SIMON MAGUS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Fireworks Pictures Director: Ben Hopkins Writer: Ben Hopkins Cast: Embeth Davidtz, Rutger Hauer, Ian Holm, Sean McGinley, Terence Rigby, Amanda Ryan, Noah Taylor, Stuart Townsend
There's an old saw that goes like this.
Anti-Semite: Do you know who caused this earthquake? It was the Jews.
More rational person: No, it was the bicycle riders.
Anti-Semite: Why the bicycle riders?
More rational person: Why the Jews?
From the way the Jewish people have been regarded by their enemies, you'd think folks of that persuasion were the most powerful people that ever lived--causing not only earthquakes but famines, economic crashes, wartime defeats, and other forms of sorcery. In watching "Simon Magus," a magical picture in more ways than one, people in the audience who are not Jewish can absorb through writer- director Ben Hopkins's careful, detailed, thoroughly human and humane storytelling the entire history of the scapegoating of the Hebrew people writ small. While the specific crimes attributed to the besieged people in the now-vanished town and culture of a 19th Century hamlet in Poland's Silesia include the charge that the bearded community were prepared to sacrifice a Christian baby for use in the Passover matzoh, such an excuse scarcely seems necessary given the dislike, indifference, or patronizing attitudes of the larger, Christian community toward a group that numbered no more than twenty in the poverty-stricken mud-slicked expanse.
The two plots that intertwine concern the romantic interest of the Jewish community's scholar, Dovid (Stuart Townsend) in the somewhat older and resistant widow Leah (Embeth Davidtz); and the struggle between Dovid and the ambitious and ruthless merchant Hase (Sean McGinley) to buy a piece of land from the an aristocratic squire (Rutger Hauer). If Dovid were to gain possession, he would construct a terminal through the community to allow the railroad to pass through, thereby helping his people modernize by enabling the dying neighborhood to trade with both Jews and Gentiles of other areas. Were Hase to succeed in buying the land, he would kill the idea of the terminal so that his own business--based on traffic through the ordinary road--would continue to prosper without competition. The Jews gain help from an unlikely source, the psychotic Simon Magus--who in the world of the Twenty-First Century would inevitably be an ignored, homeless individual living on the streets, playing a rudimentary wind instrument to raise a few coins from passersby.
What gives the story its original edge is one particular: Simon has grown to dislike, even hate his own people, and with good reason. The small Jewish boys throw stones at him, the rabbi refuses to allow him to pray with the other men on the ground floor of the crude little synagogue, and on at least one occasion he is given ten lashes by rabbinical order for urinating into the mouths of four sleeping children--an act which Simon executes at the behest of the Devil himself (played by Ian Holm).
Writer-director Hopkins--the son of a Gentile mother and a Jewish father--is adept at evoking the mystical quality of the village. Much of the action appears to take place during twilight hours, made particularly mysterious by the mist covering the muddy streets which harbor the fragile wooden homes of the poor and diminishing population of religious Jews. Hopkins evokes a theatrical performance from Noah Taylor in the title role, a man shunned by his own people and thereby manipulated by the cunning Hase who uses him as a mole to destroy the last remnants of the Jewish population. Taylor babbles to himself, shakes his body in prayer frequently during the day, and seems to gain the affectionate attentions of just one child while being exploited by the local priest (Ken Dury) and manipulated by the greedy merchant, Hase. Though he is given a chance at redemption near the story's conclusion, Hopkins's heroes appear to be the town's landowning aristocrat, a man who represents old money with all of the contempt that the class possesses for clutching merchants like Hase; and Dovid, a Talmudic scholar who pursues his lady fair despite countless rejections and widens his horizons via poetry lessons from the more wordly, more secular, and unmarried Sarah (Amanda Ryan).
Hopkins knows that in dealing with special effects, less is more. He carefully restrains the number of Simon's diabolical visions, making Ian Holm in the role of the prince of darkness appear like an insane villager himself rather than a horned demon costumed in red. In a film of conventional length, Hopkins manages to depict various types of persons--Anti- Semites determined literally to burn out the Jews; a kindly aristocrat more interested in poetry than in business; a madman who get a chance for fifteen minutes of fame; a distinguished rabbi (David De Keyser), who fears the steady attrition of his people; a scholar whose interest in a woman competes with the Torah for his attention. This is the ambience that many of Isaac Bashevis Singer's characters could call home, a now-vanished shtetl which, railroad or not, was doomed to become extinct.
Not Rated. Running time: 103 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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