The Least of These: THE KING OF KINGS

The King of Kings is an unusual hodgepodge movie: a Sunday School-style Biblical literary adaptation twice removed made by a South Korean animator with Hollywood voice performances and released by Christian indie production company Angel Studios. All that to end up with a pretty routine retelling of the story of Jesus Christ in blandly produced, generic family-friendly digital images just in time for Easter. As is always the case with interpretations of religious texts, however, it’s most interesting, and revealing, for what it leaves out and for what it emphasizes. Furthermore, this one’s complicated by being based on a slim posthumous Charles Dickens book called The Life of Our Lord. That book is a charmingly Victorian effort, not up to the depths of feeling and wit of Dickens’ best work, but an earnest effort at distilling the importance of the Gospels’ message for an intended audience of his own children. The animated version makes Dickens (Kenneth Branagh) telling his youngest son (Roman Griffin Davis) the story of Jesus (Oscar Isaac) a framing device, and then puts the little lad, along with his doughy cat, in the New Testament tableaux as an unseen observer. There it hits all the expected highlights—the nativity, the baptism, the disciples, the loaves and fishes, walking on water, the last supper, the crucifixion, the resurrection. What’s more curious is the balance of what’s left out to what’s included.

Any condensing of these stories is inevitably going to pick and chose points of emphasis that shifts theological implications. For instance, Dickens didn’t have time for the Devil’s temptations in his book, but The King of Kings makes sure we hear about it, along with a flashback to Original Sin in the Garden of Eden. That’s fitting for a telling that’s all about the Power of Belief above all else. It puts weight on Christ the powerful—telling off the devil, expelling demons, raising the dead, and calming stormy seas. Christ the vulnerable, the compassionate, the defender of the meek and impoverished, gets shorter shrift, when it even appears at all. The end result is a movie that says Jesus should be worshiped because of what he can do for you, but doesn’t care too much about what he asks you to do for others. The Sermon on the Mount is glossed over, but skipped entirely are the Parables, and the Blessing of Children, and the Widow’s Mite, and the Woman at the Well, and nearly all moments of Jesus’ teaching that emphasize a need to care for those who’re marginalized or forgotten by societal norms.

The movie’s dry liturgical value, when it isn’t upstaged by the frame story, is clearly slanted in this one obvious direction, worshiping His power, but failing to mention that we should “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and that “the last shall be first,” and what we “have done unto one of the least of these, we have done it unto [Him]”, and that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Even the manger scene opening only has time for the genuflecting Wise Men, and not the shepherds. The ending resurrection has Jesus greet Dickens’ son in the garden instead of Mary. The filmmakers include a lot of the Greatest Hits of Jesus, but take most every opportunity to downplay or diminish women and the poor in them. (There’s time for many minutes devoted to the Dickens chasing that cat, though.) It says a lot about modern mainstream American Christianity to see what concepts are ignored when the idea is to make something broadly appealing and unobjectionable to the masses. I’d say it’s some upside-down accomplishment to make a Christian movie without wrangling with the actual tough questions of the faith, but that’s sadly par for the course.