Be Mindful of Your Thoughts, Yeshua
Part X of the Celluloid Christ series
In Last Days in the Desert, Ewan McGregor plays Jesus, here called Yeshua, after having spent several weeks in the desert. He encounters two demons: the first is an old begging woman whom he notices has a snake-like tail, and the second is played also by Ewan McGregor, but this time with an earring. This latter demon, listed in the credits as The Demon (and clearly the stand-in for Satan), continues to appear to Yeshua throughout the film (no one else seems to see or hear him).
Yeshua soon encounters a teenage boy (played by Tye Sheridan), then his father (Ciarán Hinds), and eventually his mother (Ayelet Zurer). None of these characters are ever given names, but rather are revealed in their relationships. The father brought his family to the desert because of his fear of the wider world, the mother is dying but says she cannot do her dying while her son is there, and the son wants to go to Jerusalem and see the world, but stays because of his father and mother.
Yeshua converses with each of them, although most often with the father and the son. Throughout his time with father and son, Yeshua hears from them both about the challenges between them, their different desires, and their difficulties in communicating. There’s a funny scene of the son and Yeshua gathering water, where the son tells a story about wanting to do his own thing, something different from what his father expects of him, and he begins yelling over and over “I am not a bad son!” The father, too, admits in a conversation with Yeshua that he does not know how to talk to his son, and that whatever he says comes out as harsh.
The relationship between father and son functions in the film as a parable for Yeshua’s temptations. The first dialogue in the movie is Yeshua asking the Father “where are you?,” and later he asks the Father to “speak to me.” Yeshua says he struggles with his own words, which often feel hollow despite his good intentions. And the division between the will of the father and of the son in the film recalls that brief distinction between the wills of the Father and the Son in the Agony in the Garden, where Jesus prays “yet, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39).
The more specific temptations in the film differ greatly from those in canon, but none of them ensnare Yeshua anymore than the canonical ones ensnared Jesus. The Demon offers Yeshua a wager over the family’s problems, he appears in the form of the mother in a a brief and failed attempt to seduce Yeshua, and he often prods Yeshua with questions made to make him doubt that Yeshua easily rejects or ignores. There is a scene towards the end where Yeshua demands the Demon show him the boy’s future, which the Demon seems to do, but the scene does not play as something Yeshua is tempted to or that draws him away from his departure from the desert and beginning of ministry.
This is the second film in this series that takes the temptations of Jesus as their central theme, and many reviewers of this film noted its apparent connection with The Last Temptation of Christ. Such comparisons often connect the low Christology of the Scorsese film to the portrayal of Yeshua in Last Days, although I think this is overstated.
As I noted at the very beginning of this series, one of the recurring questions I wanted to investigate was how did films communicate the divine and human aspects of Jesus. Many reviewers of this film note how it really leans into the human (especially embodied) qualities of Jesus: Steven Greydanus describes it as “naturalistic,” Justin Chang says it is focused “on his humanity rather than his divinity,” and Bishop Barron calls it boring for showing Jesus “simply as a human being.”
I saw the same movie as these guys, and I see why they make this claim. Hardly any of Yeshua’s actions in the film are beyond human capacities; he walks, he talks, he helps build a house. He experiences human frailties: he thirsts, he has trouble sleeping in the cold desert night, and he is apparently a bit lost on his way to Jerusalem. Moreover, despite being at the end of his temptations, we do not see angels minister to him as they do in Matthew 4.
Yet that there is something more to Yeshua than a mere human, even a “spirituality alert” human. Through most of the movie, this is shown especially by his interactions with the Demon. When the Demon taunts him, saying “You think you are his only child? There are others,” Yeshua responds, without missing a beat, “there is only me.” The Demon makes many other references to Yeshua being the Father’s son, using the terms “Father,” “Daddy,” the “old man,” etc.
The Demon also references Yeshua’s untapped capacities. When the father character ultimately falls from a cliff to his death, the Demon says Yeshua could have single-handedly pulled up the man dangling from the rope (and seven more heavy men besides).1 In its own way, this aspect of the Demon tracks with demonic portrayal in the Gospels, as they are among the few characters to identify Jesus as Son of God.2
There’s one other moment in the desert that hits on who Jesus truly is. After the father has died and the son has decided to set off for the city, Yeshua goes to heal the ill mother. He kneels down and lays hands on her, but she stops him from doing so. He’s clearly prepared to save her life, and the Demon is quite angry at him for doing so. But the mother declines, ready to die, reluctant to anchor her son any longer to their barren land. She had said earlier she could not do her dying while her son was present, and she is ready now for nature to take its course. Yeshua abides by her free choice and heads out of the desert.
It’s true that the divinity of Yeshua is subtle, maybe even tentative, in the film, but it’s not true that it’s absent. He is neither mere human nor rampaging numinous; he has gone out to the desert looking for a place to reflect and pray in peace, he has been tempted by Satan, and he leaves now having resisted those same temptations.
The film doesn’t have a truly cathartic or revelatory moment, although I think it does effectively communicate one of the difficulties of the temptation narrative as we generally receive it. For most of us, temptation means drama and struggle, and it’s hard to imagine a person who is divine and fully aware of that divinity experiencing something like struggle. Yeshua’s sense of distance from the Father during his time in the desert, his questioning of the Demon during the latter’s appearances, these all point to that drama. It’s an interior struggle, but one also imagined through the family’s internal struggles with what each of them wants and what each of them wants for the others.
To close, I want to note that one of the strangest aspects of the film is its two endings. The first of these is a series of brief cuts depicting the crucifixion, death, and burial of Jesus. I found the crucifixion itself quite striking in its minimalism (you don’t see any other people at all, only close ups of Jesus). The tomb is closed up with a series of stones, not one large one to be rolled away, and then a group of about 8 disciples essentially hang out at the tomb.
The second ending is a distant and extended shot of the same desert we have spent the film in, except we see two small people, one in blue and one in red, walking to the edge and looking out. They then take some photographs of each other with the desert in the background. At the end of this ending, I did write in my notes “WTF movie?”
I have not found anyone who has given a compelling explanation for either of these endings, actually; most don’t even try to offer one. But I think both are actually callbacks to previous interactions between Yeshua and the Demon.
In the first, there is a moment when Yeshua is on the cross, and a blue humingbird appears right in his face. It hovers there briefly, but then we cut to Jesus’ shrouded corpse being brought into the tomb. When Yeshua and the Demon parted for the last time, the Demon said the following to him:
“I’ll come to you at the end. Give me a sign and I’ll help you down and you can stay.”
The implication here is that the hummingbird is the Demon, and that Yeshua did not give a sign because Yeshua was committed to fulfilling his mission.
With respect to the second ending, it recalls an earlier campfire conversation between the Demon and Yeshua. The scene is one of the Demon’s more sustained efforts to challenge Yeshua, and includes (as one might expect) some mixture of truth and falsehood in the process. Indeed, a widely noted line from this scene and this film is when the Demon says “I am a liar and that’s the truth.” But he says something else, a question Yeshua does not directly respond to:
“These things He expects of you, do you think anyone will care? Men of a thousand years from now?”
The people in the second ending do care, in some way, although it is ambiguous as to how. The people are filmed at such a distance that it’s hard to make out any features, anything of who they are, what their state of mind is as they experience the desert. They might simply be tourists, doing it for the ‘gram. But it might also be that they are profoundly grateful for the things the Father expected of Yeshua, including those things shown in the first ending.
The two endings are ambiguous, not triumphant, and so they do lack a sort of “spectacular payoff” the way you see in something like DeMille’s King of Kings. But they also communicate the final outcome of the temptations of Jesus: his rejection of Satan and his commitment to the will of the Father.
Stray thoughts about Last Days in the Desert:
The fireside chat scene above is the most interesting of the scenes with the Demon. Beyond attempts to discern where he’s lying and where he’s mixing truth with lies, McGregor does act with a certain wistfulness when he describes being in the presence of God. There’s also some neat moments where it’s clear that Yeshua has the Demon’s number and the Demon is unhappy about it.
Yeshua has a series of dreams during his time staying with the family. In the first, he’s in water and seems like he might be drowning; the second he is being chased by three wolves; the third he is floating in the air, looking out over the valleys. It’s not really clear to me what their symbolic meaning is in the context of the film, and I definitely don’t see strong parallels with the canonical temptations (except possibly for the last one).
As a Star Wars fan, I have to note that Yeshua looks like a roughed up Obi-Wan Kenobi, so much so that when the Disney+ Kenobi show was announced, fans used clips from this film to make fan trailers before any footage was released.
Next time in the Celluloid Christ series: Mary Magdalene (2018), directed by Garth Davis. You can find links to all the posts as they come out in the series page.
In this scene, where the Demon suggests saving someone from falling from a great height, is perhaps the closest the film ever gets to one of the canonical temptations from the Gospel.
See, for example, Mark 1:23-24 and Matthew 8:28-30/Luke 8:26-28.