TV Reviews : Easter Airings of ‘Joseph,’ ‘Jesus’ Stories

Besides being the two biblical figures to be rendered in respective Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, Jesus and Joseph have the modern distinction of inspiring competing cable specials this Easter evening. TNT’s two-parter “Joseph” movie makes for surprisingly engrossing melodrama, while A&E;’s “Jesus: His Life” stolidly treads the documentary path down Via Dolorosa.

“Joseph,” the third in TNT’s ongoing series of faithful Old Testament telepictures, finds an unusual but appropriate choice of modern movie hunkdom: Paul Mercurio, of “Strictly Ballroom” cult fame. Hearing an unmistakably Australian accent come out of one of Israel’s foremost forefathers is only a distraction for about the first half-hour; Mercurio does a swell brood and actually seems as if he might have an inner spiritual life under that frequently bared chest. (After the miscasting of Matthew Modine as Jacob in TNT’s last biblical installment, this is no small deal.)

The story is cleverly structured to commence not with the familiar Technicolor-dreamcoat saga of Joseph’s boyhood, but rather years later, with the adult Joseph a slave to the Egyptian chief of state, played to initially ambiguous perfection by Ben Kingsley. His master’s wife, eternally slinky Lesley Ann Warren, is rebuffed by Joseph and charges him with ravaging her, which leads the accused to relate to the sympathetic Kingsley a flashback of how a rape sent this long-lost clan into a downward spiral.

The bulk of the first half is taken up by this back story, with a highly charged Martin Landau doing some serious garment-rending as Jacob, patriarch of a dysfunctional family nonpareil. The second half has the ex-papa’s boy and presumed-dead slave Joseph rising to power in Egypt in the unlikeliest of circumstances and finally meeting up again--now unrecognized--with the 10 brothers who betrayed him.

It’s clear from this solid treatment why the tables-turning Joseph story has long been among the most popular of all faith paradigms, as the hero’s politely defiant insistence on worshiping just one god consistently causes him great pain in the short run and gets him miraculously ahead in the long. Few, if any, other Bible narratives are quite this inherently dramatically satisfying, and director Roger Young and scripter Lionel Chetwynd haven’t let the opportunity slide, moving the story at a good clip that’ll bring most viewers back for night two.

For better or worse, the filmmakers rarely allow any stylization of note to slip into the straightforward material, so when an actor dares to play things with a touch of camp, it stands out: Warren is a hoot vamping it up in the early stretch, reaching toward Mercurio’s nether regions and cooing, “I’m told that the barley harvest is even . . . bigger than last season’s.” This is in the great tradition of Hollywood biblical epics: Viewers get to have their sexiness and rebuke it too.

There are no heaving pecs or cleavage to be found in A&E;’s competing “Jesus: His Life,” an installment of the “Biography” series. The usual mix of Renaissance paintings and Holy Land helicopter footage provides the scenery between theologians offering gentle speculation on how the Gospels may or may not have recorded the historical reality of Christ’s life and death.

“The life of Jesus is something of a mystery,” host Jack Perkins announces at the start, and subsequent readings of biblical accounts are interspersed with scholars who remark on such familiar subjects as the Romans’ means of crucifixion (wrists, not hands) and whether Jesus spent his “lost” years in Egypt or the Orient (probably not).

One DePaul academic goes so far as to call “Christian fiction” and “propaganda” the gospel accounts of lengthy trials with Ciaphas and Pilate and a public outcry for Barabbas’ release, but the two-hour special doesn’t stray too lengthily into controversial areas. “Jesus: His Life” is a good, objective primer for biblical novices but doesn’t offer much for the more studied curious.

* “Joseph” airs in two parts on TNT. Part I will be shown Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m.; Part II on Monday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. “Jesus: His Life” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on A&E.;