During the Christmas season, we tend to see an uptick in New
Testament movies, largely focused around the birth of Christ.
Early this year, we saw the Old Testament get
a little representation with
Noah,
and now we’re turning to the second book with Ridley Scott’s
Exodus: Gods and Kings. But where I
appreciated
Noah’s steps away from
the source material (odd though the rock monsters may have been),
Exodus turns out to be too devoted to
the text without taking advantage of the technical and narrative innovations
the film teases.
Christian Bale stars as Moses on the eve of his step-brother
Ramses’s (Joel Edgerton) ascension to the throne of Egypt.
After the revelation that Moses was born a
Hebrew slave leads to his exile, a visitation from God (“I Am,” in the persona
of a small boy) compels Moses to return to free his people, with ten
plague-shaped assists from the heavens.
The first thing about
Exodus
is that it’s very competent. Scott’s direction of the action scenes recalls his
good work on
Gladiator, and the
plague scenes are terrifying for their computer-generated precision.
And of course Bale is doing his usual
top-quality work in a performance as Moses that sees him undergo at least two
distinct physical changes, two major philosophical paradigm shifts, and
frequent conversations with thin air that lack no conviction.
Edgerton is a great Ramses, as well, and the scenes leading
up to the plague of the first-born are highly effective.
It’s a shame, though, that some of the
editing in the film turns his public executions into punchlines, compromising a
more nuanced performance by equating it with mustache-twirling villainy.
Exodus
recovers with a strong supporting cast, including Ben Kingsley, Aaron Paul,
Sigourney Weaver, and John Turturro as Seti I.
These are all great performers, but they’re not given
terribly much to do.
Kingsley is
basically shorthand for gravitas, meant to lend weight quickly to the Hebrew
elders, and he manages to check off another ethnicity on his career’s bingo
card without having much to do outside of two or three scenes.
Ditto for Paul, whose role as Joshua should
have been the Robin to Bale’s Batman, so to speak, but he’s mostly set dressing
with an unconvincing accent.
Weaver and
Turturro are out of the movie in about twenty minutes; a subplot in which
Weaver wants Moses dead peters out rather quickly.
The idea that Ramses’s mother is plotting behind his back to
assassinate her stepson is a fascinating one, but the film doesn’t know what to
do with it.
This is actually a major
problem with
Exodus because it has so
many opportunities to make an original stamp on the Moses story, but it never
commits to any of those.
The apparent
emphasis on the brother relationship between Moses and Ramses seems like the
centerpiece of the film, but it too fades away, never really delivering on even
the basic comparison of the two men as leaders of opposing armies (teased by an
opening shot of a priestesses reading offal).
Even the idea of God appearing as a small boy is a neat riff, but it’s
never more than set dressing when it could have been the defining element of
the film (similar to how
Noah
replaced God for a more sci-fi being called The Creator).
The most interesting subtext in the film is a broader
allusion to the history of the Jewish people.
In one scene, assassinated Hebrew slaves are burned en masse, while
elsewhere slaves are forced to hide under their homes to evade Egyptian search
parties. In these moments, it seems Scott is building an analogy to the
Holocaust, and the film’s conclusion, gesturing toward nation-building, seems
to weigh heavily on the side of the Israelis in the contemporary conflict over
the Holy Land.
A film more dedicated to
this analogy would have been an amazing inflection of the story we all know so
well, but three scenes in 150 minutes isn’t enough on which to hang a
comprehensive interpretation.
Exodus: Gods and Kings
isn’t a bad film (a tremendous improvement from the last Scott film I saw, the
dismal
Prometheus), but it is
disappointing for how little it pushes the story beyond what we already know.
For anyone who knows the story, even in its broadest strokes, the film won’t
hold much suspense or even any emotion beyond a feeling of obligation as events
proceed unremarkably.
For all the technical
skill at work in rendering lifelike plague sequences, what’s missing is a sense
of spectacle, something we saw quite successfully in DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments.
Despite the dated Technicolor and the mild
doses of camp, DeMille’s original epic had a scope and a pervading attitude of
wonder that
Exodus is sadly lacking.
Exodus isn’t a big-budget remake of
The Ten Commandments, just a more
precise, condensed, and slightly better-acted version of the same story without
the grandeur the narrative demands.
Exodus: Gods and Kings
is rated PG-13 for “violence including battle sequences and intense images.”
The standard bevy of plagues is seen here,
with boils and insects being particularly grotesque; some combat scenes feature
violence without any blood.
The Gift (2015) –
Hands up if you’ve heard of this film? I suspect not many people are aware of
this, Joel Edgerton’s directorial debut in which Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall
(two favorites around these parts) play Simon & Robyn Callem, a married
couple who relocate to California, where they meet Gordon (Edgerton), an old
acquaintance of Simon’s. Husband and wife have varying perceptions of Gordon,
disagreeing over whether he’s a lonely friend or a creepy stalker, which
unearths latent tensions in the Callem household. That’s a pretty guarded plot
summary, because one of the great delights of The Gift is its unpredictability. This movie takes so many bizarre
turns and veers into more than a few strange directions that it’d really be
criminal to divulge too much in advance. Suffice it to say that Edgerton – who
pulls triple duty on acting, directing, and writing – has put together
something quite compelling and unsettlingly unique. As ever, Bateman brings his
expert comedic timing to bear, but he gets to display here more than most
places I’ve seen him (excepting, perhaps, This
Is Where I Leave You) how deft he can be with more serious acting roles.
Hall is sufficiently unsettled as Bateman’s beleaguered spouse, while Edgerton
walks the line between genuine and disturbing in a way that recalls classic
flicks like Fatal Attraction or more
recently Enduring Love. I’m surprised
that this flew under the radar, considering its critical reception and its star
power and its overall success as a thriller.
