The Nativity Story (2006)

The most familiar stories can take on new life when we see the ordinary people living through them. Catherine Hardwicke's "The Nativity Story," written by Mike Rich ("Finding Forrester"), is a remarkable effort to imagine the birth of Jesus as a flesh-and-blood drama set in the Holy Land two thousand years ago. Scene by scene, it leaves a strong impression. It opens with the slaughter of Bethlehem's infants, handled without graphic violence, on the orders of the paranoid King Herod (a dark and knowing Ciarán Hinds), then flashes back a year to the prophecy telling the elderly priest Zechariah (Stanley Townsend) that his wife, Elizabeth (Shohreh Aghdashloo), will bear a child. Meanwhile, Elizabeth's young cousin Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes, an Oscar nominee for "Whale Rider") helps her struggling family scrape by in Nazareth and is promised in marriage to Joseph (Oscar Isaac), a carpenter. Soon an angel tells Mary that she will conceive, while still a virgin, the long-awaited Messiah, whom her people hope will free them from Herod and his Roman overlords. So begins a detailed account of Mary and Joseph's grueling journey to Bethlehem, while three wise men spend months crossing the desert, following a bright point of light where three heavenly bodies converge in the night sky, providing some gentle comic relief along the way. Hardwicke and Rich ground everything in rich period detail, but what proves most moving are the subtleties of the relationships, especially the friendship and trust that grow between Mary and Joseph after he learns in a dream that she's telling the truth about her miraculous pregnancy. While the film should appeal to almost anyone as a straightforward story, it's far from a secular retelling of the beloved biblical account.