Prints of denial [Reviews of Life is Beautiful and The Prince of Egypt]
106.1Abstract (summary)
The film's first shot prefigures a foggy scene later in the story where [Guido Orefice], carrying the sleeping [Giosue] about the camp, happens upon a mountain of corpses. That is the one reality that Guido cannot subsume into his pretence of a game. After that foreshadowing image, the plot opens on prewar rural Italy, with Guido and his cousin Feruccio (Sergio Bini Bustric) driving a brakeless car off the road and through the hills, eventually careening through a village and stealing the glory from a fascist parade. This sort of spontaneous farce is the stuff of life for Guido, and it serves as his defence against a world that grows increasingly unfunny. Later, as Guido walks through the nightmarish mist of the camp, he wishes their concentration camp experience were a dream from which [Dora] would soon wake them. But as the opening fog casts the film, it seems more likely that the romantic comedy scenes are of the dream world. The foggy vision of the corpses lies behind the sunny love story, waiting to take over.
Guido's strategy to fantasize for survival begins when Feruccio tells him how he uses Schopenhauer's faith in will power to fall asleep: "With will power you can do anything you want." This coheres with the "magic" that Guido deploys to court Dora. At the opera, he wills her to look down to him from her balcony seat. He wows her with his "magic" predictions (when he sees the approach of the man whose fedora he has stolen, he "wishes" that someone would take his rain-soaked hat and plop a dry one on his head -- just in time for this to occur). When vandals paint his uncle's horse green and cover it with anti-Semitic slogans, Guido converts this grotesque apparition into a romantic Chagallian fantasy: he mounts the green horse, rides into Dora's engagement party, and carries her away from betrothal to her fascist fiance. But even for Guido, it becomes more and more challenging to make a game of life's difficulties. A few years later, as the family's situation is growing increasingly precarious during the German occupation, Giosue asks his father about the storefront signs forbidding the entry of "Jews and dogs." Guido explains breezily that everyone has their little quirks, and that spiders and Visigoths should be forbidden in his bookshop.
In contrast to Guido's affluent fictions, the German Dr Lessing (Horst Buchholz) is obsessed with simple riddles. The two share a light-hearted acquaintance in the early part of the film when Guido is a waiter at his uncle's restaurant, where Lessing often dines; when the doctor is stumped by a difficult word puzzle, he knows he can always rely on his quick-witted server to reveal the solution. Years later, Guido is startled to find himself being inspected by Lessing at the concentration camp. The scrawny prisoner is on the verge of being rejected for work detail -- and condemned to the showers -- but the doctor recognizes his old friend and directs him instead to the line of the living. Guido thinks he may have found a saviour in the camp doctor, only to discover that Lessing, in the midst of the Nazi death machine, is totally focused on a particularly confounding riddle. "Help me, for God's sake," the Nazi doctor asks the doomed Jew. The riddles confirm the fairytale aspect of the "simple story." But associated with the lunatic doctor they plunge us into the madness of the Holocaust. Lessing's pointless riddles contrast to the weighty play on words employed by Guido's uncle as, in the early part of the film, he is harassed by fascist thugs: "Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary." Where the uncle stoically affirms that "Silence is the most powerful outcry," the doctor's riddle has "silence" as that which "disappears when its name is called."
It can be a thin line that separates reverence from blasphemy. For proof consider two extremely popular current movies: The Prince of Egypt (DreamWorks' cartoon feature about Moses) and Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni's concentration camp tragicomedy). Though they claim piety and high purpose, both films subordinate the integrity of the collective experience for quirks of individual fancy. Both are superbly made, with moving stories, with stunning visuals in the former and excellent performances in the latter. But their undeniable entertainment value should not obscure the fact that they both lead their viewers away pore an understanding of their source material, preferring the easier indulgence of sentimentality.
It took remarkable courage for Benigni to use the Holocaust -- arguably our century s most intractable foreground -- as the background for a mix of pathos, slapstick, romance, satire, and tragedy. That courage is problematic. Should the Holocaust be used as a setting for a story that is not inescapably rooted in that event? What next, a Buchenwald Romeo and Juliet with the Eichmann Capulets fighting the Manischewitz Montagues? Or King Lear as a camp commandant dividing his authority among his three sons? Is our progressive understanding rounding us back to the historicism of Hogan's Heroes? Perhaps the unique enormity of the Holocaust should not serve stories that could be set anywhere else.
The narrator introduces this as "a simple story" that is "like a fable, full of wonder and happiness." That is fine for the first section, where the hero, Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni), prat-falls in love with the beautiful teacher, Dora (Benigni's wife, Nicoletta Braschi), and wins her away from her fascist fiance. But the fable doesn't fit in the concentration camp scenes that dominate the film. The narrator turns out to be the couple's son, Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini), who recalls his father's incredible act of sacrifice: as the family descends deeper into the horror of the Holocaust, Guido keeps drawing more deeply upon his boundless imagination in order to persuade Giosue that everything around them is part of a holiday game. All the guards and prisoners are willing participants in an elaborate contest, and whoever accumulates the most points wins first prize -- a real tank, in place of the toy one Giosue cherishes.
Should the Holocaust be used for a fable of wonder and happiness? How can one title a film about a concentration camp Life is Beautiful? True, the title evokes some irony, because reportedly Benigni takes it from one of Leon Trotsky's last diary entries, just as Stalin's assassin was closing in on him. Perhaps this sentence can speak for an individual life. But in the Holocaust, millions of tragic histories weigh against any fable of survival. Can one family's implausible (albeit partial) salvation tilt the scales away from the inconceivable weight of the tragedies around it? Can any survival saga represent the Holocaust as a whole? Clearly Benigni felt the Holocaust setting would measure out the depth of his affirmation: life is beautiful -- even when you consider the Holocaust. But spoken from here and now that seems incredibly naive. It is one thing to say the glass is half full when it is only half empty, but quite another when it is bone dry.
The film's first shot prefigures a foggy scene later in the story where Guido, carrying the sleeping Giosue about the camp, happens upon a mountain of corpses. That is the one reality that Guido cannot subsume into his pretence of a game. After that foreshadowing image, the plot opens on prewar rural Italy, with Guido and his cousin Feruccio (Sergio Bini Bustric) driving a brakeless car off the road and through the hills, eventually careening through a village and stealing the glory from a fascist parade. This sort of spontaneous farce is the stuff of life for Guido, and it serves as his defence against a world that grows increasingly unfunny. Later, as Guido walks through the nightmarish mist of the camp, he wishes their concentration camp experience were a dream from which Dora would soon wake them. But as the opening fog casts the film, it seems more likely that the romantic comedy scenes are of the dream world. The foggy vision of the corpses lies behind the sunny love story, waiting to take over.
In one respect the film evokes the biblical myth of birth and rebirth. Giosue, pronounced Joshua, is a version of "Jesus." The family name, Orefice, suggests both goldsmith -- as if Guido is an upscale version of Joseph's carpenter or has the imagination to spin gold out of lesser mettle -- and mouth, in recognition of the hero's constant babbling. Of course, his Dora evokes the adoration. Their beautiful child is conceived in an Edenic greenhouse where the lovers begin their family life. But where the biblical Father sacrifices His son Jesus, Guido here sacrifices himself to preserve his son.
Even in the early part of the film, Guido is a merchant of fictions. He constantly acts out stories and fantasies, whether declaring himself and Dora "prince" and "princess" or theatrically demonstrating a waiter's proper conduct for his restaurateur uncle. When he arrives at Dora's school, impersonating a fascist superintendent, he makes a mockery of the regime's curriculum by displaying his perfect Aryan ear-lobes and bellybutton. In a parody of Il Duce's fertility and prowess, Guido wears his official sash over the shoulder and under the crotch. For his first "date" with Dora, Guido arranges to meet her in Venice -- but in the illusionary world of Offenbach's opera. In all his games, the hero personifies fiction.
Guido's strategy to fantasize for survival begins when Feruccio tells him how he uses Schopenhauer's faith in will power to fall asleep: "With will power you can do anything you want." This coheres with the "magic" that Guido deploys to court Dora. At the opera, he wills her to look down to him from her balcony seat. He wows her with his "magic" predictions (when he sees the approach of the man whose fedora he has stolen, he "wishes" that someone would take his rain-soaked hat and plop a dry one on his head -- just in time for this to occur). When vandals paint his uncle's horse green and cover it with anti-Semitic slogans, Guido converts this grotesque apparition into a romantic Chagallian fantasy: he mounts the green horse, rides into Dora's engagement party, and carries her away from betrothal to her fascist fiance. But even for Guido, it becomes more and more challenging to make a game of life's difficulties. A few years later, as the family's situation is growing increasingly precarious during the German occupation, Giosue asks his father about the storefront signs forbidding the entry of "Jews and dogs." Guido explains breezily that everyone has their little quirks, and that spiders and Visigoths should be forbidden in his bookshop.
In contrast to Guido's affluent fictions, the German Dr Lessing (Horst Buchholz) is obsessed with simple riddles. The two share a light-hearted acquaintance in the early part of the film when Guido is a waiter at his uncle's restaurant, where Lessing often dines; when the doctor is stumped by a difficult word puzzle, he knows he can always rely on his quick-witted server to reveal the solution. Years later, Guido is startled to find himself being inspected by Lessing at the concentration camp. The scrawny prisoner is on the verge of being rejected for work detail -- and condemned to the showers -- but the doctor recognizes his old friend and directs him instead to the line of the living. Guido thinks he may have found a saviour in the camp doctor, only to discover that Lessing, in the midst of the Nazi death machine, is totally focused on a particularly confounding riddle. "Help me, for God's sake," the Nazi doctor asks the doomed Jew. The riddles confirm the fairytale aspect of the "simple story." But associated with the lunatic doctor they plunge us into the madness of the Holocaust. Lessing's pointless riddles contrast to the weighty play on words employed by Guido's uncle as, in the early part of the film, he is harassed by fascist thugs: "Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary." Where the uncle stoically affirms that "Silence is the most powerful outcry," the doctor's riddle has "silence" as that which "disappears when its name is called."
To maintain the illusion of a game, the imprisoned Guido pretends that everything he and Giosue are forced to do is their eager choice -- he rallies the power of positive thinking with a vengeance. He tells his boy that he had to insist on getting his prison tattoo, that it is a highly prized item. When a thuggish German guard arrives to explain the camp's rigid list of regulations to the Italian newcomers, Guido volunteers to translate, although he speaks not a word of German. As the stone-faced guard barks out his list of rules and punishments, Guido translates them as a series of silly instructions to a childish contest. Before long, frail Guido finds himself lugging anvils to feed the inferno of the Nazi war machine, while at the same time running himself ragged maintaining his illusion for Giosue.
Benigni is constantly imposing theatrical extremities on key turns of the plot -- in the exotic ceremony of the crashed engagement party and when the Nazis seize the family during Giosue's fifth birthday party (just as his parents are about to be reconciled with Dora's mother). Later, Guido is fatally trapped when he dresses like a woman to try to find Dora on the eve of the camp's liberation. The more harrowing the reality, the more theatrical the fiction Guido throws over it. The more Giosue learns about the nightmare of the soap-makers and gas "showers" of the camp, the more confidently Guido laughs off the "ruses" of their rivals in the "game." Climaxing this conscious application of theatre, Guido is finally trapped in an implacable searchlight as he climbs a wall.
The film invites contrary readings by the heart and the head. To the heart, star/writer/director Benigni tells a moving story about a dedicated lover/father whose fantasy helps his five-year-old son survive an unbearable reality. In this light the film affirms the power of love and the imagination in the most extreme test of our history, the Holocaust. Vesting so much faith in the power to fantasize provides a comforting emotion.
But to the head the film may pose a problem of appropriation. It raises problems both moral and pragmatic. Should the Holocaust be used as a background for a naive and romantic fiction? Can we afford to place such faith in fantasy? One might rather say that if the Holocaust taught us anything it is that we must face reality, and not hide behind delusions of civilization and safety. After all, the world's delusions about Hitler enabled him to wreak the horrendous havoc he did.
Perhaps most of all, the film's bitter-sweet ending seems unreal. With the Germans gone, the boy emerges from his hiding box looking clean, neatly dressed, well-fed, and cheery. He stands bewildered in the camp's courtyard, and a tank rumbles into view -- first prize, just as Papa promised. As he rides atop the Sherman with his American liberators, Giosue is reunited with his mother, who also looks quite healthy, fleshy, clean, with but a hint of pallid makeup. None of the camp survivors looks anything like the emaciated figures we know so well from the newsreels. The unreality of these details seems intended to transcend the real; as the miracle did at the end of Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951), these details cohere with the rose-lensed plot and the tone of the whole film. In Life is Beautiful Benigni endorses completely his hero's choice of delusion over reality.
The film clearly makes this choice even in its technical execution. By shooting the mountain of cadavers from long range in a fog, Benigni keeps its horror spectral, in soft focus. The film, like Guido, backs away from the horror, refuses to focus on it. Perhaps this aversion is most clear when a guard is preparing to kill Guido, and an officer intervenes and directs him to do so elsewhere -- off camera. This device mercifully spares our tear ducts but confirms the film's determination to avoid the horrible reality. The film, like its hero, chooses to look away.
And how effective really is Guido's example? He trusts his five-year-old son to run the bookstore in his absence, but not to deal with the terrors drawing nearer and nearer. In fact, what saves Giosue is not so much his father's lies but his own stubborn habit of refusing to go to the showers with the other children. In fact, Guido's game may well imperil his son's life since the boy has no idea of the danger of his situation -- and more than once slips up because his father has not alerted him to the life-and-death importance of extreme caution.
In fiction, a particular story is not restricted to that particular. It is supposed to resonate representivity. A historical fiction is only obviously about the period of its setting; more significantly it is about the time it is made. So while our hearts are gladdened by Benigni's sentimental story of one man's family surviving a concentration camp, our heads should perhaps go on alert. Is willful self-delusion really the way our society should deal with its dangers? Is that even a practicable strategy for an individual? For all its humanistic charm, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful affirms the individual fantasy at the expense of the common weal.
I have no doubt that writer/director Benigni's intentions were nothing but noble and humane. But he did not sufficiently think through his initial conception. By minimizing the harshness of the event, this film marks a regression in cinema's reluctant growth in dealing responsibly with the Holocaust. Although documentary footage of the camps was shown in newsreels as early as 1945, the film industry long avoided the subject. Even Alain Resnais, in his breakthrough film Night and Fog (1955), did not feel free to refer to the extermination of the Jews. To confirm the myth of French national resistance, censors removed a shot of a French policeman surveying the camp at Pithiviers. Resnais dealt with this dilemma by universalizing the meaning of the Holocaust. His detached, unimpassioned voice-over warns against forgetting past atrocities and of "the coming of new executioners" who will not look "really different" from us. The colour footage of the postwar ruins of the camps, often stunningly beautiful, contrasts to the horror of the black and white archival material. Compared to Resnais' limited treatment of the Holocaust, and after the increasing courage of The Pawnbroker (1965), Shoah (1985), and Schindler's List (1993), Benigni's film seems not just naive but perhaps even dangerous.
There is a similar evasion of history in The Prince of Egypt, albeit with less worrying effect and less noble motivation. Here the source that is insensitively represented is not our recent history but our collective mythology. That may make it less immediately painful, but no less important an error. The film pretends to tell the Exodus story to people who no longer know the Bible as well as did previous generations -- probably all previous generations. But for all the theological advice the project claims, this film's story is a Hollywooden distortion of Exodus. It reduces one of humanity's most fascinating, ambivalent mythic plots -- and its central figure -- to Hollywood formula.
The problem begins in the title. As a signifier, Moses means nothing as a prince of Egypt but everything as a prophet of the Jews. So why misrepresent him (and the movie) in the title? Why not call the film Hero of the Hebrews? Or Exodus Man (which would at least open the door to an action-hero spinoff)? The producers claim that out of piety they have decided to restrain the commercializing of the film, but the title refutes that. This film is nothing if not commercial. There can be no explanation for the mistitle Prince of Egypt other than a desire to avoid stressing Moses' Jewishness. This would be understood by the present-day Hebrew prophet, Jackie Mason, whose humour is often criticized by Jewish viewers for being "too Jewish." By avoiding being too Jewish, the filmmakers have produced a film that is not very biblical. The liberties it takes with its putative source all take the film away from the powerful myth and its meaning and closer to the comforting cliches of Hollywood.
For example, the film omits the part of the story, after the baby Moses is discovered in the rushes (portending his future film career), in which the Egyptian princess hires the child's real mother to nurse him. Instead of Moses up aware of his family and his roots, the film imposes the cliche of an identity crisis and sibling rivalry -- moreover, with the wrong sibling. Here the conflict is with Rameses instead of with Aaron and Miriam. To build this sitcom cliche, the film depicts the childhood rival becoming the pharaoh Moses must confront as Jehovah's agent. This relationship has no basis in the Bible whatsoever; it is entirely fabricated by a soap opera mind.
This hackneyed domesticity betrays a major misunderstanding of the biblical context. The Egyptians considered the pharaoh divine. His equivalent was not Moses but Jehovah. What makes their confrontation dramatic is that the mortal Moses confronts the divine pharaoh -- and (at the risk of spoiling the film's ending for you) wins! The important point is that Moses represents the new phenomenon, an unseeable god. In the showstopping number by the pharaoh's high priests, "You're Playing with the Big Boys Now," the film is as wrong-headed as the priests. Moses is playing for The Man, and there is really no competition. Jehovah even takes credit for the hardening of the pharaoh's heart and for the limited success of his agents. This playing field cannot be levelled. For sentimental effect, the film reduces an epic (however uneven) battle between gods to a showdown between supposed half-brothers. Later, amid the plagues, instead of debating their relative powers Rameses reminds Moses: "You were always getting me into trouble." This smacks of the Smothers Brothers, not Exodus. It is of the Egyptian queen, not Jehovah, that this Moses asks: "Why did you choose me?" With friends like this, the Bible doesn't need detractors.
The film's first great set-piece tips the Dreamworks hand. The mischievous and athletic young Moses challenges his step-brother Rameses to a chariot race that runs incredibly wild through the palace and over rickety scaffolding that crumbles behind them. True, this race, the destruction of the Egyptian icon, and the climactic flood of sand prefigure the brothers' rematch at the Red Sea, but that is formalist (a point of structure that does not open out to any meaning in the text). I don't remember that opening chase in my King James -- nor even in my old comic book version. The schlocky chariot race proves that this cartoon Moses is based not on the Bible's but on Hollywood's message, conflating the Charlton Heston roles in Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments and Ben blur. Here Moses is cast as Heston. The chase further misrepresents Moses by introducing him as a man of action and a playful, mischievous, thoughtless delinquent. Every specific about the film's Moses not just distorts the original but denies his biblical meaning.
As the Bible leaves Moses' early character blank, he is completely defined by his reported words and deeds. The key to the story is that he is not seen as a man either of action or thought until Jehovah impels him to both. He is a blank page on which Jehovah will imprint nature and meaning. Moses begins to take action impulsively, in Jehovah's service: he kills the Egyptian who is abusing the Israelite slave and later fights off the men bullying Zipporah's sisters at the well. In the film, the spirited charioteer kills the slave-driver by accident (he falls backward off a bridge) and defends the sisters by driving off the bullies' camels, an act rather more canny than physical. To further sentimentalize the hero, the film omits the stammer that makes Moses dependent on his brother Aaron as the two communicate God's message to the Israelites and negotiate with the pharaoh. The film has Zipporah, not Aaron, attending Moses' first visit to the Egyptian king. Until the end, Aaron is reduced to a Doubting Thomas on the sidelines, a kibitzer. In so glossing the hero, the film precludes the serious implications of Jehovah's deliberate choice of a flawed spokesman.
Still eager to improve on a 3,000-year-old story directed by God, DreamWorks introduces the Midianite love-interest Zipporah much earlier, as a fiery prisoner of war presented to Moses as a sex slave -- enabling our New Age hero to show his good character by allowing her to escape. This feminist sensibility differs markedly from the biblical Moses, whose idea of generosity towards captured womanhood was to kill all but the young virgins -- whom he turned over to his soldiers. And remember that the biblical Zipporah is ahead of Moses in some respects, that it is she, the Midianite, who allays Jehovah's wrath by circumcising her son. It is such complex points that make The Book so rich and of eternal fascination. But you wouldn't know that from this film. It replaces an intriguingly ambivalent hero with a gross -- actually a tall, dark, and handsome -- over-simplification.
What's wrong, you say, with making the Old Testament hero more -- well -- heroic for the modern age? Plenty. Part of the Bible's importance is as a document of our culture, an ancient record of how our forefathers saw the human condition and what their shaping values were. Not just our literature and language but our sense of ourselves and our customs have been profoundly influenced by the Bible. If we want to understand how we came to be what we are, the Bible is arguably our most valuable primary text. Therefore the misogyny of some of its central heroes is as telling (i.e., vital) as its tradition of brave, independent women. Whitewashing of the Bible prevents us from determining our cultural roots. There is much in the Bible to embarrass us, much that we should reject. But if we want to escape some unfortunate traditions it helps to know their source and what prompted them. When Dreamworks gives us a modern wussy Moses in a supposedly adult cartoon, they treat us as Guido treats Giosue -- but with neither love nor shelter.
The film has been praised for the grandeur of its visual design. But, like the chariot race and the homogenizing of its hero, that simply represents a triumphant abuse of the source. In the film, the pharaoh's palace seems slightly larger than the Grand Canyon -- and designed by the same architect, which confuses the theology somewhat. People seem like ants as they scurry around, building monuments for their masters. By flexing its command of scale in this way, the cartoon presents a minuscule humanity dwarfed by its own creations. This undercuts the biblical purpose of shrinking man before nature, not his own works, and of bringing man closer to God.
Some of these liberties might be forgiven if the film worked. But it does not. Presumably to enhance the commercial appeal of what has become -- regrettably -- an obscure old story, the film casts the voices of more topline Hollywood stars than you can shake Moses' rod at. But they are amazingly ineffective. None of the actors' voices establishes the kind of strong personality that, for example, Woody Allen projected in Antz, because the roles were not written for their personae; the characters are thinly conceived, and they are so disconnected from their visual presentation that we do not recognize them. There is not much Michelle Pfeiffer in Zipporah, Sandra Bullock in Miriam, Jeff Goldblum in Aaron, Helen Mirren in the queen -- or even Val Kilmer as Moses/God, or Ralph Fiennes as Rameses. Even Steve Martin and Martin Short are lost in the roles of the comical priests. The sole exception is Danny Glover's richly Jewish Jethro (Zipporah's father, the Midianite high priest). No-names would have been equally (in)effective. As a result, the film is stunning visually but stunted in its human dimension.
To be fair, I must admit that the film does declare that it has taken liberties with the historical and literary elements of the story. But it claims to be "true to the essence and values" of Exodus. Make no mistake: in virtually every key way, and certainly in the complex conception of Moses, it most certainly is not. With his gentle eyes and voice, his perfect sympathy, the flawless sensitivity of his human shepherdry, this Moses is rather a cross between Charlton Heston and Jesus than a respectful representation of the troubling Moses of Exodus.
However different the Benigni and Dreamworks treatments of the Jewish experience, they share a few disturbing points. Both espouse fantasy over reality, the historical reality in the first film and the reality of the myth in the latter. Both privilege the individual ego and fate over the assumption of a common experience and common values. Both have the believer's faith in miracles. Benigni is so sure that fantasy can save lives, even in the Holocaust, that he composes a fantasy to "prove" it. But saying "life is beautiful" does not make it so, especially not in the context of the great nightmare at the middle of our century. You can fantasize the Holocaust away, and wish it away, and pray it away, but in the real world it remains until some army -- whether of soldiers or of angels -- puts an end to it. Think about it: could Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" ever turn back a jackboot rendition of Deutschland uber alles?
Our cartoon feature actually makes Benigni's naive point in a song. The closing theme of the film is that there can be miracles, when you believe. The unfortunate corollary of that assumption is that if your required miracle doesn't happen, it's your fault for not having believed enough. That may be the gospel according to Prince of Egypt lyricist Stephen Schwartz, but Exodus it's not. The Book is full of miracles, but they don't happen because of the collective faith of the community. The Bible doesn't involve the pixie dust that believers mobilize in productions of Peter Pan. On the contrary, Jehovah constantly lavishes miracles upon the Israelites despite their lack of faith. He does it because that's His thing. That's how He proves His presence. They're so -- as He points out -- stiff-necked and faithless that they are constantly losing their path -- despite His steady supply of miracles. After being liberated by Jehovah's astounding series of plagues on Egypt, the Israelites panic and despair when they see the pharaoh's army in pursuit, then again when they're hungry, then again when they're thirsty at a poisoned oasis, then again when Moses pulls overtime at a summit meeting. No matter how often they are saved by a miracle they lose their faith the first chance they get. For Schwartz's song to have at least a Nod-ding acquaintance with Exodus it should chorus something like: "Miracles can happen if you show you don't believe." Or, "Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you're a stiff-necked recidivist pagan, whom Jehovah keeps trying to impress." That would be more biblical. But then it wouldn't have a shot at that golden gelding, Oscar. And that's the real centre of both these films' dance as they go hora-ing after false gods.
Word count: 4655
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Spring 1999
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