Scorsese’s The Saints: an admirable portrayal of St. Joan of Arc

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 19, 2024 | In Reviews

Note for readers asking how to watch this series—it is streaming on Fox Nation, which normally costs $2/month, but you can get three free months using the promo code SAINTS.

You may have heard some buzz about the new docudrama series, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, which just premiered on the Fox Nation streaming service. The series will cover eight saints, with four airing over the next month and four more in Lent 2025: St. Joan of Arc, St. John the Baptist, St. Sebastian, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Becket, and St. Moses the Black.

Catholics have reason to distrust Scorsese based on some of his past work, but having watched the first episode on St. Joan of Arc, I can give it fairly high praise. The short version is that the dramatization of St. Joan making up the bulk of the episode is excellently done, but not so much the ending panel discussion between four liberal Catholics of a certain age (though it’s also not as bad as I feared).

Though Scorsese’s name is in the title and he is an executive producer, the initial creator of the series is Matti Leshem, an Israeli producer who also founded the production company New Mandate Films, whose mission is to “mine the rich depth of Jewish history and literature”. Despite being Jewish Leshem was sent by his parents to a Catholic school where he became fascinated by the stories of the saints (especially martyrs), leading to the idea he pitched to Scorsese.

Meanwhile, Scorsese’s interest in doing a project like this goes back to the 1980s, when he was inspired by one of his cinematic influences, Roberto Rossellini, who had left behind narrative filmmaking to make educational docudramas for Italian television (some with religious subjects). Back then, Scorsese even considered leaving Hollywood to collaborate with the same Italian television network that had worked with Rossellini.

Aside from Rossellini’s inspiration of the docudrama format, it’s interesting to me that this series covers saints, like Joan and Francis, whose stories have already been adapted by directors Scorsese greatly admires. There is no anxiety of influence here, though; instead, as is perhaps appropriate for an educational program, the series’ creators are happy to show the influence of past masters. According to AdWeek, “The Joan of Arc episode, for example, pays homage to Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, while the Kolbe episode has some of the vérité immediacy of such neorealist masters as Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica.” You can see from the trailer that each saint’s story has been given a somewhat different look, most notably the black-and-white Kolbe episode.

Whereas Rossellini’s docudramas have a unique format in which the historical characters themselves deliver information, The Saints uses the more standard tactic of alternating dramatic sequences with narration from Scorsese. What sets this series apart from other docudramas is the skill with which the drama is executed.

Episode 1: St. Joan of Arc

The Joan of Arc episode was directed by Elizabeth Chomko and written by longtime Scorsese documentary collaborator Kent Jones. Thus, it does not feel like a conspicuously Scorsese-ized version of St. Joan (whatever that would mean). I wouldn’t say there are any big surprises or revelations in how the material is treated, except in the very fact that in these times of subversion, the history of the Maid of Orleans is given to us straight, with no spin. (It helps that we have detailed transcripts of her trials, so there is little for the filmmaker to invent.) It is basically a very well-executed, moving rendition of the story, with a fair bit of historical detail added in narration.

There is no suggestion of Joan being a transgender or feminist icon in Liah O’Prey’s performance. She is appropriately bold and grim when her back is to the wall, but there is nothing of the phony girlboss demeanor which plagues so many portrayals of the “strong woman” nowadays, from Cabrini to The Rings of Power. There is no self-assertion, egoistic focus on “agency”, or pride taken in being a woman warrior; rather, she repeatedly says that she has no choice but to do God’s will. It is on God’s behalf, not her own, that this teenage girl defies a tribunal full of older men and clerics who have the power to put her to death.

Neither is her story stripped of the supernatural to be palatable to modern skeptics. There are a number of scenes portraying Joan’s visions, and there is nothing to suggest that she is deluded, unless it be that we do not see what she sees and hear what she hears—which is, at any rate, a legitimate artistic choice.

The visual style is gritty without being visually unappealing; Joan is shown caked with blood and dirt in battle scenes, but it is suggested that this comes from her tending to the dead and dying rather than fighting herself. One of the most moving scenes is Joan praying the Paternoster over a dying English soldier.

Other than her resolve to do nothing but God’s will, the focus is on Joan’s betrayal by her allies and her suffering at the hands of the Burgundian-English ecclesiastical tribunal. O’Prey ably navigates the transition between Joan’s strong defiance at the beginning of the trial and her momentary lapse (and simultaneous grief at her own fall) when, weakened by months of unrelenting pressure, she signs a false confession of perjury in order to avoid execution. I was moved to tears at the moments of Joan’s greatest suffering.

In order to break Joan as a symbol of French resistance and discredit her divine mission, the tribunal tried to sully her character in various ways, including accusing her of unchastity. To this end they repeatedly had her examined to see if her virginity was intact. This is shown in two brief shots, handled visually in the same way that movies treat childbirth scenes. The reality of how Joan was treated is distasteful, but there is nothing exploitative about the portrayal (in contrast to just about any old painting of Susannah and the elders).

L’autre chaussure

So I find nothing to complain about, and much to praise, in the dramatization of St. Joan’s story. But the episode is not quite over yet, and what comes next will rightly make Catholics want to scream and run away. Each episode ends with a brief panel discussion with “friends of Martin Scorsese”. There is not a faithful Catholic among them. The first episode’s panel is Scorsese, Fr. James Martin (who needs no introduction, and should be kept a thousand miles away from any commentary on St. Sebastian), Mary Karr (poet, essayist and self-described “cafeteria Catholic”), Paul Elie (who sold out Flannery O’Connor for her alleged racism in a New Yorker essay a few years ago). Mercifully absent from this episode but present in future panels will be Fr. Edward Beck, a Passionist CNN contributor who once said we don’t know whether or not Jesus was celibate.

Given this gallery of wretches, it’s shocking that the discussion wasn’t far worse than it was: perhaps they could only do so much damage in ten minutes. They mostly stick to some basic observations about the saint’s story, opening with Fr. Martin explaining how the canonization process developed. Karr and Elie contribute virtually nothing to the discussion; one wonders if their only qualification was being “friends of Martin Scorsese”, because they certainly have no special insight or expertise on the matter.

My biggest fear was that they would make a transgender meal out of St. Joan’s dressing as a man. Thank God, there was not a hint of it. My second-biggest fear was that they would play St. Joan up as a feminist warrior-woman. Even here they did not: as in the dramatic section, the emphasis was not on what this story proves about women, but on St. Joan’s fidelity to her God-given mission for the liberation of France.

But there was no way we would get off scot-free here. The discussion founders when it reaches the topic of Joan having her virginity inspected. Mary Karr uses this abusive incident as opportunity to complain in typical liberal boomer fashion about the Church’s preoccupation with regulating female sexuality, questioning why it would matter whether she was a virgin. Fr. Martin then jumps in to “defend” the medieval emphasis on virginity by revising its significance, explaining that “virginity was considered a form of purity back then”, but that modern scholars have suggested that a woman retaining her virginity at that time was a way of retaining power. Thus, says Martin, “you don’t want to elevate virginity per se“, but in a patriarchal context it could be a “radical act of self-determination and self-definition”. It is true that being a nun was one of the only ways for a woman to have some independence in the middle ages, but this attempt to shake virginity loose from its connection to chastity, redirecting it to self-definition rather than dedication to God, is exactly the sort of thing that makes you wish Fr. Martin himself would be called up before a tribunal.

As for Scorsese himself, a clip bundled in the special features curbs any hope that this series heralds his return to the Faith: “Faith is a question that I don’t think is ever answered.... We can never really know, ultimately, who and what we are. Faith is accompanied by doubt, and I’ve come to understand that we have to live with this doubt. I’ve come to understand that faith and doubt are inseparable. They almost become the same thing.” We should pray for Scorsese to make an act of true faith, a supernatural virtue which is confident and certain, and especially for him to repent of The Last Temptation of Christ before he dies.

Yet, as far as this first episode is concerned, Scorsese and his collaborators deserve credit for dramatizing the life of St. Joan of Arc as it really happened, for telling the story straight (pun intended) especially at a time when others are blasphemously portraying her as a proto-trans figure. The panel discussion aside, this rendition of St. Joan’s story is more accurate, reverent, and truly religious in its focus than, say, Cabrini.

And Scorsese deserves credit for something else too. In another clip attached to the series, he says that people today run away from religion because they don’t want to risk themselves; they fear the intimacy of faith and the depth of opening up to a world beyond the physical. Part of his stated goal for this series is to break through the contemporary bias against the entire subject of religion and against religious art. Let’s hope the panelists don’t get in the way.