#100 - Ben-Hur (1959) - William Wyler

I didn’t know Jesus was in this movie (which is something I don’t think I’ve ever said before) – and here we are with Ben-Hur and the opening scene is Luke chapter 2 and the subtitle of the film is “a Tale of the Christ.” The movie begins ‘when all the world was to be taxed’, with Caesar Augustus and everyone returning home for a census, with a pregnant woman on a donkey headed for Bethlehem, with a guy named John dunking people in the wilderness, and with other details familiar to anyone who attended Sunday school. But all that quickly fades into the background as we’re introduced to Mr. Ben-Hur himself.

Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a Jewish prince who used to be in charge before the Romans showed up. The new boss in town turns out to be Judah’s childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd and his cleft chin). As the two catch up it quickly becomes clear that they do not see eye-to-eye about the destiny of the Jewish people, and the jovial backslapping turns into aggressive stare-downs and a rivalry is born. Messala quickly gets the upper hand thanks to some lucky timing, a parade, a passing governor, a rooftop lookout, and a loose tile. He frames the falling tile as an assassination attempt and Judah and his mother and sister are locked up and out of the way. The rest of the movie follows Judah’s life as a slave and his efforts to return home, exact his revenge, and see about his family. But it’s at its most interesting when dealing in these coincidences and chances of timing.

For much of the movie, Jesus remains a background figure, a whisper in the winds of Judean gossip, something special that might be happening. And the characters cross paths with him and his message in subtle and powerful ways. A stranger gives Judah some water when he needs it most. A man confuses Judah for a preacher he’s been looking for. This man introduces Judah to his friend in the chariot racing business. The chariot race involves Messala. All these connections may seem far-fetched, but the subtlety works as a gentle Christian (or Jewish) message that there’s a plan out there and someone behind it. But towards the end of the movie this subtlety is lost and replaced with heavy-handedness.

When leprosy shows up you know where things are headed – if you’re going to get healed by Jesus leprosy is the disease to get.  The climax is never in doubt. And there are some obvious and clichéd speeches about the futility of revenge, turning the other cheek, selflessness, and forgiveness and quotations of Bible verses and it gets to be too much. The movie turns from a gentle Sunday school teacher into a bossy nun. With a subtitle like that it has every right to, but the soft touch was much more effective.

At its roots Ben-Hur is Christian movie. But it spends the majority of its 3 hours and 40 minutes as an epic about one man and his quest through the Middle East, through slavery, in ships, on mountains, in chariots, up the ranks of Roman society, and back home. It is long and tedious. But there are some highlights, the most notable being the famous chariot race scene.

It is one of the most well-known action sequences in movie history. And the fact that it remains genuinely thrilling more than 50 years later is a testament to its effectiveness and is illustrative of some of the problems in today’s CGI-driven action landscape. Mark Harris, formerly of Grantland (may it rest in peace) wrote about this issue by comparing the newest Avengers movie and Mad Max Fury Road. Watching a supervillain rip out a chunk of a city and float it into the air while computer-animated robots do battle with stunt doubles is too cut off from reality. There are no real stakes involved and it’s hard to be invested when you know the problem can be solved with a few keystrokes by a CGI artist. Fury Road, on the other hand, was incredibly effective for its now-famous (and Oscar awarded) use of ‘practical effects’. This means that in Fury Road when cars flip and crash and burn, there were actually real cars somewhere in real space that flipped and crashed and burned. They drove in the desert and people were really on and in them, and the CGI was used to enhance things that were really there and filmed by a camera. The whole thing feels alive and seems to have real consequences attached.

The chariot race in Ben-Hur, of course, was shot using real people, real chariots, real horses, and a real crowd. And all this realness produces a sense of real danger (the urban legend that a stuntman died on camera doesn’t hurt either). You feel the strain on the racers’ bodies, you see the tension in their eyes. They sweat. Some fall out and are crushed. Some are dragged by the reins when their chariots crumble. You really don’t want that scumbag Messala to win and you wouldn’t mind if something bad were to happen to him along the way. You’re invested in it. It is a stark contrast, not just to modern computer-generated action, but to another scene in the movie. At one point Judah finds himself as an oarsman on a war ship. A battle breaks out and it is filmed in the 1950s version of CGI. The whole thing is shot – very obviously – using miniatures. The tiny boats – supposedly filled with hundreds of rowers – bump into each other over and over from the same camera angle and nothing about it is real. You know they could just be picked up and put out of each other’s way and the whole thing could be avoided. The chariot race feels real because, even though it’s still part of a movie, in the most important way it is real.

Ben-Hur is a spectacle in scope and scale – huge in every way. But with that size comes weight and its huge ambitions ultimately weigh it down. It navigates its message with precision and subtlety for much of its run-time, but eventually succumbs to heavy-handedness and uneven melodrama. For all its virtues – and there are quite a few – such a behemoth can only remain nimble for so long.


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