"let God have his eternity; my precincts are the seconds and the minutes"
Written: Sep 23 '03 (Updated Aug 14 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: Visually creative and stunning; articulate, fun, curious, and serious; acted with intelligence and restraint.
Cons: No, a 63-minute movie probably can't say anything brand-new and insightful about religion.
The Bottom Line: If you don't find Christianity at all interesting, I doubt the Book of Life would work for you. Otherwise, it's tense, thought-provoking, and fun.
Suppose, for the moment, that you have accumulated debts you cant pay. Gambling debts: like so many others, you win just often enough to distract you from how often you lose. The only visible solution, at your income, is to retire from gambling after winning one big bet, the one that pays for the others. Youre at your favorite coffee house, trying to get served (not for the first time) on credit by Edie, the shy, pretty Japanese woman at the counter, with whom you like to banter. A confident man in his 30s with a too-broad smile sits by you, and starts telling you things about yourself including that the coat youre wearing, which you took off the coffee-shop rack after it had been hanging there neglected for a week or two, had been specifically bought for you at a Goodwill by Edie the counter-woman, who knew you needed it and would take it. Anyway, this man, who seems to know so much, says he can arrange to have you win the lottery for you tonight. The only price is Edies eternal soul.
Yeah, youve heard tales like that. But you dont believe in souls. People have only minds, made up of practical modules for dealing with life, and useless in death. Even if people did have souls, Edies a Buddhist and presumably not for sale. You dont believe this man can win you the lottery, but at a non-existent price, well do you take the offer?
Or. Lets say youre the devil. You do believe in souls: youve been collecting them for millenia. But today is December 31, 1999, and tonight the world is set to end. Revelations has fortold it: the fifth, sixth, and seventh seals of the Book of Life will be opened, setting off catastrophes untold and, as seal #7 is opened, revealing the names of the elite 144,000 who will sit in heaven with God during the final battle. That final battle is fixed: you know youre going down. Do you take a vacation? Or do you keep on tempting mortals, right til the end, because thats what you do?
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Theres a lot of theology in the Book of Life, especially given its mere 63-minute length: delivered playfully, as often as not, but with a serious fascination. I wont go into it, because the films presentation is far more interesting than mine would be. But the basic issue is Jesuss need to decide whether to bring on the Apocalypse, which is after all what his law firm pays him for. Ive read two very funny novels on roughly this premise Donald Westlakes Humans, the Neil Gaiman / Terry Pratchett collaboration Good Omens but those assume that the demons and angels have found us humans to be interesting and charming, and thus dont want to do us in.
Book of Life is less flattering. In some sense, it's a movie about organizational inertia: how any task becomes its own reason for being, how workers will identify with the labor rather than the goal. Beyond the movie, lawyers and judges start out intending to punish the guilty and save the innocent, but learn instead to love rules that have lost any connection to the task. Beyond the movie, farmers lobby to keep being paid for the land they dont farm, and tons of chemicals are wasted growing crops that will be burned as excess, and cattle that will be diseased, slaughtered, and buried. Beyond the movie, there are still dozens of overlapping agencies devoted to controlling pests now extinct, and diseases now obselete, because their employees have livelihoods to protect. Beyond the movie, my summer job had me doing data entry for the Massachusetts government, and I found myself wanting to rewrite the rules so that state money would be distributed to people based on how easy their handwriting was for me to read. And in the movie?
Well, its not that the devil loves corruption: he just thinks hes part of a good system, those balanced tugs-of-war over human souls. And its not that Jesus loves humanity: but too many people have played by the rules, even died by the rules, and the math says most of them cant be in the Book of Life.
Go ahead, remind Jesus and Satan, remind them that the Apocalypse is the whole _point_ of humanity, the end in sight all along. But once humans exist, what matters is that they exist. You dont just stop funding an organization because its job is done. That screws with way too many lives, mortal or otherwise. Pretty soon Jesus and the devil those opponents in your game might wonder if they have more in common with each other than with you, the meddler whos trying to blow the final whistle.
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The Book of Life is a Hal Hartley film, and if Hartley was the worlds best-loved scriptwriter / director rather than merely mine and my wifes, you would instantly know some things to assume. You would expect, correctly, that the actors would be articulate and careful in their speech, even the law-firm receptionist forced to repeat Armageddon, Armageddon, and Jehosophat, how may I direct your call? to client after invisible client. You would expect to be shielded from the characters most painful scenes, allowing them their dignity while we wait outside for results, even if whats at stake is the end of all human life (yours included).
You would expect to recognize the actors from earlier Hartley films, and to immediately appreciate the casting choices. Martin Donovan, cast as Jesus, would of course give the son of God a weary, earnest goodwill that chafes, ever-so-slightly, against advice from anyone, including his bosses. Thomas Jay Ryan, the title character of Henry Fool, would obviously hide in Satans evil a gleeful but small-minded degeneracy, under the Foe of Foes blowhard charm. Miho Nikaido will of course endow her character with a kindness and watching intelligence that need few words to convey themselves strongly which may well be how she handles being the wife of Hal Hartley, a man who insists on writing, directing, and composing the music for an entire new movie every couple of years. And while P.J. Harveys presence in the film (as Mary Magdalene) is new to Hartleys oeuvre, you would of course expect him to make use of her clearest strengths: singing, and wearing tight black jumpsuits. All true.
Whats new, from a filmmaking standpoint, is the camera-work Hartleys doing. Even the dialogue scenes, which look pretty conventional, have unusual visual depth, and unusually clear boundaries between figures. During transitions, though, anything goes. Theres jerky chase scenes, where individual frames are left on the screen just long enough to disrupt any illusion of continuous movement. Theres blurring, and then theres unusually stark black-and-white. Theres a hypnotic scene in Tower Records where Mary Magdalene goes to a listening station and sings, intently, along to music we cant hear, even as an unrelated, dark, woozy song plays in the store behind her. (I think the store song is a P.J. Harvey song, but her listener-station torch singing clashes bizarrely with her recorded voice). Its beautifully shot, and it all makes everything hyper-real, concentrated, the way the end of the world should be.
Its also, mind you, visually playful. The Book of Life is a Mac PowerBook: as Jesus decides whether to open the fifth seal, we see a cartoon clasp open, and an Okay / Cancel option (his pointer moves between them uncertainly). And Satan, by far the most monologue-prone character, pauses in the middle of a chase to direct his thoughts to a boom microphone on a sidewalk.
But the last monologue isnt his: Satan is too full of blarney, and theology comes too easily for him, too self-servingly. The last monologue is, in fact, an exception for a movie built on quick-witted heresies: an absolutely straightforward statement of truths that are certainly not news to me, and not meant to be news to you, either. Its rare to find moral preachments in smart indie movies anymore Id estimate, for example, that about 75% of the Sundance Channels selections star protagonists who are on the wrong side of the law for no good reason, with the implied question that what the hell business is that of yours? I suspect thats because its hard to set up situations in which we dont immediately tune out, from over-familiarity.
Its hard, that is, to set up dramatically shot moral pronouncements from likeable, confused, slightly-moody people who tilt their head funny, and get angry at their father, and hold our fate in their hands (literally). Its even harder, Im sure, to write them so that they work with the character, as well as with what we know.
But now I can tell you this: its one heckuva worthwhile trick. Here, its a trick attached to an interesting, playful, visually breathtaking movie.
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