Shakespeare becomes this difficult, serious, high-culture, nigh-impenetrable thing, that bears little resemblance to the actual works of Shakespeare. We tend to talk about Shakespeare in this weird, abstracted and academic way.It’s kind of heartbreaking, when a film stacks the deck so in favour of me loving it, as if it was made with me in mind, but fucks it up so badly that I think “it’s basically fine, I guess, I don’t know, it has some problems.” It might be targeted at a very specific niche of which I am a part: Mary Magdalene was described as not appealing to Christians because it’s such a different take on the Gospel story, and not appealing to non-Christians because it’s so religious, but I’m a feminist Christian whose favourite film is The Last Temptation of Christ, king of unorthodox Gospel films. It might tick a bunch of boxes of things I reliably enjoy, like Hell or High Water, a neo-western about the Great Recession featuring comedic bank robberies and a great performance from Jeff Bridges, one of my favourite actors.

Sometimes a film is so set up for me to like it that nothing speaks to its failure like my thinking it’s only okay. This article is part of the Notes on Failure series, which discusses interesting cinematic failures.

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