Mary Magdalene review – toothless attempt to overturn Sunday school myths

Rooney Mara brings her customary intensity to the title role as Jesus’ ‘favourite pupil’, but the result is a bit too solemn to be a convincing reinventionThis movie, from screenwriters Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett and director Garth Davis, sets itself a bold task: to rescue Mary Magdalene from an age-old tradition of patriarchal condescension and misinterpretation.

And yet it winds up embracing a solemn, softly-spoken and slow-moving Christian piety of its own.Mary was a key apostle of Jesus, and intimate witness to some of the most important events in his life, but has been wrongly recast in popular tradition as a “fallen woman” and “prostitute”, perhaps because of a prurient need in the male religious hive-mind for a diametric opposite to the Blessed Virgin of the same name – a need to perpetuate the misogynistic ideology of madonna/whore, and simply to denigrate a woman’s importance.This

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