You were the people's one true god, for a moment.

Ben-Hur

(1959)

(SPOILERS) Ben-Hur has the fairly unchallenged virtue of being a biblical epic that, if not quite as astounding as its unparalleled 11 Oscars would suggest, is actually really good. The number of kids foisted into watching it during a Religious Studies class only to be very pleasantly surprised (I can’t say my response was similar when Pink Floyd: The Wall got an unlikely airing), and its status as a Bank Holiday weekend fixture, has given it a well-earned reputation, even if nothing in the rest of its 3 hours 32 minutes comes close to matching the nine-minute chariot race.

Notably, like Titanic (which isn’t nearly as good, but also gleaned 11 statuettes), Ben-Hur failed to bag snag the Best Screenplay, but at least it was nominated in the first place (unlike Jimbo’s doomed romance). Karl Tunberg took the final credit, but there were a number of cooks involved, including Gore Vidal, very vocal in later years about how he persuaded Stephen Boyd to play Messala as the spurned lover of Chuck’s Judah Ben-Hur. How true this anecdote is is a source of debate, particularly given Vidal seemed to be (successfully) attempting to wind up Charlton Heston as much as anything, but there’s no denying the unbridled joy Judah takes in seeing his old pal again (“We were friends as boys. We were like brothers”).

Boyd didn’t get nominated, although he deserves credit for attempting to infuse Messala’s Machiavellian machinations with a touch of substance beyond mere villainy – he might have been lent more of a hand by the writers, as in the telling there’s usually too much of the polar opposites to make the dynamic between Judah and Messala really interesting; we aren’t really buying Judah being accused by Esther (Haya Harareet) of becoming just like him, and Heston’s rock of rectitude is a little too impermeable to express anything very deep, certainly to the extent of deserving the Best Actor Oscar. I mean, he’s fine, and he does what’s required of him, which is to bring star wattage to an epic, something that’s no small feat in itself – others have been much more disparaging, including director William Wyler – but it takes a different class of actor to add layers to such a basic outline (this may be a thinking person’s epic, but that only stretches so far). Like Russell Crowe in Gladiator, for instance, which riffs on Ben-Hur shamelessly, and also attained Oscar glory as a consequence.

As personified by Chuck, Judah is just your everyday, blonde(-ish) haired, blue-eyed Aryan Jew, and it’s difficult not to see America’s support of the recently-established State of Israel in his pronouncements and resistance to Roman rule. There’s also a light veneer of McCarthyism critique during the early stages (“Tell me the name of the criminals” demands Messala, asking his old friend to inform on his countrymen; which is about when Messala is required to start twirling his moustache – “What do the lives of a few Jews mean to you?”)

Wyler proudly declared that it took a Jew to make a decent film about Christ, but I’m not sure it’s quite that. The Jesus episodes are closer to Forrest Gump-encounters with Judah, who just happens to stumble by at divine moments (a cup of water here, a Sermon on the Mount there), and the picture very significantly reduces the impact of Ben-Hur’s conversion. He never actually pronounces himself as a Christian, but rather confesses “And I felt his voice take the sword out of my hand”, much preferable to the cold dead ones Heston intoned to the NRA that time as well as being an implicit rejection of the wrathful Old Testament God.

Generally, there’s a sense of stuffiness and earnest, classical Hollywood reverence to the “Tale of the Christ” parts, superbly mimicked by the Coen Brothers and George Clooney in Hail, Caesar!, that has you longing to get back to a slave galley or the arena. Of the former, jolly Jack Warner does offer some comparative theology (“Your God has forsaken you. He has no more power than the images I pray to”). Of course, Arrius only goes and adopts Judah, putting a spoke in what is turning into a Job story. Arrius is the exception to the general disdain shown towards the hissable Romans, which takes in Judah’s audience with Pilate (the superbly surnamed Frank Thring).

There’s a warm view given to the Arab of the piece, albeit a blacked-up Arab in the shape of Sheikh Ilderim (Welshman Hugh Griffith, who won Best Supporting Actor), showing solidarity with the Jew and backing him against Messala. That scene, as Messala, surrounded by fellow Roman soldiers, insults him, finds Ilderim in the mode of marvellously casual sarcasm: “Bravely spoken”.

The chariot race needs no commentary. If the Christ passages are old Hollywood, this is the ushering in of the new; it remains an enthralling piece of filmmaking, a clear influence on the likes of Spielberg (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Lucas (The Phantom Menace), with Miklos Rozsa’s otherwise marbled score (John Williams evidently picked up a few cues from him) dropping away to allow for the furore of hooves and whips and Messala’s death-dealing “Greek chariot” (presumably all that nation’s chariots chopped the wheels from under you that season). Wyler really didn’t like widescreen, finding it next to impossible to fill the expanse of image, or exclude elements from it, but you wouldn’t know it from his and cinematographer’s Robert Surtees’ staggering efforts.

The trouble is, after the chariot race is over, and Messala’s toast (John Le Mesurier can’t save him) there’s still more than forty minutes to go, and interminable attempt by Chuck to bring relief to his leprosy-ravaged mother and sister. Very fortunately, it appears everyone within a twenty-mile radius received healing when Jesus died, something I didn’t read about in The Bible.

Despite this inflexibility when it counts, Ben-Hur generally makes the whole sword-and-sandals/ religious epic thing look easy, deceptively so when so much in the genre is such indigestible stodge that there’s no chance of replicating it as formula (look what happened to Ridley Scott when he tried to go back to the well, twice). If you needed convincing, another remake would be along in almost sixty years to prove the point…

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Dude. You’re my hero and shit.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
(SPOILERS) I was going to say I’d really like to see what Vince Gilligan has up his sleeve besidesBreaking Bad spinoffs. But then I saw that he had a short-lived series on CBS a few years back (Battle Creek). I guess things Breaking Bad-related ensure an easy greenlight, particularly from Netflix, for whom the original show was bread and butter in its take up as a streaming platform. There’s something slightly dispiriting about El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, though. Not that Gilligan felt the need to return to Jesse Pinkman – although the legitimacy of that motive is debatable – but the desire to re-enter and re-inhabit the period of the show itself, as if he’s unable to move on from a near-universally feted achievement and has to continually exhume it and pick it apart.

The past is a statement. The future is a question.

Justified Season Six
(SPOILERS) There have been more than enough damp squib or so-so show finales of late to have greeted the demise of Justified with some trepidation. Thankfully it avoids almost every pitfall it might have succumbed to and gives us a satisfying send-off that feels fitting for its characters. This is a series that, even at its weakest (the previous season) is leagues ahead of most fare in an increasingly saturated sphere, so it’s a relief – even if there was never much doubt on past form – that it doesn’t drop the ball.

And of those character fates? In a show that often pulls back from giving Raylan Givens the great hero moments (despite his maintaining a veneer of ultra-cool, and getting “supporting hero” moments as he does in the finale, 6.13 The Promise), it feels appropriate that his entire (stated) motivation for the season should be undermined. He doesn’t get to take down Boyd Crowder, except in an incarcerating sense, but as always he is sanguine about it. After…

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

It’s not every day you see a guy get his ass kicked on two continents – by himself.

Gemini Man (2019)
(SPOILERS) Ang Lee seems hellbent on sloughing down a technological cul-de-sac to the point of creative obscurity, in much the same way Robert Zemeckis enmired himself in the mirage of motion capture for a decade. Lee previously experimented with higher frame rates on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, to the general aversion of those who saw it in its intended form – 48, 60 or 120 fps have generally gone down like a bag of cold sick, just ask Peter Jackson – and the complete indifference of most of the remaining audience, for whom the material held little lustre. Now he pretty much repeats that trick with Gemini Man. At best, it’s merely an “okay” film – not quite the bomb its Rotten Tomatoes score suggests – which, (as I saw it) stripped of its distracting frame rate and 3D, reveals itself as just about serviceable but afflicted by several insurmountable drawbacks.

You’re only seeing what’s in front of you. You’re not seeing what’s above you.

Mr. Robot Season 2
(SPOILERS) I suspect my problem with Mr. Robot may be that I want it to be something it isn’t, which would entail it being a much better show than it is. And that’s its own fault, really, or rather creator and writer-director of umpteen episodes Sam Esmail’s, who has intentionally and provocatively lured his audience into thinking this really is an up-to-the-minute, pertinent, relevant, zeitgeisty show, one that not only has a huge amount to say about the illusory nature of our socio-economic system, and consequently the bedrock of our collective paradigm, but also the thorny subject of reality itself, both of which have been variably enticing dramatic fodder since the Wachowski siblings and David Fincher released a one-two punch at the end of the previous millennium.

In that sense, Mr. Robot’s thematic conceit is very much of a piece with its narrative form; it’s a conjuring act, a series of sleights of hand designed to dazzle the viewer into going with the flow, rath…

What you do is very baller. You're very anarchist.

Lady Bird (2017)
(SPOILERS) You can see the Noah Baumbach influence on Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, with whom she collaborated on Frances Ha; an intimate, lo-fi, post-Woody Allen (as in, post-feted, respected Woody Allen) dramedy canvas that has traditionally been the New Yorker’s milieu. But as an adopted, spiritual New Yorker, I suspect Gerwig honourably qualifies, even as Lady Bird is a love letter/ nostalgia trip to her home city of Sacramento.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

You’ll just have to face it, Steed. You’re completely compromised.

The Avengers Season 6 Ranked – Worst to Best
The final run, and an oft-maligned one. It’s doubtful anyone could have filled Emma Peel’s kinky boots, but it didn’t help Linda Thorson that Tara King was frequently earmarked to moon over Steed while very evidentlynot being the equal Emma and Cathy were; the generation gap was never less than unflatteringly evident. Nevertheless, despite this imbalance, and the early hiccups of the John Bryce-produced episodes, Season Six arguably offers a superior selection of episodes to its predecessor, in which everyone became perhaps a little too relaxed.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog