SOUL FOOD:’The Nativity Story’ is almost perfect

If only “The Nativity Story” were all good news. After all, how long will it be before someone gets the chance to tell this story in Hollywood again?

This is one of those times I wish — really wish — a screenwriter and director could be given the chance to tweak a few weak points in the production and do it again. Say, maybe, before next Christmas.

Not a chance. I know.

I can live with it. I saw the film, which opened in theaters last Friday, and enjoyed it enough that I plan to see it again this coming weekend. It will likely become a Christmas tradition for me (and I suspect for others).

In spite of its flaws, there’s plenty to savor packed into its 1-hour, 41-minuteruntime. The film befriends a story that has suffered the contempt of familiarity.

It vividly renders its astonishing demands made 2,000 years ago, particularly on its main players, and the demands it still makes on those who hear the story now.

How do we know the will of God? Where do we find the strength to do God’s will when doing it is uncomfortable, heartbreaking or costly?

In their telling, screenwriter Mike Rich and director Catherine Hardwicke have clung closely to the gospel accounts (what there is of them) of the conception and birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Drawing from Scripture and extra-biblical sources, they portray the story, for the most part, straight as historical drama.

But given how brief and rather skeletal the gospel accounts are, they also flesh out the story with some of their own ideas. Mary and her family are cheese makers, for example. The three magi could moonlight as comics.

And Joseph, portrayed so well by Oscar Isaac, is three-dimensional. Glean what you can about Joseph from the Bible and you’ll be able to tuck it into the palm of your hand.

The Joseph of “The Nativity Story” chooses Mary for his wife because of the virtue he perceives in her, but he struggles with trusting her to return to him and Nazareth after she travels south to spend time with her cousin Elizabeth. He struggles even more to trust her when she returns to Nazareth pregnant.

He’s loving and devoted, but clearly no fool. Yet neither is he given to condemn his betrothed, who could — according to Jewish law — be stoned to death for her condition were he only to utter an accusation.

As in the gospel accounts, it takes an angelic visitation to put his tormented heart and mind to rest. Only after the angel Gabriel appears to Joseph in a dream to corroborate Mary’s story, is he convinced she is telling the truth: She has not been with a man; it is God who has made her pregnant.

He and Mary are stoic as those in their village shun them. But Joseph is not without humor.

When they leave Nazareth for Bethlehem through a gauntlet of disapproving stares, he jokes with Mary. “They are going to miss us,” he says. It makes her smile, something that until then has been a rarity for her.

Keisha Castle-Hughes has been much criticized for depicting the young mother of God with too straight or hard or blank or dour or expressionless a face. I was well prepared to share this disappointment

Then I didn’t. Instead, I found Castle-Hughes as Mary to be movingly convincing.

Here is a teenage girl, (a girl! — never mind that her mother and her mother’s mother were married even younger) who yearns like any girl to play and chatter with her friends.

Here is a girl who has to bring in the harvest, make cheese and sell it. Here is a girl who must study Scripture after work and never be mindless or tardy.

Here is a girl who lives in what’s considered to be the most godforsaken village in all the country, impoverished by the heavy-handed taxation of Roman oppressors.

Here is a girl who sees another girl her age snatched from her home by Roman soldiers to satisfy the tax debt of her father. Here is a girl who is given for marriage to a man she doesn’t love because her father can’t scratch living enough from the ground of Nazareth to feed her.

Here is a girl to whom an angel appears to tell her she has been chosen by God to give birth to his son. Here is a girl who knows well what happens to a woman who becomes pregnant by any man other than her husband.

Here is a girl without a whole lot to smile about, much less laugh. Here is a girl too overwhelmed to even cry, let alone rejoice.

We may confuse virtue (“Be it unto me according to thy Word.”) with strength, but young Mary doesn’t. Strength is something she borrows from her husband Joseph until she develops it in herself.

Not that Joseph is fearless. In one of my favorite scenes, Joseph tells Mary that the angel Gabriel told him not to be afraid. “Are you afraid?” Mary asks him. “Yes,” he tells her then asks, “Are you?”

Of course she is. These are not pious caricatures Rich and Hardwicke have given us. Joseph wonders if he will be able to teach his son anything. Mary wonders when they will know for certain he is more than an ordinary child. Hardwicke has clearly taken great pains to lend the setting and the culture and the characters authenticity. But the film at times walks a distracting line between realism and theater.

Characters pray in Hebrew, but without subtitles. But by and large, they otherwise speak in modern, if sometimes, somewhat accented, English, except for when their lines have been taken directly from Scripture. Then, their English leans toward that of the King James Bible.

And there are other things. Mary’s birth is without blood or even umbilical cord.

The three magi, who look like crèche figurines come to life in an alternative Nutcracker dream, often seem to think they’re in a 1st-century remake of “City Slickers.” They exchange comedic banter like true vaudevillians. These are the small distractions that mar — but never quite ruin — “The Nativity Story.”