Movie Night With Urbaniak: Ben-Hur

To be honest, I was nervous as a kitten. I’ve been watching Ben-Hur on a regular basis since I was a child and when I got the screenwriting bug I discovered it all over again, and for you young screenwriters out there I direct you to study Ben-Hur‘s structure because it’s really awfully good. And I’m not someone who sits around watching Bible epics as a rule. But I wasn’t sure how it was going to come off to a hepcat indie-stalwart like Urbaniak. I felt like I was bringing a date home to meet the parents — would he like Hur? Generally, when Urbaniak and I sit around watching a movie together, he talks about the acting and I talk about the screenplay. Or rather, he teaches me things about the acting I wasn’t seeing before and I jabber on about scene structure and dialogue and he makes grunts of understanding.

And while the screenplay of Ben-Hur is a relentless, stakes-ever-raising plot machine, the acting, mm, the acting is a little Technicolor let’s say. So I wasn’t sure if there was going to be much in it for Urbaniak to appreciate.

When I rediscovered Ben-Hur in my 30s it blew me away so completely that I went backward and forward from The Ten Commandments to Cleopatra watching every big-screen, big-budget Technicolor Bible and/or historical epic I could find to see if maybe there were other great screenplays out there that have somehow been overshadowed by their bloated production values. Nope, turns out not. Ben-Hur, as near as I can tell, is the only one of the genre that works. All the other ones feel like pageants and spectacles, visually stunning but dramatically inert.

[A digression: one Passover weekend, I was sitting at home flipping channels on my little black-and-white TV and landed, momentarily, on The Ten Commandments. This is the ten seconds or so that happened to be on when I landed there:

THE PALACE, DAY
(The Egyptian queen is going to get to the bottom of this whole Moses thing.)
QUEEN. (to servant, imperiously) Fetch me my chariot! I am going to Goshen!

(Dissolve to:)

A HOVEL, GOSHEN, NIGHT
(Moses’s mom and sister sit by the fire, shucking peas. We hear the sounds of horses and wooden wheels, off. Sister looks up, alarmed.)
SISTER. (to Mom) What’s that? A chariot? Here? In Goshen?

End of digression.]

Why does Ben-Hur work when all the others don’t? Well, it contains some very good filmmaking, there’s one thing it’s got going for it. It’s visually sumptuous and splendorously spectacular in an old-fashioned Hollywood way, but in many ways it’s shot in a much more modern style than, say, The Robe. And while I can easily say that it contains Charlton Heston’s best, most accomplished, most nuanced performance, the fact remains that he is still Charlton Heston — a shiny golden boy with astonishing physical presence and little noticeable acting talent. When Judah Ben-Hur feels something, there’s little guesswork on the part of the audience as to what the emotion is — Heston doesn’t “indicate” or “emote” in the ham actor sense, he practically screams whatever inner turmoil his character is experiencing. He glowers, he snarls, he beams, he contorts his body into ridiculous, kabuki-level pretzels in order to show us Judah’s anger, pride, joy or misery.

No, what makes Ben-Hur work after fifty years is, you may have already guessed, the screenplay, which does so many things right it constitutes a miniature screenwriting course all by itself. It contains one of my favorite Inciting Incidents ever, when Judah’s sister accidentally knocks a roof tile down upon an Important Roman Guy during a parade. This tiny event sets a gigantic, life-changing set of plot-points into motion, culminating in, of all things, the crucifixion of Jesus.

Hard upon this great Inciting Incident is Judah’s Gap. Judah takes the blame for his sister’s accident, thinking his wealth and friendship with the local constable will protect him and his family. What happens instead is his family is thrown in prison and he is sent to work as a slave in the galley of a Roman warship. Judah’s Gap then widens when the ship’s ranking officer, Arrias, recognizing something noble in Judah’s character, undoes his chains prior to an important battle. It widens still further when, after saving Arrias’s life, Judah is made a Roman citizen, and so on.

(By looking at a crucial moment in history through the lens of one man’s journey through its various classes and societies, Ben-Hur anticipates, improbably enough, Forrest Gump. And the intimacy of Ben-Hur‘s story-line [it’s really about only a handful of characters] set against its spectacular, cast-of-thousands background is what sets it apart from “great man” epics like Gandhi or The Greatest Story Ever Told or the aforementioned, must-to-avoid Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur is a personal story, even a private story, not a historical drama.  Like The Godfather, Part II, the story it tells is epic, and its running time is quite long, but each individual scene is a model of compactness and efficiency.)

One of the key phrases in story construction is “But There Was One Thing They Had Forgotten.” Ben-Hur is a virtual compendium of “But There Was One Thing They Had Forgotten” moments. Judah thinks his wealth and political connections will save him, but he has forgotten that the Important Roman Guy the tile fell on is his Roman friend Messala’s new boss, who has been charged with getting the Jews in line in Judea. Pilate grants Judah Roman citizenship, thinking that Judah will be overjoyed to finally be on the winning side, but he has forgotten that Judah was thrown into slavery because of the same oppressive Roman regime that Pilate represents. Judah goes to Jerusalem to see Jesus crucified, but he has forgotten that he’s actually met the guy before, when he was on his way to the Roman galleys. And so forth.

Then there’s the still-awesome chariot race, which I’ve touched on before when discussing The Phantom Menace, but for those coming in late, the upshot of the thing is that the chariot race in Ben-Hur comes after about two and a half hours of relentless plot regarding Judah’s doomed friendship with Messala, his Roman ex-friend who consigned Judah’s mother and sister to prison and is responsible for what Judah believes is their deaths. The stakes are ratcheted up to absurd heights leading up to the race until the tension is all but unbearable, and then the race itself unfurls with a brutal elegance and technical sophistication still unbeaten in cinema history. In contrast, the pod race in The Phantom Menace involves a kid we just met racing against a creature we barely know, because some people who he ran into at the junk shop need a spare part for their space ship. The race itself is a technical marvel, but to compare the two in story terms is a futile exercise.

(The recent 4-disc reissue also includes the 1925 silent version of the movie, which, although it contains some pretty silly Silent Hollywood filmmaking, is well worth watching for the chariot race, which is, in some ways, even more accomplished and startling than the 1959 version.)

The story of Ben-Hur also works, by the way, as a drama about the hubris and folly of imperialism. Funny how I never noticed that before now.

Finally, I should just say, you know, I have very little patience in my life for Christian fundamentalism. But the whole Jesus aspect of Ben-Hur works for me because the filmmakers have chosen, wisely I think, to concentrate on the philosophical and humanist aspects of the Christ message instead of the “follow me or you’re going to hell” and the “all other faiths but mine are wrong” aspects. It makes Ben-Hur a drama about a man’s spiritual awakening instead of a tract designed to frighten or cajole.