‘The Book of Clarence’ Rewrites — and Radicalizes — the Biblical Epic

It’s just another day on the mean streets of Judea circa 33 A.D., where people hang out on sunbaked corners talking smack, working-class stiffs scramble to get by, and Roman centurions — the L.A.P.D. of their day — stop and frisk anyone who they feel matches the description of a suspect. (As in: anyone that does not look like a white Roman centurion.) If you’re lucky, you might get to see a chariot street race already in progress, like the one between Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) and Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor). He is a twentysomething dude trying to figure out his future, living at home with his Mom (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and selling magic, smokable herbs to pay the rent until plan B presents itself. She is… well, if you’re up on your Bible studies, Ms. Magdalene needs no introduction.

What many pious folks may not have known, however, is that Mary is great behind the reins of a moving vehicle, and the combo of her skills plus some local preadolescent urchins leaves Clarence coming in second. A win would have settled his debt to a local kingpin-type named Jebediah (Eric Kofi-Abrefa). Now, Clarence has no cash and 24 hours to pay up. He’s all out of bright ideas. Ditto his good friend Elijah (RJ Cyler). Time to spark up and prepare for certain doom.

But there’s this guy who’s been causing a big stir around the neighborhood, getting the Romans all up in arms and talking a good game about loving your neighbor and such. In fact, Clarence’s twin brother Thomas (also Stanfield) is one of his, er, what do you call them? Apostles. If he can get in good with this man in the shroud and his 12 besties, Clarence may be safe. First, he tries to get dunked and “saved” by John the Baptist (David Oyelowo). No dice — Saint John the Forerunner knows Clarence is an atheist. Then, as a test to prove he’s worthy, Clarence attempts to free a bunch of enslaved gladiators. Only the brutish Barabbas (Lupin’s Omar Sy) leaves unchained. Out of desperation, Clarence figures that if he can’t join him, he can beat him by getting into the Messiah racket himself. And that’s when the real trouble starts….

If you were lucky enough to catch Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall, you know that a) the musician-turned-filmmaker is one hell of a stylist, throwing a lot of pumped-up sound and vision on the screen with the confident swagger of a seasoned vet, and b) he’s got a knack for bouncing recognizable conventions against notions of representation. Genres are sandboxes. There are performers who have traditionally been relegated to specific, constricted cul-de-sacs within genres or denied access to them entirely. And while there’s a modest but vital history of Black Westerns, there are virtually no big-budget biblical epics with predominantly Black casts. As with Samuel’s 2021 horse-opera debut, part of the sheer joy in watching this throwback to ye olde sword-and-sandal tales is seeing a whole generation of all-star actors finally get the chance to play in this sandbox once and for all. This is how you resurrect certain types of films associated with a bygone era. Are you not entertained?!

The answer in regard to The Book of Clarence is: for the most part, yes. It’s a movie that brims with Samuel’s signature flourishes, from Judean stoners literally floating after a few puffs to choreographed disco dances to a gladiatorial fight sequence that could have been lifted out of Spartacus. (A quick shout-out to Woody Strode, who walked in Kubrick’s drama so Sy’s warrior could strut.) Having played the holy fool Darius on Atlanta, Stanfield now gets to play a sensitive Common Era hustler turned holy man; even if he wasn’t doing double duty as Clarence and his twin, you’d still feel like he was giving you twice as much as most performers. To hear Jean-Baptiste tease her son about his obvious after-hours onanism is to find yourself inadvertently cracking up. To later hear her yell, “They take our babies!” as Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy) oversees a Black man being lead away by violent agents of the state is to feel that you’re no longer in the safe space of centuries-old ancient history.

It’s also a film tends to be either one heavenly wisecrack away from outright parody or serious as hell, with little gray area between the two. There are moments that mock, sometimes tongue-in-cheek and other times with slightly bared fangs, the entire idea of false prophets and easily-led flocks à la The Life of Brian. And then there are sequences that seem to be channeling the straight-faced gravitas of Ben Hur, notably that Oscar-winner’s scenes of a faceless Prince of Peace. It seems like Samuel is directly nodding to that epic by initially having his Jesus walk around with a hood obscuring his visage, until he finally, fully reveals the Son of God (Nicholas Pinnock). At which point, you notice that this Christ doesn’t resemble the thin, white duke that Western civilization has grown accustomed to seeing in paintings and wall calendars.

That’s a big part of what The Book of Clarence is really about: correcting the record while expanding the perspective, the parameters, and the list of people who get to tell this story. Jesus almost assuredly looked a lot more like Pinnock than, say, Jeffrey Hunter, or Jim Caviezel, or Benedict Cumberbatch with long hair and a beard; the Doctor Strange actor shows up in the later chapters of Book for what amounts to an elaborate visual gag. And the casts of these movies that seek to bring the ancient past into the here-and-now present aren’t usually filled with actors like Stanfield, Taylor, Sy, Cutler, Anna Diop (playing a romantic interest), Alfre Woodard (as the Virgin Mary), Caleb McLaughlin, and Babs Olusanmokun.

If the film goes out on what feels like a somewhat rote find-your-faith note — it’s a given that Clarence’s atheism will give way to accepting a certain someone as his lord and savior — it doesn’t lessen the overall achievement. Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.

It’s just another day on the mean streets of Judea circa 33 A.D., where people hang out on sunbaked corners talking smack, working-class stiffs scramble to get by, and Roman centurions — the L.A.P.D. of their day — stop and frisk anyone who they feel matches the description of a suspect. (As in: anyone that does not look like a white Roman centurion.) If you’re lucky, you might get to see a chariot street race already in progress, like the one between Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) and Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor). He is a twentysomething dude trying to figure out his future, living at home with his Mom (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and selling magic, smokable herbs to pay the rent until plan B presents itself. She is… well, if you’re up on your Bible studies, Ms. Magdalene needs no introduction.

What many pious folks may not have known, however, is that Mary is great behind the reins of a moving vehicle, and the combo of her skills plus some local preadolescent urchins leaves Clarence coming in second. A win would have settled his debt to a local kingpin-type named Jebediah (Eric Kofi-Abrefa). Now, Clarence has no cash and 24 hours to pay up. He’s all out of bright ideas. Ditto his good friend Elijah (RJ Cyler). Time to spark up and prepare for certain doom.

But there’s this guy who’s been causing a big stir around the neighborhood, getting the Romans all up in arms and talking a good game about loving your neighbor and such. In fact, Clarence’s twin brother Thomas (also Stanfield) is one of his, er, what do you call them? Apostles. If he can get in good with this man in the shroud and his 12 besties, Clarence may be safe. First, he tries to get dunked and “saved” by John the Baptist (David Oyelowo). No dice — Saint John the Forerunner knows Clarence is an atheist. Then, as a test to prove he’s worthy, Clarence attempts to free a bunch of enslaved gladiators. Only the brutish Barabbas (Lupin’s Omar Sy) leaves unchained. Out of desperation, Clarence figures that if he can’t join him, he can beat him by getting into the Messiah racket himself. And that’s when the real trouble starts….

If you were lucky enough to catch Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall, you know that a) the musician-turned-filmmaker is one hell of a stylist, throwing a lot of pumped-up sound and vision on the screen with the confident swagger of a seasoned vet, and b) he’s got a knack for bouncing recognizable conventions against notions of representation. Genres are sandboxes. There are performers who have traditionally been relegated to specific, constricted cul-de-sacs within genres or denied access to them entirely. And while there’s a modest but vital history of Black Westerns, there are virtually no big-budget biblical epics with predominantly Black casts. As with Samuel’s 2021 horse-opera debut, part of the sheer joy in watching this throwback to ye olde sword-and-sandal tales is seeing a whole generation of all-star actors finally get the chance to play in this sandbox once and for all. This is how you resurrect certain types of films associated with a bygone era. Are you not entertained?!

The answer in regard to The Book of Clarence is: for the most part, yes. It’s a movie that brims with Samuel’s signature flourishes, from Judean stoners literally floating after a few puffs to choreographed disco dances to a gladiatorial fight sequence that could have been lifted out of Spartacus. (A quick shout-out to Woody Strode, who walked in Kubrick’s drama so Sy’s warrior could strut.) Having played the holy fool Darius on Atlanta, Stanfield now gets to play a sensitive Common Era hustler turned holy man; even if he wasn’t doing double duty as Clarence and his twin, you’d still feel like he was giving you twice as much as most performers. To hear Jean-Baptiste tease her son about his obvious after-hours onanism is to find yourself inadvertently cracking up. To later hear her yell, “They take our babies!” as Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy) oversees a Black man being lead away by violent agents of the state is to feel that you’re no longer in the safe space of centuries-old ancient history.

It’s also a film tends to be either one heavenly wisecrack away from outright parody or serious as hell, with little gray area between the two. There are moments that mock, sometimes tongue-in-cheek and other times with slightly bared fangs, the entire idea of false prophets and easily-led flocks à la The Life of Brian. And then there are sequences that seem to be channeling the straight-faced gravitas of Ben Hur, notably that Oscar-winner’s scenes of a faceless Prince of Peace. It seems like Samuel is directly nodding to that epic by initially having his Jesus walk around with a hood obscuring his visage, until he finally, fully reveals the Son of God (Nicholas Pinnock). At which point, you notice that this Christ doesn’t resemble the thin, white duke that Western civilization has grown accustomed to seeing in paintings and wall calendars.

That’s a big part of what The Book of Clarence is really about: correcting the record while expanding the perspective, the parameters, and the list of people who get to tell this story. Jesus almost assuredly looked a lot more like Pinnock than, say, Jeffrey Hunter, or Jim Caviezel, or Benedict Cumberbatch with long hair and a beard; the Doctor Strange actor shows up in the later chapters of Book for what amounts to an elaborate visual gag. And the casts of these movies that seek to bring the ancient past into the here-and-now present aren’t usually filled with actors like Stanfield, Taylor, Sy, Cutler, Anna Diop (playing a romantic interest), Alfre Woodard (as the Virgin Mary), Caleb McLaughlin, and Babs Olusanmokun.

If the film goes out on what feels like a somewhat rote find-your-faith note — it’s a given that Clarence’s atheism will give way to accepting a certain someone as his lord and savior — it doesn’t lessen the overall achievement. Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.