Mary Magdalene (2018)

Garth Davis approaches the most maligned woman in Christian history with the patience of a restorer working on a damaged fresco. Mary Magdalene, released in 2018 after a distribution saga that would test the faith of Job, takes the figure long branded a prostitute by the early church and reinstalls her as the first and most steadfast of the disciples. Rooney Mara plays her as a woman who walks out of an arranged marriage and into a movement, and the film never apologizes for the exit. The closing captions make the correction explicit, which is where the picture's real project announces itself: a two-thousand-year clerical error, quietly reversed over the course of two hours.

The engine here is gender and religious authority, and it runs hot. Mary baptizes, preaches, and asserts the spirit working through her, which puts her directly across from Peter, who regards her as a weakening influence and says so. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives Peter a wounded institutional pride that makes the schism feel administrative as much as spiritual. The casting is notably international, though the film's progressive energies are spent almost entirely on the question of who gets to speak for God, not on the demographics of first-century Judea. On economic and environmental matters the film has nothing to say, and it declines to say it loudly.

What keeps the enterprise from curdling into a sermon is Davis's restraint. No modern lecture is smuggled into the sandals, no anachronistic speechifying, just a slow and sorrowful argument about memory and who gets to write it. The result is reverent, deliberate, and occasionally inert, a passion play that trades momentum for dignity. It received mixed notices, which seems fair. This is a quiet act of historical correction, and quiet correction is still correction.