The Nativity Story

The Nativity Story is a remarkable, if frustratingly restrained act of imagining the tale of Jesus's birth as the prophesied Messiah, a flesh-and-blood drama actually set in Judaea two thousand years ago. The film makes very strong impressions in a scene-by-scene way.

Beginning with the mass murder of Bethlehem’s innocents under orders from a the paranoid and illegitimate Edomite King Herod who had just stolen the Davidic throne of Judaea with the aid of the Roman occupiers, the film then jumps back a year to the prophecy that informs Zechariah that his wife, Elizabeth will bear a child. Meanwhile, Elizabeth's cousin, the very young Mary, struggles with her family to make ends meet and is promised to Joseph.

Soon comes word to Mary from an angel of God, that she will carry, while still a virgin, the long-awaited Messiah who will liberate the true Israelites from the Edomite King Herod and his Roman benefactors. Thus begins a detailed account of Joseph and Mary's hard travel to Bethlehem, while three Magi spend months crossing the desert trying to rendezvous with some point below the convergence of three heavenly bodies in the night sky.

While The Nativity Story should appeal to almost anyone as a straightforward narrative, it is not a secular version of the familiar Biblical history. The Nativity Story also cleverly weaves hints of things to come later in Jesus Christ's life, into the unfolding history.