"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 can’t 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. You’re 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 you’re 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 Edie’s eternal soul.
Yeah, you’ve heard tales like that. But you don’t 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, Edie’s a Buddhist and presumably not for sale. You don’t believe this man can win you the lottery, but at a non-existent price, well… do you take the offer?
Or. Let’s say you’re the devil. You do believe in souls: you’ve 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 you’re going down. Do you take a vacation? Or do you keep on tempting mortals, right til the end, because that’s what you do?
***********
There’s 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 won’t go into it, because the film’s presentation is far more interesting than mine would be. But the basic issue is Jesus’s need to decide whether to bring on the Apocalypse, which is after all what his law firm pays him for. I’ve read two very funny novels on roughly this premise – Donald Westlake’s 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 don’t 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 don’t 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, it’s not that the devil loves corruption: he just thinks he’s part of a good system, those balanced tugs-of-war over human souls. And it’s 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 can’t 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 don’t 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 who’s trying to blow the final whistle.
***********
The Book of Life is a Hal Hartley film, and if Hartley was the world’s best-loved scriptwriter / director rather than merely mine and my wife’s, 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 what’s 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 Satan’s 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. Harvey’s presence in the film (as Mary Magdalene) is new to Hartley’s oeuvre, you would of course expect him to make use of her clearest strengths: singing, and wearing tight black jumpsuits. All true.
What’s new, from a filmmaking standpoint, is the camera-work Hartley’s doing. Even the dialogue scenes, which look pretty conventional, have unusual visual depth, and unusually clear boundaries between figures. During transitions, though, anything goes. There’s jerky chase scenes, where individual frames are left on the screen just long enough to disrupt any illusion of continuous movement. There’s blurring, and then there’s unusually stark black-and-white. There’s a hypnotic scene in Tower Records where Mary Magdalene goes to a listening station and sings, intently, along to music we can’t 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). It’s beautifully shot, and it all makes everything hyper-real, concentrated, the way the end of the world should be.
It’s 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 isn’t 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. It’s rare to find moral preachments in smart indie movies anymore – I’d estimate, for example, that about 75% of the Sundance Channel’s 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 that’s because it’s hard to set up situations in which we don’t immediately tune out, from over-familiarity.
It’s 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). It’s even harder, I’m 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: it’s one heckuva worthwhile trick. Here, it’s a trick attached to an interesting, playful, visually breathtaking movie.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.