The Nativity Story

Even the dimmest Hollywood executive would have to concede that you're onto a winner with the film version of The Greatest Story Ever Told.

To begin with, well, it’s the greatest story ever told. Not a bad start. But what makes director Catherine Hardwicke's reconstruction of holy events is the fleshing out of hitherto sketchy characters.

Hardwicke, who showed she could deal convincingly with teenage angst in Thirteen, takes as her starting point the unique predicament of a couple of ostensibly ordinary youngsters.

Mary (Castle-Hughes) and Joseph (Isaac) both eke out a subsistence living (thanks to Herod's punitive tax system) in the poor village of Nazareth, he a carpenter and she as a helper to mom.

However, their pre-ordained lives take a very different course when, after their arranged marriage has been announced, she returns from a visit to friends of the family heavily pregnant.

Hardwicke treats this turn of events with a suitably comic touch as Mary's parents and her understandably miffed hubby-to-be greet the situation with incredulity…until an appearance by an angel puts everyone in the picture.

We then follow the couple as they journey to Bethlehem for the birth with some dramatic frisson introduced by Herod's impending decree that all first-borns under two are to be slaughtered.

There's nothing tricksy here. No radical reinterpretation of events as they are laid down in the stories from Matthew and Luke. Just a story of the nativity simply told.

There's also some room for humour - the three magi are portrayed as a regally bickering version of the Three Stooges while Herod's murderous lieutenant has the look of Dave Lee Travis. Just imagine the Hairy Cornflake overseeing the Slaughter of the Innocents.

At a time when the Yuletide schedules are polluted with seasonal dross such as Christmas with the Kranks and Deck The Halls, this back-to-basics approach pays dividends.

Praise be that Little Mel didn't get hold of it as a companion piece to The Passion of the Christ.

Tim Evans