Usually, movie distributors save uncategorizable headscratchers for late in the year, when they can compete for coveted positions on obscurity-pilled critics’ Best-of-the-Year lists for easy promotion.  In contrast, January dumping season is usually reserved for movies with gimmicky, single-idea premises originally scribbled on bar napkins.  After a couple grueling months of picking apart challenging, thorny Awards Contenders like The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, and Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s nice to kick back and unwind to inane novelties that can be neatly categorized and easily understood.  We should spend January watching Wyatt Russell swim laps in a haunted swimming pool. We should be watching Jason Statham shoot guns at nameless goons while dressed in a beekeeper costume. We should not be questioning the mysterious meaning behind a movie, and we definitely shouldn’t be questioning the mysterious meaning behind life.  That’s why Jeymes Samuel’s semi-ironic, semi-evangelical The Book of Clarence is such a strangely timed release for the first few weeks of the year.  A backpack rap modernization of the sword & sandal Biblical epic, it would be a tricky movie to market in any context, but TriStar Pictures’ impatience in not saving it at least until Easter feels like an admission of defeat.  The movie’s own distributor doesn’t really know what to do with Samuel’s low-key religious epiphany, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with it either.

That tonal & thematic ambiguity does work in its favor, though.  The Book of Clarence is not especially great, but it is Interesting and difficult to parse, which is more than you can say in favor of most contemporary “faith-based media.”  You can tell this isn’t the hip-hop equivalent of God’s Not Dead PureFlix propaganda as soon as LaKeith Stanfield appears as a crucified Christ figure in the opening seconds, just before the clock is dialed back to his Ben Hur-style chariot race with a badass Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor).  The Book of Clarence casually flirts with blasphemy throughout its runtime, even though it’s ultimately a loving message to the Believers in the crowd.  Stanfield stars as Clarence, an atheist contemporary of Jesus who believes the proclaimed messiah to be a conman magician, since he has never experienced one of His miracles first-hand.  Out of an act of financial desperation (and a pointed fuck-you to his twin brother, Doubting Thomas), Clarence is determined to cash in on the local phenomenon of Jesus’s popularity any way he can.  He starts by attempting to angle his way into Christ’s inner circle as “The 13th Apostle,” then eventually shifts gears to repeating His conman playbook by declaring himself “The New Messiah.”  The scheme blows up in his face, attracting both the attention of the white Roman officers who brutally police his community and the attention of Jesus Christ, who gradually wins over Doubting Clarence as a reluctant follower.

If there’s any overt, recognizable mission in Samuel’s screenplay, it might just be in making the world and characters of the Gospels relatable to a modern audience.  Clarence and his friends are just normal everyday guys from “the cobblestones” (i.e., “the streets”), getting by selling ditch weed to the nightclub and opium den patrons of ancient Jerusalem.  They’re depicted as laidback stoners who chain-smoke blunts to high-minded funk & hip-hop sound cues, but a lot of that hipster posturing is undercut by dialogue that refers to them as “highfalutin nincompoops,” among other old-timey turns of phrase.  There’s a distinctly Black take on the narrative of Jesus and the Apostles’ outlaw status under the oppressive eye of Roman soldiers, culminating in a police-brutality execution of an innocent man outside a nightclub, recalling far too many real-life news stories from recent years.  What’s less distinct is what the movie is trying to say about Clarence’s relationship with Faith.  He eventually emerges from his Biblical trials as a follower of Christ, but in a confused way that makes a distinction between “knowledge” vs “belief” in his path away from atheism – the kind of bullshit intellectualism that inspires people to say “overstand” instead of “understand”.  I appreciate that Clarence’s personal salvation is mostly found in his rejection of his once selfish ways, at one point sacrificing his personal freedom to free an army of slaves he has no personal connection to.  I just can’t quite figure out the reason why his story has to mirror the exact Stations of the Cross that marked Jesus’s ascent, except maybe that the script was originally written with Jesus as the main character and was considered a little too playfully blasphemous in its initial rough draft.

Maybe all of this not-quite-blasphemous modernization of the Jesus narrative would make more sense to me if I were successfully raised Christian.  Maybe I’m too much of a first-act Doubting Clarence to fully understand where the third-act Knowing Clarence fits in the grander theological debate outside this movie’s permitters.  Either way, I do think the film’s odd sincerity and thematic confusion are ultimately beneficial to its overall memorability & entertainment value.  It easily stands out as one of the most interesting wide-release novelties that hit multiplexes this month, which is impressive considering that it’s retelling the most often repeated & reprinted story of all time while competing with a horror movie about a killer swimming pool.

-Brandon Ledet