The Book of Clarence
A biblical fiction in which Clarance, a drug dealer who owes money to a gangster, meets Jesus and his disciples. Clarance decides to pretend to be a rival messiah in order to doop money from followers to pay off his debt. After gaining followers and notoriety he gets arrested by the Romans, who want him to reveal the location of Jesus to them. Clarance chooses not to betray Jesus, ends up performing real miracles, and is crucified.
This is a very strange movie and I don't understand the point of it or why it exists.
The movie has a good cast with a lot of actors I actually really like. LaKeith Stanfield, Michael Ward, Nicholas Pinnock, Babs Olusanmokun, James McAvoy, and Benedict Cumberbatch are all really great actors but the entire time I was watching the movie I was just rather unimpressed with all of them.
The movie feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts off as a religious comedy/spoof, kind of a The Life of Brian, but then halfway through the movie takes a hard right turn into just being The Passion of the Christ (but for black people) with all pretense of levity gone. The comedy part of it isn't that funny, and the serious drama doesn't really work either because of the weird religious fanfiction aspect to it.
Halfway through the movie Clarance starts acting like he actually believes himself to be a Messiah figure, he even starts to perform real miracles like walking on water. He gets tortured and crucified, like Jesus, and he even gives the "forgive them for they know not what they do" speech and gets stabbed with the spear of destiny by Pontius Pilate. Clarance literally fills the Jesus role, except that Jesus is ALSO in the movie. After Clarance dies on the cross and is buried in a cave (exactly like Jesus, with a stone covering the entrance) Jesus comes and resurects him. We are told that Jesus is ALSO going to get crucified a day later (presumably in the exact same way).
What is the point of making Clarance figuratively Jesus if you're also going to literally have Jesus there? It's not so there would be a black Jesus analogue, because the Jesus in this movie is also black.
I don't understand what they were going for at all, and I'm not sure they do either. There's some allegories of Romans being cops and "over-policing" the black community, but this is more of a tangent the story takes rather than being the point of it.
It really feels like LaKeith Stanfield did Judas and the Black Massiah, and during the filling of that movie someone got high and went "what if we did a biblical fiction where YOU were a black messiah?" and then no additional thought was put into what the movie would actually be about.
So yeah, it's weird and unfocused, and I don't think it's very good. I watched the whole thing being fascinated with "where are they going with this" and the answer was apparently "fucking nowhere."
I don't know, maybe I'm just too white and too non-religious to "get" it.
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