Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
CULTURE/FILM
Hagiopics from Hollywood
AVATAR, Twentieth Century-Fox
LEGION, ScreenGems, 2010
THE LOVELY BONES, DreamWorks SKG, 2009
THE BOOK OF ELI, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010
Review by David Sterritt
Religion has a checkered history on the silver screen. Most films with spiritually tinged agendas are merely wish fulfillment in drag, and the challenge for progressive moviegoers is to sift the occasional worthy items—such as Scorsese's Kundun, Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, and yes, Monty Python's Life of Brian—from run-of-the-mill "hagiopics," to borrow film scholar Pamela Grace's excellent term. The latest crop includes a couple I can recommend. But others also deserve mention, partly because their failings shed light on current Hollywood mindsets, and partly because ignoring them would give them a free pass they don't deserve.
Avatar was temporarily kicked off more than 1,500 screens in China to make way for a state-sponsored biopic starring Chow-Yun Fat as Confucius, the ancient sage who's making a major comeback there. But overall James Cameron's epic is going strong, racking up huge grosses and a fair share of religious commentary. Telecommunications critic Jaron Lanier sees it as a parable of the "hive mind," viewing the spiritually attuned Na'vi people as plugging into a planetary super-consciousness the way some real-life internet users believe they do when they network with computers around the globe. Lanier may be onto something, which is more than I can say for conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who says Avatar is propaganda for pantheism, a false religion that worships heartless Nature and offers "no God to take on flesh and come among us." No wonder it opened at Christmastime, Douthat observes—it's the Gospel According to James, designed to change worshippers of God into huggers of trees.
My own take is less portentous. Avatar is awesome as a 3-D technical feat and its subtexts are right on target, calling out the perils of environmental pillage, the sins of colonialist exploitation, and the evils of militaristic adventurism. What curbs my enthusiasm is a contradiction I sense between the film's eagerness to entertain, on one hand, and its desire to uplift and enlighten, on the other. While its ideas are admirable, they're swathed in so much cinematic razzle-dazzle that the spectacle outweighs the significance for most viewers, judging by what I've read and heard from people who aren't critics or pundits but simply wanted a lively night at the movies. I hope the film's messages will get across more pointedly as the excitement over its effects inevitably moderates over time. Unless and until that happens, count me as an agnostic on this movie.
Very different messages slither out of Legion, an eschatological horror film wherein God decides to touch off the Apocalypse, sparking a battle between well-meaning mortals and "angelically possessed" zombies. The two camps are led by the archangels Michael and Gabriel, respectively, each armed to the teeth with heavy-duty lethal weaponry. Michael wins the fight and prevents Armageddon, becoming the hero of the movie by nullifying God's will—a surprising twist, since even Hollywood usually avoids making God a bad guy who needs to be bailed out by an angel when He goes postal. Perhaps the picture is aimed at people like Rev. Pat Robertson, whose noxious brand of Christianity revels in self-righteous rage, blaming a "pact with the devil" for Haiti's recent earthquake and saying ungodly tolerance for abortion, feminists, and homosexuals provoked Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attacks. By those lights, God is the scariest villain since Ming the Merciless, and we should all hope Michael shows up the next time God's temper gets out of hand. Legion is a blasphemously bad movie—think Wings of Desire meets Night of the Living Dead—but it illustrates the scary truth that violence and paranoia have colonized contemporary consciousness so completely that entertainers now imagine even the angels with guns in their hands and hatred in their eyes.
The Lovely Bones, based on Alice Sebold's bestselling novel and directed by Peter Jackson, presents a more benign view of divine intervention. Susie, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, is murdered by a madman in her neighborhood and later watches from above as her parents try to track the killer down. They don't succeed, but the madman gets his just deserts anyway, thanks to Susie's uncanny (and unexplained) ability to project her desires earthward at critical moments. While the picture is nonsensical, attention must be paid to it, because it's exactly the kind of faith-based fantasy that crowds fact-based accounts of social and political horror—like the British-made Red Riding trilogy, which conveys deeply disturbing truths about child murder and police ineptitude—out of multiplexes and into the steadily shrinking art-theater circuit where approximately twenty-five people will have a chance to see them.
The Book of Eli is no masterpiece, but its religious inklings make it a picture I can recommend with reservations. Like last year's The Road, it takes place after nuclear catastrophe has wiped out civilization. The hero, superbly played by Denzel Washington, is a voyager on a mysterious mission, carrying a leather-bound book that he reads from daily but won't let others touch. His journey brings him to a ramshackle town ruled over by an evildoer named Carnegie, who's been hunting obsessively for a book that will, he claims, enable him to rule the world.
Although much of the story is standard-issue action fare, it gains interest from the identity of Eli's book. (If you plan to see the picture, you should put off the rest of this review until then.) It turns out to be the Bible, which has become a rarity because some people held it responsible for the nuclear cataclysm and destroyed every copy except the one that Eli found. As its guardian, Eli is the hero of the film, and a finale resembling Fahrenheit 451 confirms the wisdom of his struggle to preserve it. But it's revealing that Carnegie covets the book because he knows how readily its meanings can be misappropriated to deceive and manipulate the masses. Could the nuclear disaster have indeed been caused by a demagogue—like Carnegie, or like the Rev. Robertson, for that matter—who thumped the Bible so hard that the world literally exploded? Food for thought.
David Sterritt, Tikkun's film critic, is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and professor emeritus at Long Island University. He was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for decades. His latest books are The B List and The Honeymooners.
Sterritt, David. 2010. Hagiopics from Hollywood. Tikkun 25(2):65 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010sterritt
