Exodus: Gods And Kings

Any movie where John Turturro plays a Pharaoh and Christian Bale plays Moses is worth seeing in my book. But just as it should not have taken the Jews 40 years to cross that desert, it should not have taken Ridley Scott almost three hours to tell the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt.
But three hours it takes, and it befuddles that Scott, who is quite a visual storyteller, chooses to linger on endless chariot chases, multiple aerial views of Memphis (not Tennessee), has Jews sauntering through the desert with what seems nary a care in the world,  and Moses falling in love for forever in screen time with Zipporah (who cares?). But then he doesn't let the story alight on more interesting stuff.
Blink and you will miss the golden calf. But the most egregious omission is that he diminishes the very payoff of the story: the bequeathing of the ten commandments to the Jews. They were slaves for centuries, they are liberated by Moses with the help of some fabulous CGI plagues, courtesy of a very testy God who murders everything in sight, and, in an amazing ironic twist with a Biblical amount of chutzpah, gives them the basic tenets of civilization in writing, which include, in capital letters, Thou Shalt Not Kill. It is with these laws that they will flourish as a free nation. Alas, we are not to see this epic moment in this epic film. Instead, we see a much diminished Moses sitting inside a dumpy cart guarding the ark of the covenant as if it were lost luggage at La Guardia.
Why bury the most redeeming aspect of such a violent story? To me this is far more ridiculous than the decision to have God appear to Moses in the form of a British child. I would have much preferred the thundering voice of say, Benedict Cumberbatch coming from behind that feeble burning bush that looks like someone lit it by accident with a can of Sterno, (perhaps Reese Witherspoon wandering in from Wild - same story), but apparently Scott and his four writers move in mysterious ways.
Having a physical presence for Moses to argue with is not an uninspired choice. It may have seemed more modern to the filmmakers, but it does detract a wee bit from the majesty and mystery of an unseen, but very much felt, God.
Epic movies about anything that happened more than two centuries ago are not to be taken factually or seriously. They tend to be a hoot. Hence, it is my humble opinion that it is a waste of time to disparage the racial casting in this movie. We might also whine about 2000 years of Western art in which Jesus, the Virgin and the Apostles are always all as white as Wonder Bread. I didn't see an actual Jew playing any Jews, but I haven't heard anyone complain about this either. I agree that movies need to be more inclusive and true to reality in casting, but not necessarily when it comes to ancient times. Ancient times call for British thespians and Aaron Paul looking as if he'd rather be dead in Arizona than Joshua in this other desert dump.
Turturro nails his sadly short part with a couple of wonderful scenes with Bale, with whom he seems to have real rapport. Edgerton, who has quite a pair of Egyptian lips, is also quite good and campy as a petulant megalomaniac with daddy issues. He finds something to hold on to in his Ramses, while Bale has a harder time finding Moses as Moses tries to find himself. It's hard to be a Jew. Also, it's hard to play a hero whose transformation into a revolutionary is not very convincing. Is it because he saw the suffering of the people, because Ben Kingsley told him to, or because God finally appeared to him? I love that he argues with God, true to biblical form, but I didn't understand how Moses gained his sense of purpose. So Moses is conflicted. But his conflict seems visited on him by the rulebook of Hollywood Personal Conflicts 101, rather than by a real identity crisis. Being an Egyptian prince your entire life only to find out you are a lowly Jew has got to to mess with your head, but Scott prefers to cut (again and again) to the bigger battles.
We can discuss other strange liberties taken by this movie, such as why the very corrupt and evil character of the Viceroy (an Egyptian played by Ben Mendelsohn, probably the only Jew around), is a raging homosexual of the most insidious variety. Why does he have to be a sibilant gay? Is that in the Bible? More importantly, is anybody other than me complaining about this yet? Why bring in Sigourney Weaver to give her half a second of screen time? After three hours of some truly well crafted spectacle interrupted by unnecessary padding, I realized that the reason why this this epic story was failing is because it has been boiled down to yet another irrelevant yarn about two dudes fighting. GAWD. Guys, you got to get a hold of yourselves. This is getting tiresome. You can feel the movie balloon in preposterousness while it deflates in intelligence as this ridiculous, simplistic thread is pursued. If we're not going to have a payoff of Biblical proportions, why bother?

The Imitation Game

Sure, it is a conventional biopic about a most unconventional man: Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who broke the code for the German Enigma machine which helped the allies win World War II, and he basically created the world's first computer, only to be humiliated and driven to suicide by the British government for being a homosexual. The Queen only gave him a posthumous pardon last year. A man who should have been hailed as a national hero but instead had to choose between incarceration or chemical castration because of his sexuality. Tragic.
It is a fascinating story, given a toothless. crowd pleasing treatment by director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore (based on a biography by Andrew Hodges), under the recognizable imprimatur of The Weinstein Company. And yes, some of the one liners are painfully obvious, especially when repeated three times, but it is to the credit of the splendid cast, led by the excellent Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, that they do their best, which is very good, to make them sound better than they are.
As heartwarming Weinstein Company biopics go, this one, with all its flaws, somehow works. It helps that the cast is uniformly excellent. It helps that my beloved Mark Strong plays the role of an MI-6 agent. He does so much with a shrug or a risen eyebrow; he nails his every line with elegant precision and a sense of humor. He is divine. So is Matthew Goode, as Turing's hostile colleague, so is Keira Knightley, as the sole woman to be hired to try to break the code, and of course so is Cumberbatch, who makes Turing into a rather adorable, socially awkward curmudgeon. Of course, I would have preferred a much darker, cerebral movie. After all, all the British pictures of the Weinstein Company (The King's Speech, My Week With Marilyn, etc) seem to be made by cookie cutter, but let's face it, they are a bit of a guilty pleasure. If you, like me, are an unrepentant anglophile and fan of British thespians who loves nothing better than to hear Mark Strong or Colin Firth or Benny Cumberbatch, or Judi Dench serenade you with their most mellifluous elocution, well then, it is heaven.
Alexandre Desplat, who is perilously close to falling into a vat of schmaltz and never coming back, provides the music, which at times is very effective (although I miss his formerly edgier work, as in Birth or Syriana). The production design makes London at war look like a beautiful, color coordinated diorama, there's plenty of tweed to go around, and the story has Turing solve Enigma by overhearing a girl gossiping at a bar. I have no idea if this was true or not, but it is hokey and extremely entertaining at the same time. Alan Turing deserves a smarter movie, but this one is very enjoyable, as long as you forgive the clichés.

NYFF: 12 Years A Slave

This film by Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) is based on the harrowing real story and book by Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free Black man from Saratoga, NY, who is kidnapped to be sold to slave owners in the South. It is McQueen's most conventional film to date, and though it is a powerful movie that retains his trademark unflinching look at intense human suffering, this time focused on slavery, there is something stilted about it. All his movies have a paradoxical tension between extreme emotional states and aesthetic distance, which works well with their intimate scope. But this is a big period epic, and you can feel the tension between the need to tell a story in a more conventional manner and McQueen's suggestive style. There is tension, for instance, between the eloquent literary, almost theatrical dialogue, which sounds faithful to Northup's narrative, and the realistic depiction of brutality.
The most astounding scene in the movie is a wordless tableau that takes place in the middle of the film and that says more about the depravity of American slavery than anything else in the movie, or anywhere, for that matter. Were it shown separately, it would be one of the greatest short films ever made. This is the kind of condensed visual metaphor that makes McQueen an exciting director, but this style is mostly sacrificed for more straightforward storytelling, and by corollary, more commercial possibilities.
The filmmakers want to make the story accessible to the widest possible audience, which is as should be. But this responsibility to garner a wide audience presents an interesting conundrum. I could not help but think of the Holocaust, because the parallels with American slavery are many and obvious, as are the parallels on how genocidal violence is depicted in film.
Slavery is the African-American Holocaust. McQueen makes sure this is branded into our consciousness by showing episode after episode of unspeakable cruelty. Sticking closely to what Solomon Northup witnessed and lived through, the experience of this film is as close as we're ever going to be to what it was like to be a slave.
Still, cinematically, the magnitude of slavery as a crime against humanity is so  unfathomable, that any attempt to dramatize it creates an obvious problem with authenticity, which is generally true of Holocaust movies as well. How, for instance, do you use music to punctuate such circumstances? Any fictional embellishment threatens to banalize the authentic depiction of historical evil. The use of well known actors becomes distracting, even if all the famous talent in this film (Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Alfre Woodard) rises to the occasion. In United 93, also a movie about a historical act of human evil, director Paul Greengrass bypassed this problem by using unknown actors, giving it unquestionable verisimilitude. It worked, but nobody saw it.
This is the paradox of this film.
Perhaps this is why McQueen chose Ejiofor, a well-known British actor, but not very known here, and newcomer Lupita Nyong'o for the main slave roles. They are both very good. Solomon Northup, urbane, educated, sensitive, and appalled at his fate, learns to obey and quell his temper and dignity in order to preserve his life. He  cannot fight back, so his journey is the opposite of what we are used to from cinematic heroes: from being a well rounded, accomplished human being, he needs to do less and less in order to get out alive. His heroism relies in surviving and trying to hold on to his last shred of dignity, even when forced to collude in his own dehumanization. Chiwetel gives a very empathetic performance, but there is something about a passive hero that makes it hard to connect for the audience.
Like any other form of institutionalized sadism, slavery is shown to cast not only a dehumanizing pall on slaveowners and slaves alike, but it is encased in its own bizarre bubble; an insane parallel reality. In the dissolute character of slaveowner Epps (Michael Fassbender), corrupt madness runs like a fever. Epps is an ignorant, Bible thumping drunk; cruel, childish, arbitrary. Fassbender is very good at showing his spineless weakness. There is nothing grand about him. He is at the bottom of the human totem pole, a grotesque character, a second rate bully, clearly inferior to Northup in every way.
From the beginning, McQueen establishes that slavery was unregulated capitalism at its nadir. Although he makes clear that even those who profited from it were aware of its revolting effects, even judicious people, such as Thomas Jefferson, engaged in it. It is particularly chilling to think that Northup's descent into hell, as McQueen shows with close ups of water churning through the wheels of a river boat, was only a short journey from New York to Washington D. C.. He went to dinner one day with whom he thought were potential business partners, and woke up in a dungeon in chains. There was a legal and economic system in place that allowed this to happen, and there was nothing he could do about it.
This powerlessness sparks enormous moral outrage. The film's effect is cumulative: it lashes out at you relentlessly - as life lashed out at Northup - until its cathartic ending. This is not a wishful tale about righteous white people with good intentions. It is not fiction. It is a remarkably evenhanded and perceptive eyewitness account of slavery from a survivor. The hero is a Black man, and he engineers his own survival. In this sense, 12 Years A Slave is possibly the truest film about the topic ever made.
Yet McQueen's approach, even as he meticulously documents the most harrowing scenes of cruelty, feels somehow emotionally detached. The piling up of horrors, if utterly valid and faithful to Northup's experience, makes you brace against it. Only at the end I felt a cathartic emotional release. Perhaps this is intended to mirror Solomon Northup's own journey: in order to survive, you have to harden your heart. Unlike Steven Spielberg's Amistad, 12 Years A Slave is unadorned with human pieties. It's an endurance test that shows no mercy towards the audience.
Hopefully, 12 Years A Slave will spark a serious conversation about slavery in this country. For all of our boisterous public debate about race, very little is discussed about slavery (unless, I assume, you are stuck in history class in high school). This is perplexing, to say the least. Considering how important it is a chapter of American history, more needs to be discussed. Because even today there are economic systems in place that are not too distant from slavery: the abuse of undocumented migrant workers, private prisons that profit from the wholesale incarceration of mostly Black and Latino people. The nasty unethical, yet fully legal, exploitation of certain groups continues.

This movie put a thought in my head:
The still benighted South, home of a majority of people who think universal health insurance is communism, and who'd rather die than pay taxes for a more progressive and cohesive society, should be made to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves in America. This is not a new concept, but perhaps 12 Years A Slave will bring the idea back to the table. This movie intends to reopen an old wound. I certainly hope it does.

12 Years A Slave opens October 18.