Writer-director Jeymes Samuel’s latest film, The Book of Clarence, incorporates ideas from some of the most iconic cinematic biblical sagas — such as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments — but fails to execute them into a cohesive, effective Black Jesus sociopolitical comedy.
The problems with the film begin with Clarence’s character. Played by LaKeith Stanfield, Clarence is a ne’er-do-well street hustler indebted to a fierce gang leader in Jerusalem. Clarence is left to provide for his mother when his twin brother Thomas becomes one of Jesus’ disciples. Playing on the game of telephone that undoubtedly happened between the events of Jesus’ life and death and the decades after in which those events were recorded, the film’s cheeky suggestion is that the doubting Thomas characterization of the disciple from the Bible came from scholars confusing the very faithful Thomas with his unbelieving twin brother Clarence. The Book of Clarence, therefore, is an untold story.
Yet Samuel never seems to give us a compelling reason to care about Clarence. He’s self-absorbed, a jerk, and has no discernible talent or skill. He’s the annoying guy who pops up at your job to force you to pay attention to him (he does this to “love interest” Varinia, played by Anna Diop). And he’ll discard you if he thinks you’re no longer useful.
We see that in the scene where Clarence pretends to be a messiah like Jesus and performs fake miracles for people to give him donations to pay back his debt. He goes to the house of Jesus’ mother to figure out which “tricks” Jesus used to become the Messiah. When Mary has no information for him about Jesus “magic,” Clarence abruptly leaves, uninterested in hearing the truth about who she knows her son to be.
Still, Clarence has a very faithful friend in Elijah (played by RJ Cyler), but we don’t ever really know or see why they’re so close, especially since Clarence continues to endanger Elijah’s life. After all, Clarence owes the debt to the gang leader, not Elijah, yet Elijah has a bounty on his head by association. While Clarence attempts to earn money to pay it off, he comes across a group of enslaved fighters and ends up freeing a man named Barabbas. Barabbas’ loyalty to Clarence is understandable, but it’s unclear why he chooses to go along with Clarence’s scam. And while Clarence may have just been a typical narcissist and not extraordinarily evil, nothing in his trajectory earns him the end-of-Act 2 about-face that turns him into a freedom fighter.
Clarence’s redeeming quality is supposed to be that he wants to get his mother out of poverty. A few scenes with him and his mother are supposed to indicate that this is what drives him — his embarrassment that he can’t provide a safe and comfortable home for his mother.
Yet women are merely peripheral to the story, especially Clarence’s mother (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Varinia, whom he has a crush on. They only exist as props to be desired by the men Samuel is more interested in. I suppose there should be gratitude that Samuel listened to the backlash he received for casting light-skinned actor Zazie Beetz to play a historically dark-skinned woman in The Harder They Fall and cast dark-skinned women as love interests in The Book of Clarence. But Teyana Taylor is wasted as Mary Magdalene, Elijah’s crush who has no interest in him and no story of her own — except to be saved from a stoning by Jesus.
Poor Varinia and Clarence’s mother, who’s never named, only exist so the audience can determine whether Clarence has succeeded in his aims by getting his mom into a life of luxury and winning Varinia’s heart by being wealthy enough to deserve her. Clarence is so thinly drawn as a character that his story puts the burden on the audience to project life, depth and meaning into him. That is intentional.
Sony Pictures
Samuel is betting on our cultural knowledge of the story of Jesus, his Crucifixion, and Bible stories of yore, as well as our current anger and devastation over police killing Black people. Without these cultural understandings and deeply felt emotions, the entire movie falls apart.
The third act was more moving than the plodding first two, but that’s despite Clarence, not because of him. When Clarence is mistaken for Jesus and taken into custody by the Romans to be executed, Clarence’s mother cries out, “They always take our babies!” It’s hard not to be emotional in that moment. But no shade to Jean-Baptiste, the actor who plays the role, the emotions aren’t earned from what’s seen on screen, but instead rely on our actual Black reality under the police state as well as our long-understood horror of what Jesus — not Clarence — suffered.
This is where Christians might get upset watching The Book of Clarence — if they even make it this far into the film. Yet, Christians shouldn’t be mad about “blasphemy,” which is not in the film. The movie is a deeply Christian story of a troubled man who goes from unbeliever to believer. If anything, they should be mad that the story is boring and trite, save for one low-hanging Nword joke and a reference to The Matrix, it’s unfunny.
Most of all, I wonder what the movie is for and what it set out to achieve, besides, like Clarence’s journey to becoming a messiah, its own vanity.
As the writer/director, Samuel invokes powerful names, from the setting to the characters to the story itself. But what does he do with them? Ben-Hur was revolutionary for its time, set box office records, and felt like a massive production, whereas Clarence feels very insular and small, and for a $40 million budget, it looks a little cheap.
In fairness, epics such as The Ten Commandments, which cost $13 million to make in 1956, would cost over $100 million today. But all of that could’ve been ignored if The Book of Clarence were compelling. Trojan War hero Achilles dates back to the 8th century BC, and we still know his story. Jesus’ life is called “the greatest story ever told.” The Book of Clarence can’t hold the weight of the icons it invokes.
It’s not even original to have this story told with Black characters. Black American Christians have been seeing Black Jesus crucified at church plays since childhood and have been hearing Jesus’ execution analogized with police violence in Easter sermons for just as long. We’ve also seen it on screen several times.
Black Jesus is already a satirical TV series, and there’s also the 2006 movie Color of the Cross. So, what new thing does The Book of Clarence say or add to the conversation?
So far, it feels like Samuel’s filmography boils down to “What about Westerns, but with Black people! What about Jesus, but with Black people!” and not going a drop deeper than that. Even if The Book of Clarence was a true story, there’s a reason it was forgotten. Better ones swallowed it up.
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