‘The Book of Clarence’ Review: LaKeith Stanfield Is an Unlikely Messiah in Jeymes Samuel’s Brash Biblical Epic
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic The grand-scale Biblical epics that midcentury Hollywood churned out to roaring box-office returns had many drawcards as (so to speak) mass entertainment — brawny action, transporting spectacle, then jaw-dropping effects — but a sense of humor, by and large, wasn’t one of them.
That’s something British musician-turned-filmmaker Jeymes Samuel attempts to rectify in his offbeat messiah story “The Book of Clarence,” a newly invented tale that runs parallel to the life and death of Jesus in ways both blithely blasphemous and sincerely Christian.
Following on from Samuel’s debut, the rollicking hip-hop western “The Harder They Fall,” with its flagrantly anachronistic remix of genre traditions and a predominantly Black cast, “Clarence” clearly seeks to be the first film loosely of its type to make any pop-cultural impact since Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” nearly 20 years ago.
It’ll certainly prove a hard sell to the U.S. audience that conventionally turns up for faith-based fare — people who tend to prefer their Bible stories without four-letter words, disco dance interludes and atheistic, weed-smoking heroes.
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