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Movie to Avoid
Mar. 11th, 2007 10:44 amPerhaps I should have known better.
Perhaps I did know better, on some level.
But the movie was called One Night with a King, and suggested some of my more potent archetypal motifs, and it was about Esther, who was one of my earliest heroines. (I was a seriously religious little girl growing up in the early 1970's and my options were limited. Joan of Arc, Esther, and Dorothy of Oz were my first heroines.)
The movie had been recommended by a friend of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_storyteller_, and it had been on uncrowned_king's and my to-do list, so last night we picked it up from Blockbuster.
It was awful.
Utterly awful.
It started hundreds of years prior to the actual story, with Peter O'Toole as a demented-looking, murderous Prophet Samuel bursting into King Saul's tent to berate him for not slaughtering all of the child-sacrificing Agagites and all their livestock. (The narrator has to tell us that the Agagites sacrificed children, otherwise the Israelites' genocide would not have been justified, right?) But King Saul, in one of his many lapses of obediance to God's commands, had kept the king's herds for himself and spared both the king and queen. Samuel took a sword and went out to kill the king himself, but the queen escaped and gave birth to a child who was raised to hate the Israelites and seek vengeance for the slaughter of his father and people. The queen even designed a special symbol for this quest for her son and his descendents to wear.
Hadassah (Esther) first comes on screen as a lively, intelligent young woman who chides her uncle Mordecai for not thinking more about wanting to return their people to their days of glory. She looks and speaks like a modern high school girl.
Cut to her and two of her friends wandering in the marketplace, and Hadassah being openly envious of a rich woman being carried in a screened litter. Her friends tease her. Then a darkly-handsome man rides into the market. The viewer is treated to an extreme close-up of the gold symbol on his robe, the symbol the Agagite queen gave her son. To a casual bystander, he would appear merely a handsome, arrogant, rich man -- but somehow his aura of evil is tangible to Hadassah, who quickly draws children out of his path and then crouches down with them to shield them in her arms.
We didn't watch long enough for him to be named, but who could it be but Haman?
It was all so appallingly melodramatic and badly acted -- with costumes that seemed straight out of a high school drama department's closet -- that I couldn't bear to watch any more. We took out the DVD and watched an episode of Brother Cadfael instead.
I understand that Esther is something of a melodrama in its original form, with an obediant but plucky heroine, a hissable villain, perilous situations, and dramatic revelations -- but even melodrama requires a decent script, and it has to play itself like a melodrama, acknowledge its genre if it's going to work. This movie seemed to be presenting itself as a true drama, and a drama of faith at that, something to be taken seriously as well as being entertainment.
In my opinion, a group of religious high school students could probably have put on a more authentic faith-drama production. At least it would have come from their hearts, and their mistakes would have been honest. The people who made this mess should have known better.
I'm sincerely interested to read what the person who recommended this movie liked about it, even if it's left as an anonymous comment. I know my background in academic religious studies and theater make me more critical than others might be.
Perhaps I did know better, on some level.
But the movie was called One Night with a King, and suggested some of my more potent archetypal motifs, and it was about Esther, who was one of my earliest heroines. (I was a seriously religious little girl growing up in the early 1970's and my options were limited. Joan of Arc, Esther, and Dorothy of Oz were my first heroines.)
The movie had been recommended by a friend of
_storyteller_, and it had been on uncrowned_king's and my to-do list, so last night we picked it up from Blockbuster.It was awful.
Utterly awful.
It started hundreds of years prior to the actual story, with Peter O'Toole as a demented-looking, murderous Prophet Samuel bursting into King Saul's tent to berate him for not slaughtering all of the child-sacrificing Agagites and all their livestock. (The narrator has to tell us that the Agagites sacrificed children, otherwise the Israelites' genocide would not have been justified, right?) But King Saul, in one of his many lapses of obediance to God's commands, had kept the king's herds for himself and spared both the king and queen. Samuel took a sword and went out to kill the king himself, but the queen escaped and gave birth to a child who was raised to hate the Israelites and seek vengeance for the slaughter of his father and people. The queen even designed a special symbol for this quest for her son and his descendents to wear.
Hadassah (Esther) first comes on screen as a lively, intelligent young woman who chides her uncle Mordecai for not thinking more about wanting to return their people to their days of glory. She looks and speaks like a modern high school girl.
Cut to her and two of her friends wandering in the marketplace, and Hadassah being openly envious of a rich woman being carried in a screened litter. Her friends tease her. Then a darkly-handsome man rides into the market. The viewer is treated to an extreme close-up of the gold symbol on his robe, the symbol the Agagite queen gave her son. To a casual bystander, he would appear merely a handsome, arrogant, rich man -- but somehow his aura of evil is tangible to Hadassah, who quickly draws children out of his path and then crouches down with them to shield them in her arms.
We didn't watch long enough for him to be named, but who could it be but Haman?
It was all so appallingly melodramatic and badly acted -- with costumes that seemed straight out of a high school drama department's closet -- that I couldn't bear to watch any more. We took out the DVD and watched an episode of Brother Cadfael instead.
I understand that Esther is something of a melodrama in its original form, with an obediant but plucky heroine, a hissable villain, perilous situations, and dramatic revelations -- but even melodrama requires a decent script, and it has to play itself like a melodrama, acknowledge its genre if it's going to work. This movie seemed to be presenting itself as a true drama, and a drama of faith at that, something to be taken seriously as well as being entertainment.
In my opinion, a group of religious high school students could probably have put on a more authentic faith-drama production. At least it would have come from their hearts, and their mistakes would have been honest. The people who made this mess should have known better.
I'm sincerely interested to read what the person who recommended this movie liked about it, even if it's left as an anonymous comment. I know my background in academic religious studies and theater make me more critical than others might be.
