 1898 — says at least as much about the people who made it as it does about the man himself.

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” paints a heavily Catholic, heavily bloody image of a suffering hero. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” draws a romantic, Rennaisance-derived portrait of a lush, otherworldly Christ. “The Jesus Film,” produced for evangelistic purposes, takes its text entirely from the biblical account, attempting to render a literalist version of a savior. William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” functions almost like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of the story, with the main character crossing paths with Jesus only occasionally while experiencing a more broadly appealing revelation about radical forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. (And, yes, racing chariots.)

“The Book of Clarence” is something entirely different than these and dozens of other renderings. But it bears some passing resemblance to another contemporary Jesus hit: “The Chosen,” a wildly popular television show that was crowdfunded and produced by Angel Studios (of last year’s megahit “Sound of Freedom”), and was so popular on streamers that the CW bought the rights to broadcast the first three seasons in 2023. (The fourth season will premiere exclusively in theaters this February.) Its popularity owes as much to a broad appetite for faith-inflected content as to its central concept: This is Jesus and those around him as you’ve never seen them before. They’re humans, with lives and dramas — not flat figures on a stained-glass window, or storybook characters, or ethereal saints. (It helps that the Jesus of “The Chosen,” unlike many other representations, actually looks like he’s from the Middle East.)

As with that series, “The Book of Clarence” is a highly ambitious attempt at relatability, with an added reverence for the old-school “Ben-Hur”-era Hollywood biblical epics. Jeymes Samuel, who wrote and directed the film, clearly knows and loves the Bible story. He also doesn’t feel particularly beholden to a literalist rendering of the text. Here, Jesus and the apostles and their neighbors and friends are played by Black actors from around the diaspora, mostly in their own accents. The white actors play the Romans, a colonizing force of oppression.