WILLEM DAFOE is my favorite onscreen Jesus, and since The Last Temptation of Christ’s release three decades ago, he’s been indelibly associated with that role. His Jesus was a corrective to the over-mysticized versions in epics such as Ben-Hur and The Greatest Story Ever Told, which portray Jesus as a kind of magician instead of a person.
Dafoe’s Jesus (which is also the Jesus of novelist Nikos Kazantzakis and Paul Schrader, who adapted Kazantzakis’ work for the screen) is a serious attempt at grappling with the human questions his story demands. This Jesus is a breathing, sweating, sleeping, dancing, agonizing, raging Jesus: a political Jesus who prefers a donkey to a revolution; a compassionate Jesus who struggles to figure out his own needs amid the burdens of the world; a thinking Jesus who doesn’t emerge from the womb with a fully formed philosophy but learns by experience, scripture, and prayer.
Fictionalized Jesuses are, of course, like any other Jesus: We see all the Jesuses we’ve ever met through the lens of our own experience. The light of Willem Dafoe’s Jesus (not to mention his astonishing portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in the recent masterpiece At Eternity’s Gate) is more useful to me than the “magician” versions because I’m not sure I can learn much from superheroes.
Having said that, the most immediately surprising thing about Dafoe’s most popular film, the massive DC Comics action fantasy Aquaman, is that it presents a coherent story and is consistently entertaining for its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. The second surprise is that it has something meaningful to say about the world in which we live.
Its hero, Arthur, is the child of an earthbound human and a sort of undersea goddess, so he must navigate two ways of seeing and being. The fact that he is played by native Hawaiian Jason Momoa and Arthur’s father is played by Māori actor Temuera Morrison may be coincidental but also represents something meaningful: After the brilliant Black Panther and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a transition to mainstream multicultural hero-hood continues.
What’s even more important is that the new king, Arthur, doesn’t want to rule with an iron rod. The entire plot of Aquaman hinges on its protagonist learning that mercy is better than sacrifice. It’s one of the strongest challenges to the myth of redemptive violence I’ve seen in a movie of this scale. And while Willem Dafoe is only a supporting character in the film, he gets to participate in doing a very Jesus-esque thing to the bad guy.
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and storyteller based in North Carolina. He is the founder of www.moviesandmeaning.com, and you can also find him at www.garethhiggins.net.
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