Okay, now, the storytelling isn't really all that meditative, to where it's overly artistic focus upon the environment and atmosphere, yet it is often very dry, somewhat atmospheric and even sometimes kind of surreal, with moments in which it dips into all-out dreamy, a transition that is occasionally not all that smooth, thus exacerbating the aforementioned tonal unevenness. I don't believe that I've given Martin Scorsese enough credit, let alone respect for being an extremely diverse director who experiments with many different storytelling methods, though, of course, that means that it was only a matter of time before he dipped his toes in the dreaded waters of overly meditative storytelling, which arrives in this film as problematic as it almost always is.
The only thing harder to follow than the liberties is the overall story, as it is structured in a sometimes hurried, sometimes overdrawn and even occasionally overly elaborate fashion that leaves a degree of convolution to set in, with such storytelling flaws as a degree of tonal inconsistency, worsened by Peter Gabriel's sometimes unfitting and uneven score work (As I'll get more into later, it's still a pretty good score, but who in the world thought that it would be a good idea to get Peter Gabriel to do the score for a film about Jesus in the first place? It was because he was in a band called Genesis, wasn't it?), intensifying the confusion, yet the storytelling flaws don't end there. Immediate development is all but absent and gradual exposition is scarce, making it difficult to lock investment and even knowledge into this story, as it is riddled to the rim with liberties in the story and even personality of Jesus, as well as the people who surrounded him, leaving even the people who have seen the story of Jesus done to death without the advantage of knowing what in the world is going on. Now, that's not to say that this film is bad, or even mediocre, as it is ultimately enjoyable, though hit pretty hard by more than a few flaws. Well, at least it's not quite as discomfortingly honest as the similarly "The Passion of the Christ", and note that I said, "honest", because as far as a Jesus film is concerned, it doesn't get more offensive than this, being that it is liberty-tastic in, sometimes, the sickest of ways, yet its problems most certainly don't end there. I could have compared him to some kind of other animal, like whatever in the world Gary Busey is, though he seems like he belongs somewhere in the shark family, being that he always plays such creepy characters, so much so that even his portrayal of Jesus is a little bit off-putting, though I suppose that's what happens when you have the guts to make a film that analyzes the temptations of the most sacred human being to walk upon the earth and its water and expect the guy who directed "Taxi Driver" and the guy who went on to dress in drag as a gay man in "The Boondock Saints" (That's an awesome title, but those saints were hardly sacred) and be in a film called "Antichrist" (Wow, really?) to not make a lustful Jesus come off as too discomforting. Yeah, I know that the size of a jaw doesn't play too terribly big of a part in the volume of your voice, though I think that may just be the case with people who don't have a megamouth shark somewhere in their family tree, because I think the reason why Willem Dafoe tries to stay quiet so often is because when he gets started yelling, that tooth foghorn between his nose and chin isn't gonna let him stop. Of course, maybe Willen Dafoe is going a bit too far, because with a jaw like that, Jesus wouldn't need that crazy, super-cool booming voice that von Sydow had going on or an odyssey across the land to educate the world on his views all he would need is an afternoon and one good shout. I don't know where people started getting in their heads that Jesus had a broad jaw, though I suppose it makes sense, because if you're going to preach as boastfully to the world as Jesus did, then you're going to need a jaw that can handle it. Somewhere between Max von Sydow and Christian Bale, there was Willem Dafoe, the biggest mouth of all.