Eccentric Flower:199901/holy moses

four january

holy moses

Hmph. A new year and all that. I hope that now that everyone's back to work and getting their heads settled, I'll start getting some email again. This has been an unusually dry spell.

Yesterday I said I'd speak a little about The Prince of Egypt, which we saw on Friday. Just to show you I don't trust everything Entertainment Weekly says, I should point out that they were indifferent to the movie, whereas I liked it. In fact, I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I was expecting something tolerably pleasant. To my surprise it was actually good. Of course, it is a Bible story, and you have to expect a certain amount of maudlin when Bible stories are involved - I think that's the fundamental problem the EW reviewer had, they weren't prepared to deal with a certain amount of stickiness.

One of the most interesting things to me about the movie is that the Hebrew characters have the classical Jewish nose, olive-dark complexions, et cetera - in other words, the Hebrews are actually allowed to be Hebrews! They even speak Hebrew every now and then (notably in the middle of one song, to good effect). Look! Jews in a picture about Jews! Someone tell Cecil B. DeMille!

Actually, although it's obvious that the animators had seen Cecil's film a few times (notably evident in the parting of the Red Sea and the Angel of Death sequence), this film actually does those scenes and nearly everything else better. There's a sense of pacing here; the film is more tightly "cut" than Cecil's, and of course much shorter. (The Red Sea is the obvious boffo finish for a film about Moses - everything after that is an anticlimax. The Dreamworks folks realized that. Cecil might have too, but given the title of his film, he could hardly leave the commandments out of it.) Historical details are heeded - the funny shape of Egyptian oars, the style of Egyptian upper-class dresses with their semitransparent outer sheath, et cetera. The Midianites (the tribe Moses finds in the desert) are properly darker-skinned than the Levites, Moses' people. In fact, there is not a Caucasian skin in the film.

There's been noise about the voice casting oddities, but frankly I don't think casting Brit Patrick Stewart as the Egyptian patriarch Seti is any less probable than casting Brit Cecil Hardwicke in the same role - and Stewart does it better, the part needs the dignity of his voice. Accent schmaccent.

By the by, I was looking up the historical facts, and I found out that calling the father-son pharaohs in the movie Seti and Rameses is a Cecil-derived thing. Historians do not think it plausible that Seti (Sethos I) could have been the father, i.e. The Great Oppressor, which means that Rameses II could not have been Moses' adopted brother. However, Rameses II is one of the two plausible historical candidates for the father, i.e. Cecil might have been a generation or two off. I don't know what scholars were believing back then - it may have been that Cecil's film was as correct as the information available could make it. I have a lot more here on pharaonic dynasties and the difficult task of dating Bible episodes, but let's not digress.

It's fun to try to figure out which of Prince of Egypt's tics are stolen from Cecil and which aren't. Both movies have a moment in the Burning Bush sequence where the God-manifestation raises his/its voice and flares up at Moses (I call this the "Because I'm God, that's why" moment), but there is actual Bible evidence for this - or as Stan Mack puts it, Moses said "Why me?" and God said "Why not you?"

But why do both movies portray Aaron as tall and skinny with an extremely long face? Is there Scriptural precedent for this? Doubtful. Probably Dreamworks was stealing from Cecil again.

Anyway, I liked the film. Can you tell? Oh, and I forgot to mention what struck us both the most. Moses is allowed to be human. After telling Rameses that he has brought on the worst (Rameses has just, unknowing, condemned all Egypt's firstborn, including his son), Moses is shown leaning against a wall in the low town, slumped, crying. Don't forget, from Moses' point of view, he was destroying his own life and family. It had to have been rough. But Charlton Heston would never have been willing to cry on camera.

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