Book of Clarence is a weird film that has a lot going for it, even as it cements its place as the year’s first box office bomb. I hadn’t seen anything about this movie going in besides the lightest dusting of a trailer maybe six weeks ago, which basically registered as another strange and fascinating film with Lakeith Stanfield at the helm, this time a black comedy in Roman times. I happen to be a really big fan of blind-casting films in Roman times (especially you, Ovid and the Art of Love). I was raised on Lamb by Christopher Moore and the Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman, and the positioning of Lakeith Stanfield’s character as a hustler in the “ghetto” of Jerusalem made for some excellent aesthetic pastiche, thinking of the strip club/brothel scene or really any scene where a Roman centurion asks someone for their papers. (This is the annual announcement that the tumblr medievalbipoc is still so fun to thumb through.)
There is an entrancing dance sequence–in a year that has been all about dance sequences–which isn’t quite worth the price of admission but should get you pretty close. The chief issue with this movie appears to be the marketing of it. It’s kind of cursed with the fact that it is at its core a satire about race (several different visual gags that put a new spin on old Renaissance paintings), while also being a religious parable very closely influenced by the likes of WEB DuBois’s Darkwater (“They always take our babies”), while also being an ensemble film of young, up and coming black actors and Oscar award winners, so who exactly walks out of it satisfied? I watched this movie in an empty theater on a Tuesday night and walked out near midnight pretty sure that someone was going to murder me before I could get back to my car. Fairly sure that a fire alarm went off outside my movie for like half an hour but was too scared to go check in case it was a trap, and as I was buying my popcorn to go in, it was extremely clear that most of the employees at that snack station were going to be gone before I found my seat.
Book of Clarence is very neatly structured into three acts that are all tonally completely different. One of the things that I find so difficult to grapple with is the fact that the movie really dispells with the ambiguity of Jesus’s divinity in a way that they could’ve hedged more, Roshomon-like, maybe had the same story retold by multiple people with and without magic and “tricks.” Instead, it really tips the hand of the story’s intended interpretation in similar ways to, say, Ready or Not‘s strange and amazing ending. But it’s strange things like the overexplaining of Jesus that makes this movie feel a little too neat. I challenge you to check this out and tell me it’s not straight up cool to look at.
