Still epic after 50 years

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2009)

"Ben-Hur" isn't really a film about Jesus, or rather it's a film in which Jesus is the main character, but he's never seen except in partial glimpses, never heard. Rather he is the character around whom the life and fortunes of the Jewish prince, Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) revolves, though he doesn't know it until quite late in the film.
I haven't read the 1880 novel by General Lew Wallace, nor have I seen either the 1907 1-reeler or the 1925 Fred Niblo version, also a long and expensive epic. But William Wyler's film is fascinating to me in part because of this absence of Jesus - and the absence of religion from much of Ben Hur's life in the film, though not from his thoughts. The basic story is really quite simple: Ben Hur's childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd) returns to Judeah after years in Rome, now a tribune and second in command to the military governor or prefect. Though the two seem overjoyed to see each other we quickly learn that Messala both have ulterior motives in renewing their friendship - Messala to help crush opposition through Ben Hur's help, and the Jewish prince to accomplish the exact opposite. This is not a friendship made to last. In short order, Ben Hur is accused of a crime he didn't commit and sent to the galleys; after years of rowing in chains, he saves the life of a Roman consul during a naval battle, for which he is freed and eventually becomes the consul's adoptive son, all the while earning a name for himself as the greatest charioteer in Rome. But his heart belongs to his homeland, and as quickly as he can he returns to take vengeance on Messala, who has also imprisoned his mother and daughter. Messala, also a great chariot driver, will eventually face him in the justly famed chariot race where no rules apply and each man plans to seek the other's death. This 9-minute action sequence really is as thrilling as I remembered it from years ago and is deserving of all the praise it gets; it has a "real time" you-are-there feel to it that I've never seen in any other historical epic.
But in the background is always the young rabbi, roughly the same age as Ben Hur, who gave the then-slave a drink of water as he was about to be shipped off to the galleys, and who the now-freed son of both Rome and Judeah feels compelled to offer the same favor as the Crucifixion draws nigh. Jesus appears in long-shot or in partial view for perhaps 5-10 minutes out of the 3 1/2 hour running time here, but his presence lingers throughout; the biggest problem I had with the film, in fact, was in the last half hour as the rather cheesy-looking scene on Cavalry translates is intercut with the healing of Ben Hur's now-leprous mother and sister and his own conversion - it all seems to obvious and simplistic; but I guess that for a believer it must work. Too, it seems that Ben Hur is able to have his cake and eat it too: achieving his vengeance, getting his fortune and family back, finding the love of the onetime slave girl who had been promised to another. Sure, he suffered, but at the end his worldly happiness seems more obvious than any spiritual redemption.
This isn't a huge flaw for me, however, as I realize how difficult such a dramatization is, and in particular when filmed by believing Jews and Christians and intended for an audience that had not yet tired of such simple homilies and the grand scale that the film does, at least, still impress with. The acting is all pretty much what one expects in such a thing - lots of declamations and stagy, overly dramatic glances, hands thrown up at the site of lepers, etc. The photography is quite beautiful if completely unrealistic - this never really looks like the holy land, never really even looks like the real world, with a lot of dreamy overlit closeups, deep shadows when deemed dramatically necessary, interior lighting that is sometimes indistinguishable from exteriors -- none of it matters really, if you accept that this is "big scale Hollywood Biblical melodrama" and look at it in terms of its success as a genre piece. I like a lot of the actors in smaller roles, particularly Frank Thring as a somewhat sympathetic, realistic Pontius Pilate whose words of wisdom Ben Hur rejects in one of the best scenes in a film that is really dominated by intimate character interludes despite its reputation for spectacle.
On the whole, it works for me, Wyler is a fluid enough storyteller to keep things moving despite the immense length and the extremely wide format is rarely a distraction, if rarely necessary either. It's easy to see why this was such an immense hit, earning the equivalent of over $700 million today theatrically; it's also to see why it marked the peak of the genre and why it all went downhill rather quickly, as it was such a grueling production that few filmmakers would want to tackle such a thing again even with the potential of very large returns. By 1966 or so (John Huston's "The Bible") the genre was effectively dead, at least on such a large scale.