Bible Films Blog Review of 2014

In previous years, I’ve offered a review of the year, although this has rather fallen by the wayside in recent time. However, 2014 was a bit of a stonker, so it would seem remiss not to do at least something.

The big news was, of course, the long awaited release of a number of biblical epics, which hit not just the odd art-house cinema, or graced a local congregation with a decentish video projector, but in the local, everyday cinemas. Russell Crowe was talking about Noah in primetime TV shows. The Guardian was offering opinion pieces about Moses every time Ridley Scott coughed in a vaguely atheistic manner.

As it turned out neither film made the, um, waves, that their respective studios had hoped for and neither director will be pleased to hear that they are more likely to win a Razzie than an Oscar come the spring.

But before all that there was the matter of the Son of God - not so much the actual one as the cinema release of the Gospel footage from the History Channel’s 2013 series The Bible. Cutting down a TV series to a movie is a risky strategy. On the one hand the popularity of the “best of” genre might mean that he TV series might just be part of a lengthy marketing campaign – the world’s longest ever trailer if you like. But the question still remained, why would people get in their cars, drive out of town and pay through the nose to watch something they have already seen for “free”?

As it turned out Son of God did rather well, perhaps because compelling answers were found to that question. Buying a ticket to Son of God was a statement of faith, a chance to send a message to Hollywood. Or you could buy two and bring along a friend with whom you wanted to share your faith.

From an artistic point of view however the quality of the product was largely the same as that of the original 2013 series. Jesus was still too blond and off-puttingly good looking; the dialogue and the acting still left a great deal to be desired; and it still wasn’t really clear what Jesus was actually about other than being nice.

One Bible film hero who eluded, with consummate ease, any charge of being overly nice, was Russell Crowe’s Noah, who shifted from grunting environmentalist to genocidal maniac over the course of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. It’s the kind of precipice along which many edge along when they tell us how bad humans in general, and children in particular, are bad for the environment? But that’s another matter.

Actually the scenes where Noah contemplates whether he should kill his own granddaughter were, in my opinion, rather misunderstood. Noah didn’t want to murder members of his own family, he just thought it might be what “The Creator” was calling him to do. After all it was the logical extension of what he had already done – a point that may of the faithful struggle to appreciate. It was a great performance from Crowe, but the terrain of unlikeable anti-hero seemed to leave the film, rather than just its antihero rather unloved. It was a shame. Aronofsky’s bizarre epic was drenched in biblical and other religious references, many of which weren’t even half as odd as the original text.

December is often a busy time of year for those of us interested in Bible films and 2014 would prove no exception. In the cinema Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (my review ) received a fairly lukewarm welcome in many western countries and was banned in several countries in North Africa and the Middle East. In the current climate it's hard to know which is more damaging, western indifference or Egyptian anger.

In the west the film's biggest talking point was the supposed white washing, casting Joel Edgerton and Christian Bale as an Egyptian and someone who manages to pass as an Egyptian for forty years. I must admit I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand Christian art has always portrayed the faith's heroes in its own image as a way of relating to them. At the same time, as my comments above about Son of God suggest I also like to see more realistic casting.

One film that did embrace a more ethnically accurate Jesus was The Gospel of John the latest output from the Lumo Project (an offshoot of Big Book Media). The series, which is available on Netflix, narrates John's Gospel over dramatized reconstructed video footage. Jesus is played by Selva Rasalingam who is half Tamil. If his face is familiar it’s because he has been playing Jesus in various Lumo/Big Book projects over the last few years, including the music video for Deliriou5?'s "History Maker" and the BBC’s The Story of Jesus (2011). Also part of those projects, as well as 2012’s David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul, is director David Batty.

The Lumo Project will eventually cover all four gospels in the same style, and Netflix features narration in both the King James and the New International versions of the Bible. As a medium it’s very similar to the Genesis Project’s Gospel of Luke (1979) which starred Brian Deacon and was recut as Jesus (1979), certainly it’s quite different in feel from other the two Visual Bible word for word projects Matthew (1994) and Gospel of John (2003).

Given that John’s Gospel only received the word for word treatment 11 years ago, it’s surprising that the filmmakers have chosen to start with John, particularly as John’s wordy gospel is perhaps the one least suited to such a treatment. Personally I wished they’d opted for the only gospel not, yet, to have been filmed this way, Mark. But that will later this year if the IMDb is to be believed. Hopefully it will get a UK Netflix release as well. Incidentally 2015 will also see Rasalingam star as James in a Jesus-cameo film Clavius

The appearance of The Gospel of John on Netflix seems to reflect a broader trend of niche faith-based films being broadcast away from traditional channels. Another such production in 2014 was The Red Tent, an adaptation of Anita Diamant’s historicalish novel of the same name. Diamant’s novel took the stories from around Genesis around Leah and Jacob’s daughter Dinah and re-imagines Shechem as her lover rather than her rapist. Young’s mini-series, which aired on the Lifetime network early in December, cast Rebecca Ferguson, star of 2013’s excellent The White Queen’s, and also features Minnie Driver, Debra Winger, Morena Baccarin and Hiam Abbass in prominent roles. Peter Chattaway has a great interview about the series with the director Roger Young.

The other TV film worth a mention was the BBC animated short film On Angel Wings, which aired in the UK on Christmas Eve. It starred an old man recalling the visit of the Angels on the first Christmas night to the group of shepherds he worked for and how one angel secretly flew him to the stable so he got to meet the baby Jesus. Readers may recall my enjoyment of the Fourth King a fictional tale about the magi. On Angel Wings would make a good companion piece dealing as it does with Jesus' other Christmas visitors.

Then there were several smaller films which brought the more poetic parts of the Bible to the screen. The Song re-imagined the life of King Solomon as an amorous country singer, with nods to both Song of Songs/Solomon and Ecclesiastes. Meanwhile Amos Gitai directed one of the short films in the anthology film Words with Gods. Gitai already has two fine Bible films under his wings, [Esther (1996) and Golem: l'esprit de l'exil (1992)] and here he took the on the work of his namesake, the prophet Amos.

Perhaps the most significant of the films dealing with the more poetic parts of the Bible was Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan. As with The Song it took the form of a modern story, this time the story revolves around a man fighting corruption in the coastal town where he lives, but there is also a healthy dose of the Book of Job. It's also likely to be the most successful of those films with a substantial link to the Bible, having been Russia's entry for the foreign language Oscar it's now one of the final nominations and has already won the Golden Globe in the same category.*

Documentary-wise it was a fairly light year, though it's more than possible I missed something. David Suchet did feature in In the Footsteps of St. Peter, the follow up to his 2013 In the Footsteps of St Paul .

However, there were a couple of new books about Bible Films that are worth a mention. David Shepherd's "The Bible on Silent Film" looks to be an excellent guide to an under-discussed period in the genre's development. I couldn't afford the hardback or a Kindle editions so I've only read excerpts but the bits I've read are full of fascinating detail and insight. Technically the hard back was released right at the end of 2013, but seeing as the paper back will be released in March this year, we can split the difference. I'm looking forward to getting a copy.

Another book to touch upon the sub-genre is Graham Holderness' "Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film" which touched on Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ and The DaVinci Code, as well as various books about the life of Jesus. There were also various books released related to the films mentioned above including a picture book for the team behind Son of God.

And lastly there was a conference. Not so much about a Jesus Films as a very close relation. "Jesus and Brian: or What Have the Pythons Ever Done for us?" ran for three days in June in Kings College, London and featured an impressive team of speakers, including John Cleese and Terry Jones, and even gained some national press coverage. Sadly neither time, nor money, nor health, permitted me to be there, but Mark Goodacre made it, blogged about it and did rather rub salt in the wounds of those of us who would have loved to be there but weren't. I mean, he got to meet John Cleese.

Anyway 2015 promises a great deal. There are various films due for release about which Peter Chattaway is doing some great blogging. He also posts numerous things on the Bible Films Facebook page, for which I'm incredibly grateful. There's also a few books to look out for, including David Shepherd's follow up volume "The Silents of Jesus" and there might even be a book with a couple of chapters by myself to report on in next year's review of the year.

*There were some subsequent edits here, made after the Oscar nominations

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

Given its big-budget and epic scale, it's tempting to think of Ridley Scott's Exodus: God's and Kings as a remake of The Ten Commandments (1956) for the 3D age, but in many ways it's more of a live action remake of The Prince of Egypt (1998). Certainly the two films explore the theme of brotherhood, a fact underlined by Scott dedication of the film to his late brother. Whilst The Ten Commandments also dwells on the rivalry between Ramses and Moses, no love is lost between them - Ramses' jealousy-fuelled disdain is matched only by Moses' impassive morality.

Here however the bromance-turned-sour theme rests on solid performances from Christian Bale (Moses) and his sort of cousin Ramses (Joel Edgerton). Early on their "father" Seti (in an intriguing performance by Coen Brothers' favourite John Turturro) expresses his qualms about Ramses' faults, but when Seti's death coincides with discoveries about Moses' past, the new Pharaoh swoops to secure his throne.

In the run up to Exodus' release I found it hard to imagine Christian Bale as Moses, least of all when portrayed as a combative fighter-general who turns terrorist. In other Moses movies these scenes were played by a pure and upright Heston, a feeble Kingsley, an effeminately drawn Kilmer and by Burt Lancaster's son. But Bale's performance is one of the best aspects of the film, bringing a new angle to Moses and the threat of a Hebrew uprising. Various Moses films have depicted the actions of the fearful Pharaoh who drowned the Hebrew boys. Few have captured the dread and paranoia behind them. Bale's more muscular performance in tandem with Edgerton's subtle and not unsympathetic turn as Ramses take the film into new territory.

Perhaps it's because the two leads perform so well that Scott draws so little on the wealth of acting talent he also had on the payroll. Sigourney Weaver is almost invisible. Aaron Paul hardly speaks. Turturro sparks in his few scenes but is snuffed out of soon. Kingsley gets the next greatest amount of screen time, but even his role is limited.

Indeed other than the leads, arguably the most interesting performance comes from the 11-year old Isaac Andrews as Malak, a figure halfway between God and his messenger. This fits well with the ambiguity in Exodus 3 over the identity of the voice that speaks to Moses. Not a few have objected to this portrayal finding Andrews petulant and inconsistent. One can only assume these objections come from those who haven't read Exodus 4:24-26 in a while (where God, having just commissioned Moses, then tries to kill him).

Yet despite these subtleties, it's difficult to see what persuaded Fox to press ahead with this project. It's been ten years since The Passion stunned movie execs with its surprise success at the box office. But that success was routed in the devout turning out to show their support for a faithful retelling of the pivotal moment in their faith. It was shot on a small budget and as both Hollywood studios and Christian filmmakers have discovered, what will get the devout to turn out has proved perilously hard to predict.

Furthermore Scott's vision of the film, gestated more in atheism than in belief in the supernatural, was the kind of approach that was likely to leave church audiences wary whilst not sufficiently detoxifying the Bible brand to appeal to the non-religious.

As it turns out, though, Jewish, Christian and Muslim audiences need not have been so cautious. Scott's scepticism only results in ambiguity rather than a credible debunking and, for me at least, the film's internal logic undoes much of the scientific theories it presents.

Take, for example, the bump on the head which immediately precedes Moses' first encounter with God. This is arguably Exodus' most controversial moment suggesting that Moses was, in fact, suffering from some kind of hallucination. Yet such a theory suffers because from the very start of the film Moses is the most rational, anti-religious sceptic in the whole film. Wouldn't he, of all people, questioned whether his bash on the head was partly responsible for his new vision? Would such trauma-induced visions persist even for a few weeks, let alone the months and years that pass over the course of the film?

Then there are the plagues. Scott draws on theories that have been around for many years which have suggested that the rivers turning to blood was what drove the frogs onto land, which caused the plague of flies and resulted in various other plagues occurring. Strangely, such theories tend to act like Rorschach ink blot tests: Believers see confirmation of the events narrated in scripture; unbelievers see a rational explanation that removes the need for God.

Exodus: Gods and Kings puts this theory on the lips of an Egyptian professional sceptic played by Trainspotting's Ewen Bremner. However, instead of portraying Bremner's character as a wise, archetypal scientist, centuries ahead of his time, he is played as a comically incompetent charlatan, his sudden execution being played for one of the film's few laughs. It's not unprecedented that such a comical character unwittingly hits upon scientific truth (Pumbaa's "big balls of gas millions of light years away") but these moments are generally for knowing comic purposes themselves rather than for advancing serious theories.

What's also odd is that whereas these domino theories about the plagues tend to see the first plague as the result of exponential growth in the numbers of red-coloured algae, here a plague of crocodiles descend on a fishing boat and having devoured the fishermen they then turn on each other. The modification, though, raises two further critical problems. Firstly even this bloodbath seems insufficient to cause the level of pollution that the film suggests and moreover, what caused the sudden and unusual convergence of all these crocodiles in the first place?

Perhaps the most glaring example of this tendency is in the parting of the Red Sea. Here the film's theory is that the seabed is cleared by the drawback preceding the tsunami which then annihilates Pharaoh's soldiers. It's not necessarily a bad theory, but it's both unnecessary from a biblical point of view and undermined by subsequent action. On the one hand a far simpler explanation can be found in the footnotes of the Bible itself - the earliest manuscripts talk not about the Red Sea, but about the Sea of Reeds - a shallower, marshier area many miles away, where ordinary overnight tidal variations might make all the difference. In any case this section of the film culminates in the movie's most preposterous scene where despite getting hit with the full force of the tsunami both Moses and Ramses somehow manage to survive.

In many ways this gets right to the tension at the heart of such a production which is caught between forwarding rational alternative explanations and presenting a spectacular biblical action movie. So many moments in film history rest on the utterly unbelievable - from Buster Keaton's antics on The General to the spinning hallway scene in Inception. Attempting to explain one seemingly watery implausibility (the parting of a huge body of water) and then randomly inventing another immediately afterwards (Moses surviving a tsunami) them is to go against the flow of the both this specific film and the broader genre. Why not just pass on the whole "dry land" bit and have Moses and his followers surf over on the crest of a giant wave?

Indeed what's strange about Scott's attempts to explain away the supernatural aspects of the story is that far simpler explanations for the miraculous events described in the final texts of Exodus can be found through the work of literary criticism. But then they would not have provided the ingredients for a biblical blockbuster. Ultimately Scott seems to want to have his cake whilst audiences eat it.

And as blockbuster historical epic beefcake goes, it's surprisingly palatable. It's no Gladiator, of course, even to those who question its weaknesses, but it's a far greater film than Scott's woeful Robin Hood and a good deal better than either Kingdom of Heaven or 1492: Conquest of Paradise. As with those films the detailed sets, costumes and CGI make for an impressive spectacle and the pacing and tension are good throughout. Indeed of all the Moses films I have seen none capture the drama of the chasing Egyptian army as plausibly as this. Sadly I suspect that yet another commercial failure by a Biblical epic will lead to a long hiatus in big budget Bible films for the immediate future.