'Last Days' delivers thoughtful dual portrait of Jesus

The mystical and the mundane come together with captivating force in "Last Days in the Desert," Rodrigo Garcia's thoughtful, intriguingly layered interpretation of the gospel stories of Jesus' confrontation with the devil while fasting and praying in the Judean desert.

The subject has previously proven rich fodder for great filmmakers, including Pier Paolo Pasolini ("The Gospel According to St. Matthew") and Martin Scorsese ("The Last Temptation of Christ"). Garcia proves worthy of their company in a film that seeks to examine this well-known story, not as an easily digestible illustration or an opportunity to indulge in misty-eyed moralizing, but as an exploration of the psychic showdown between all fathers and sons - which can be every bit as fraught as that between the Father and Son themselves.

In the gospel stories, Satan tempts Jesus with three visions of the worldly powers he could assume if he turns his back on God. Those precise images - of turning stones into bread, surviving a fall off a great tower and of the vast kingdoms Jesus could oversee as an omnipotent ruler - aren't present in "Last Days in the Desert."

Instead, Garcia comes at the tests they symbolize more obliquely, as an internal argument between Jesus - called Yeshua - and his own darkest human impulses. The filmmaker's most startling choice is also his most effective, in casting the devil not as a cloven-hoofed creature or menacing disembodied spirit, but as the mirror image of Jesus, played by Ewan McGregor in a seductive double-turn.

In a crafty, charismatic performance, McGregor's blue-eyed Jesus of "Last Days in the Desert" may initially call to mind Ted Neely in "Jesus Christ Superstar," or painter Warner Sallman's 1940 rendering that launched billions of kitschy Sunday school reproductions. But those unfortunate comparisons eventually fade in a film that dodges condescension and sentimentality to become an engaging portrait, not just of a titanic spiritual struggle, but of love, service and filial loyalty.

On his travels, Yeshua takes shelter with a family in the throes of their own conflicts around obedience and conflicting missions. The son (Tye Sheridan) longs to move to Jerusalem, while his father (Ciarán Hinds) insists that he stay alongside him and his ailing wife (Ayelet Zurer).

At one point, the boy asks the wandering holy man to describe Jerusalem. "Dirty and corrupt," Yeshua replies. "But also alive. Very alive."

"Last Days in the Desert" is comfortable with such dualities, no more than within Yeshua himself, who spends the first part of the film walking with parched confusion amid the punishing heat and cold of a forbidding wasteland, either laughing maniacally or desperately pleading for clarity from the unseen patriarch who remains maddeningly distant. Photographed with arresting richness and simplicity by Emmanuel Lubezki in the southern California desert, the film possesses a stark, lit-from-within beauty; it's of a piece with the work the cinematographer has done with Terrence Malick.

"Last Days in the Desert" shares the Malick-ian sense of spiritual discernment, albeit in a context wherein the stakes couldn't be higher. As Yeshua's sojourn with the family grows more complex - culminating in an act of physical risk that echoes the gospels' temptation of the tower - so does his self-doubt.

These sequences - of agonizing ambivalence and seductive alternate realities - are written and staged by Garcia with imagination and spiky, anachronistic wit. And it's in these scenes that McGregor convincingly portrays both the prayerful existence of an ascetic and its laceratingly sharp-eyed opposite.

Most people know how this story ends, but surprises still abound. Garcia has managed the extraordinary with "Last Days in the Desert," infusing one of the world's most familiar stories with the genuine shock of the new.