Film Carew: Exodus: Gods And Kings

Exodus: Gods And Kings

Of all the cinematic visions of God, none of ever resembled what we see in Ridley Scott’s biblical epic Exodus: Gods And Kings. Forget a white-bearded patriarch, voice booming in the firmament, here the almighty is a snotty, sneering English schoolboy with a speech impediment. When appearing to Christian Bale’s holy Moses as an obnoxious vision of vengeful God, it’s hard — no matter how many children he’s indiscriminately killed nor plagues he’s sent — to tremble at the sight of 11-year-old Isaac Andrew, especially when he’s really a widdle wascal talking “thweats” and “Phawaohs” and “Wamesses”. It does make sense, though, that Exodus’s God is English, given the cast is loaded with Brits and Australians effecting the toffee accents apparently en vouge amongst the Egyptian aristocracy.

In another year in which the biblical epic has failed to make a box-office-conquering comeback, Exodus is marginally better than Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, but that seems as much con as pro. All those wacky elements — the rock-men, the robots, the psychedelic visions of creation — that tilted Noah towards disaster were the things that made it, at the very least, memorable in its failure. But Exodus is barely memorable; a by-the-numbers biblical saga that feels utterly bland from start to finish. Bale wanders the artistic emptiness of a 3D desert, once-posh accent growing more New-York-Jew with each year in the wilderness, eventually — once we take the turn past two hours — leading his chosen-people straight outta Egypt in a slow, sluggish plod.

Exodus attempts to begin with a bang, with an opening action-movie sting in which brothers-from-another-mother Bale and Joel Edgerton — his Ramesses all emo eyeliner and complaints about the renovations — attack the swarthy Hittites, Scott instantly uncorking untold biblical-epic clichés (Mid-battle chariot races! Their wheels grinding together!) in a matter of mere minutes. It’s the high-octane opening to placate the mandates of the studio, but soon the drama isn’t just pleasing to those in board-rooms, but evocative of them: Memphis the bureaucratic capital of a slave-whippin’ empire founded on regular reports, economic responsibility, and balanced budgeting for every 100-foot-tall Bender-esque monument.

"Bale wanders the artistic emptiness of a 3D desert, once-posh accent growing more New-York-Jew with each year in the wilderness."

Such slave-whipped construction of false idols inspires an almighty pestilential tanty from schoolboy-God, and whilst the Nile runs with blood, Bale makes like a 13th-century-BC Che Guevara, waging a “war of attrition” with a rag-tag group of dissident Hebrews co-captained by Aaron Paul; these dissidents hoping to incite insurrection amongst the Egyptian populace via proto-terrorist actions. Edgerton stews with megalomaniac rage, with high-camp Ben Mendelsohn whispering villainous nothings in his ear, and eventually there’s a race to the Red Sea, waters parting as over-the-top CGI tsunami, and, hey look, the ten commandments.

Steven Zaillian’s script, Scott’s direction, and Bale’s performance all attempt to court, well, not realism, exactly, more plausibility; looking at the silliest aspects of both bible and DeMille and coming at them from a more-rational angle. Yet, the characters are all drawn as broad as caricature; the laughless Bale and Edgerton the only ones given even the slightest shading, these manly men wrestling with mighty male morals whilst the women are reduced to exotic-beauties-sitting-on-the-sidelines-with-the-kids. Zaillian goes all in on the screenwriting cliché that profundity occurs when dialogue gets repeated; the film’s every emotional moment being echoed again later-on, in a callback that feels less toweringly-profound, more first-year-film-school. Exodus is 150 minutes that cost $150mil, but the writing feels plenty cheap.

The Green Prince

The son of a decorated Hamas higher-up, Mosab Hassan Yousef has spent his whole childhood under surveillance, so the second he puts a foot out of place — at 17, buying black-market weapons out of rage at Israeli occupation — he’s arrested. After a stint of ‘interrogation’, he agrees to provide information for Israel’s Shin Bet, initially as a way to get out of prison. But the moment begins a sea change in his life, in which his loyalty and devotion shift from his birth father, to a man who becomes a surrogate father: his Shin Bet handler, Gonen Ben Yitzhak.

With shades of Errol Morris, director Nadav Schirman sits Yousef and Yitzhak down for to-camera confessionals, illustrating their testimony with surveillance-camera footage both from-the-source and staged. Of course, any kind of modern-day truth-is-stranger-than-fiction documentary is going to owe a debt to Morris; what the comparison does, with The Green Prince, is underline just how clean the presentation, how grippingly-told the yarn. The plot twists and turns are familiar from spy-thrillers — all the double lives and double crosses, the ‘Game’ of the sting, the theatre of keeping a source out there in the field without blowing the ruse — but, coming solely from the subjects, it’s less about the tension of set-ups, more about the emotions each as feeling; the growing relationship between the men finding tenderness in a stand-off so often the source of horrors, men from either side of the political divide, separated by a cultural chasm and a literal wall, finding a way to work together in harmony.

Human Capital

Paolo Virzì’s glossy thriller begins with a tragic accident, or at least the shadowy implication of it, before circling back around to it, in Rashomon-ish repetition, from the different perspectives of its principle, top-notch cast. Human Capital a portrait of class-collision in the modern economic climate: Fabrizio Bentivoglio’s low-rent real-estate agent hoping to glom his way into upward-mobility when his daughter (star-in-the-making debutante Matilde Gioli) starts dating the privileged son (Guglielmo Pinelli) of Fabrizio Gifuni’s ultra-wealthy hedge-fund shyster. Gifuni is married to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, a fading-belle-turned-bored-housewife, a former actress spending her marital wealth in the guise of arts-patron, which leads her ever-closer to Luigi Lo Cascio’s sentimental theatre-director. Gioli’s mother, Valeria Golino, is a psychologist who happens to be helping a dreamy-yet-tortured boy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks (Gigio Alberti).

Working from Stephen Amidon’s novel — picket-fence America now transplanted to Alpine Italy — Virzì presents each character’s take as its own separate, distinct short story; committing wholly to the perspective of each. But the themes that unite each are clear, incisive, savage: the film seething with repulsion for the titans of the modern economic climate.

Mystery Of Happiness

Guillermo Francella and Fabián Arenillas don’t just own an appliance store in Buenos Aires together, they’re ‘life business partners’, BFFs since childhood whose lives are mirroring images, in perfect sync; the slow-motion romanticism and loving gazes in the stylish opening montage of Daniel Burman’s dry, sentimental comedy surely suggesting that they’re partners. But, it turns out, Arenillas is unhappily married to neurotic Inés Estévez; and, no sooner do we meet her than he vanishes without a word.

In the trailing wake of his disappearance, Burman paints an unusual love-triangle: Francella and Estévez coming together to try and track down their respective former partner, forming a flowering relationship centred around Arenillas’s ghost. It sounds slight, and in many ways it is, but Burman has sketched two winning lead characters, expertly played by a pair of veteran thesps. It’s less bawdy comedy than arch, ironic portrait of people who’ve each lived their lives in service of a man, it turns out, whose secrets they never knew.

Folies Bergère

Folies Bergère occasionally threatens to devolve into French farce, but Marc Fitoussi’s pleasingly-ramshackle comedy instead wants to chronicle infidelity with both gentle humour and underpinned drama; essentially settling on the simple notion that what matters isn’t who you dabble with, but just that you come back home. Home, for Isabelle Huppert, is a rural farm in Brittany, where the cows wear blue-ribbons and her skin is troubled by a symbolic rash (an itch!). When the neighbour’s neice (Anaïs Demoustier) throws a blow-out party at the property next door, Huppert — still wearing the flares and listening to the jazz of her youth — is sucked into a world of glittering Glass Candy disco jams and passed-around joints, the smarmy smile of Pio Marmaï a welcome change from the gruff snarl of her husband, Jean-Pierre Darroussin.

At first, Fitoussi telegraphs a simple cross-generational romance, with Huppert off to Paris to chase this younger man. But all that glitters under the Eiffel ain’t gold, and the appearance of dapper Swedish gent Michael Nyqvist only confuses the matter further. Fitoussi is interested in the human complexity of comic conceits; Darroussin’s arrival in Paris not making for farcical hijinks, but a rising tide of melancholy. The narrative is handed back-and-forth between husband and wife, at times at moments unexpected, with an odd sense of rhythm. And, with a retro-loungey, harpsichord heavy score from Tim Gane and Sean O’Hagan, plus jams from Glass Candy, Beach Fossils, and Olafur Arnalds, so much of that rhythm is kept to the beat of a sweet soundtrack.