Movie reviews

Recently we have seen several very successful Israeli movies: "Ushpizin"
(meaning guests), "The Syrian Bride" and "Walking on water." The tremendous
differences in scope of these movies is impressive. "Ushpizin" tells the
story of an orthodox Jewish couple in Jerusalem and how they cope with the
visit of unexpected guests, who are really petty crooks. "The Syrian Bride"
is about the marriage of a Golan Heights Druse woman to a Syrian Druse man,
and once she crosses the border she will never be able to return to her
family. "Walking on water" is the story of a Mossad hit man, who loses his
nerve, and his brush with the German family of a Holocaust murderer. These
movies share nothing in common regarding their stories, but they are all
Israeli, and with some other recent movies, show that Israeli cinema has
reached a new high level of maturity, since they turned out such films as
"Salah Shabati", the classic Israeli film of the 1950s.
One aspect of these movies is that the production values and cinematography
are first class. They are not trying to hit you over the head with an
obvious story, but rather are telling what appear to be true stories with
real people under complex circumstances. Another feature that they have in
common is that none of these movies is propagandistic. Certainly they all
make points, regarding for example, the stupidity of bureaucracy in dealing
with people's problems, and the morality of killing old men who are no
longer any threat. But, they are sophisticated and eschew crude political
scoring.
This is not true with all Israeli movies, certainly there are some made by
Israelis (both Jews and Arabs) that are a showcase for the Palestinian
position, such as the entirely false "Jenin, Jenin" that claims that a
massacre occurred in Jenin in 2002. But, the value of a film is greater the
less it is trying to make political propaganda and the more it deals in a
balanced way with the fate of individuals.
Another recent phenomenon is that the depiction of Jews in movies has
changed somewhat. You still have the stereotyped Jewish nerd (Ben Stiller)
and stupid comedian (Woody Allen), but in serious cinema there are
coincidentally two recent examples where the approach has changed, namely
the portrayal of Shylock by Al Pacino in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice"
(directed by Michael Radford) and of Fagin by Ben Kingsley in Dickens'
"Great Expectations" (directed by Roman Polanski). These are two great
actors, trying to depict the complexity of their characters rather than
using the standard anti-Semitic portrayal that was de rigueur in former
years. Is it because now the politically correct attitude is that overt
anti-Semitism is socially unacceptable, is it because the recent upsurge of
anti-Semitism (related to anti-Israelism) has made the producers more
sensitive to such a charge, is it that western society has matured somewhat
and no longer accepts such one-dimensional characterizations, or is it
simply because the two directors are themselves Jewish (although Radford
only found this out recently)?
Whatever the reasons, this is a welcome improvement. It is interesting that
both Shakespeare and Dickens, arguably the two greatest English literary
geniuses, both resorted to Jewish "characters" to enliven their work, and
that they made these characters important enough that even today the nature
of their portrayal is a matter of significance.