MOSES THE LAWGIVER (1975) **1/2 I suppose that the parallels between the treatment of the Israelites at the hands of the Egyptians, and the treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, either jump out at you or are entirely inaccessible. In any case, the film reminds me how nice it is to live in the 21st century Western world: where feeding your family is not difficult for most, work can be gratifying, and objections to political idiocy and incompetence don't revolve around fears that your children will be thrown into the river. I have to say that Burt Lancaster wouldn't be my first choice for any particularly difficult role, but he manages to generate a moving sense of an ordinary man of extraordinary faith thrust into an era of manifest impossibility. And stubbornness, he succeeds in portraying Moses as very stubborn. I feel sorry for the guy, what with his flock refusing to get it and always trying to give up. It's not that the herd is necessarily smarter now-I think they are though, due to evolution-but we have thousands of years of the documented errors of humanity to point out to them. It may be that Moses' contributions toward imposing social order should be considered, even at the expense of distracting from the religious implications of his life. I'm not enough of an Old Testament scholar to comment intelligently on whether or not the letter and spirit of scripture have been followed, but I have to say that Moses comes off as something of a death penalty enthusiast. Different times may call for different measures, but to modern eyes Moses' animal sacrifices can't help but appear bizarre, even if the point is that he wasn't in favour of human sacrifice. If the argument is that the will of the herd can only be deflected by degree, that leaves an awful lot of moralistic wiggle room. And I don't believe that to have been the intended point. Truth of this magnitude is misty, maybe, if not opaque. The teleological suspension of the rational? Or political expedience? I'd be surprised if e'er the twain should meet. Gianfranco De Bosio does a fantastic job of working Ennio Morricone's music against the desert backdrop during epiphanies, which does give moments of the film a special power. It's confusing, during those moments, I think--the relationship between the forces of nature and the source of the epiphany towards a being in time. Dov Seltzer's songs are also very nice. I might argue that the film lacks consistency to be much of a recruiting video, except that inconsistency has never seemed to serve as much of a bar to recruitment.
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