I can't explain why, but I expected the film to be a bit of work to watch. Perhaps it was the epic length or religious subject matter or the sense that it was never entirely mainstream; I steeled myself for a hard-go. The film is nothing of the sort. Temptation took off almost immediately and absolutely overwhelmed me. At present, it's stuck like a broken record in my mind, the way only the best films can get stuck.
Everyone involved in this film has gone up a notch or two in my estimation. Scorsese was already strong (this is my seventh Scorsese film in the last year and isn't even regarded as his best work), but Willem Dafoe and Harvey Keitel were astonishing (to be clear, I didn't think either of these actors could surprise me anymore; I've seen both in dozens of films, but their performances here showed some new things. Dafoe in particular seemed to be a different man than virtually every other role I've seen.)However, the true knock-out is how emotional the film is. To be frank, I know the Christ story inside out and expected a sort of pantomime narrative that hit the bases and delivered the important play-by-play. The great surprise is that Temptation accomplishes so much more! Moments that I know from "The Big Story" and have seen performed in other contexts suddenly seemed much more real and consequential and...well, human. In particular, the scenes in Gethsemane and especially the interaction between Jesus and Judas - if the object of Temptation was to humanize Christ and demonstrate his fallibility - drove the point home better than imagined. In any other context and without the significant Biblical baggage, these sequences would have been great, great drama, real movie meat. But wrapped in the wider story, they have become something even more astonishing.
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