Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I've never cared much for those big Biblical epics they used to make -- films like The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told. They always strike me as overwrought spectacles, with the actors within them Emoting! Every! Word! Because! It's! All! So! Important!! Every gesture becomes exaggerated hugely, every emotion is felt deeply, every line of dialogue is followed by an exchange of serious glances. In truth, the only thing that I ever really like about these movies is the music. Some of the greatest filmscores ever written come from the Biblical epics: Alex North's Cleopatra, Alfred Newman's The Greatest Story Ever Told, Miklos Rozsa's King of Kings. (OK, Cleopatra probably isn't actually a Biblical epic....)

Yesterday I finally managed to get through Ben-Hur in its entirety. I've seen it in bits-and-pieces over the years, but never from start to finish, and I've owned the score album for a while now. (The Rhino Records release of the Ben-Hur score, on two CDs with a lavishly illustrated booklet and copious liner notes, is one of the classiest film score releases I've ever seen.) I found the film in the local library's video collection, and figured, Hey, why not? I ended up being fairly surprised at how much I enjoyed the film.

I still observed some of the flaws I've observed in other Biblical epics: scenes that go on too long, overacting, spectacle-for-the-sake-of-spectacle, occasionally stilted dialogue. But I found a lot more in Ben-Hur to enjoy. Without going into the film too deeply, what struck me most was the way the story is structured so that the life of Judah Ben-Hur occasionally intersected the life of "a young Rabbi from Nazareth", and the way that Ben-Hur is constantly aware of something larger happening, that the events of his life are mirroring other events that are to change the world although he knows not how. I liked how the religious elements of the film are muted, so that our focus is constantly on Ben-Hur's reactions to them rather than on the events themselves. The film never shows Jesus directly -- he is not even named -- and yet his presence is felt all through the film, a bit of subtlety in a film genre that was never known for subtlety.

I also admired the film's pacing. Most Biblical epics, I have found, are the cinematic equivalent of Christmas fruitcake: heavy, leaden things that are digested for very long periods of time. Ben-Hur, though, somehow manages the feat of seeming shorter than it really is, by keeping the focus on Ben-Hur himself and his journey to revenge and redemption. The pacing isn't perfect, of course; the scenes of Ben-Hur as a galley slave go on and on, and the film comes dangerously close to grinding to a halt after the chariot race, but the film does not bog down nearly as much and not remotely as often as other Biblical epics.

Ben-Hur isn't a perfect movie, by any means, but I was surprised by how much I liked it, considering that it is part of a genre that usually makes my eyes glaze over and my hand grope for the nearest book or magazine.