Something of a catastrophic category error seems to have happened at Netflix. For some reason it seems to be billing its new film Mary as a Christmas film, when it doesn’t appear to be anything of the sort.
We all know what elements a film needs to have to be considered festive. A big-city career girl. A plaid-wearing apple farmer. A local school that needs to be saved. Maybe a naked snowman who comes to life to teach a hot widow how to love again. Almost certainly Lindsay Lohan. And yet Mary has none of these. It’s all deserts and angels and babies being born in mangers and king Herod. It really isn’t very Christmassy at all.
Admittedly the archangel Gabriel does keep turning into a scarf and floating about in the film. Maybe it’s the same scarf that magically makes snowmen come to life in Hot Frosty, in which case Mary is clearly part of some fiendish Netflix Christmas cinematic universe and I take it all back. On the whole, though, you wish that Netflix had got a bit more involved and re-nosed Mary as something like Christmas Baby on Candyfloss Lane or Herod: Grouchy Santa.
However, what Mary does have, slightly inexplicably, is Anthony Hopkins. One of the greatest actors of all time. A man who only recently won an Oscar for being so good at acting. And now he’s turning up in Mary, as a supporting character in a cheap-looking, straight to Netflix faith-based movie directed by the man best known for giving us xXx: Return of Xander Cage.
It’s such a weird booking. At this point in his career, Hopkins presumably has the money and clout to only pick projects that truly speak to him. That really doesn’t seem to be the case here, though, because not only is it a film and role unsuited to Hopkins’s talent, but he doesn’t really look as if he wants to be there.
Hopkin spends his scenes doing the sort of cod-Shakespearian spluttering he sometimes resorts to when he doesn’t have a strong director to keep him in check. What’s more, as another critic has pointed out, there are scenes in Mary where he delivers lines while looking at a piece of paper and moving his eyes back and forth, the same way you would if you were reading dialogue from a cue card. There’s every chance that this isn’t the case, of course, but that’s how it looks.
We’ve seen great actors do this sort of thing before, of course. Nicolas Cage spent a decade and a half saying yes to everything, putting his name to work that was beneath him, because he was in dire financial straits. More troublingly, the last years of Bruce Willis’s career were littered with remote, checked-out cameos in several films too unscrupulous to care about his increasingly evident frontotemporal dementia.
The upcoming projects listed on Hopkins’s IMDb page don’t suggest that Mary is a one-off either. Of the five films he has lined up, only one – a Handel biopic – seems to have much in the way of prestige. The others include a film about the Maserati family, an Island of Dr Moreau reimagining and an Antarctic thriller called Bruno Penguin and the Staten Island Princess.
Again, this isn’t to say that Hopkins is broke or unwell. Maybe he simply saw Herod as a meaty, weighty role that only an actor of his calibre could play. Maybe he’s friends with someone involved in production. Maybe he just really likes Christmas and saw Mary as a strategic lateral move that would help him get cast in Hot Frosty 2. We may never know the answer.
Whatever the reason, though, it’s unlikely that Hopkins will star in a Mary sequel, since – and this is a spoiler alert, since it deviates quite dramatically from the source material – the birth of Jesus Christ appears to make him die of a heart attack instantly. Which may not be the case, it might simply be a combination of over-egged acting and bad editing. But if he did die, it’s probably a good thing. It means we can all draw a line under Mary, forget it ever happened and keep thinking of Hopkins as someone who makes good films.
• Mary is out now on Netflix
