Jewish World Review Dec. 29, 1998 / 10 Teves, 5759

Artistic masterpiece

By Alan Oirich

IN A CASCADE OF COLOR and beauty in three-plus dimensions, DreamWorks has carved itself a permanent place in the landscape of animation with their first such feature release, The Prince of Egypt.

This powerful piece walks the fine line between entertainment and biblical content, managing to ignore the damoclean omnipresence of its predecessor - The Ten Commandments - until the imposing memory of Cecil B. Demille’s 1956 classic fades before this film finishes its opening musical number.

The Prince of Egypt comes into its own with lustrous animation, a dazzling musical score, a fetching couple of plot turns, and the humility to portray an abiding reverence for its sacred source material. There is a tenacious balance about the whole procedure that is this film, with a storyline and execution that manages to humanize Moses and convey the universality of the story’s message without bleaching the main character and his people of their identities.

Val Kilmer gives us the voice of the here-understated Hero. This Moses is an everyman, from whom we are to learn that anyone can be inspired and do great things. Kilmer starts out with a youthful exuberance and his Moses becomes wizened, if not jaded, by the peculiar events of his life. As we know, the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt. The Pharaoh gives the order to kill all of the newborn Hebrew boys. Moses is set adrift in a basket by his mother in a desperate bid for his life. These events are articulated with a fabulous musical production piece "Deliver Us", wherein the slaves are entreating their creator for salvation. The music bounces from this, their darkest hour of desperation, to the faint ripple of hope accompanying the little boy floating down the Nile.

The song is stunning, sometimes heartbreaking. Framed by enslaved Hebrews pleading "deliver us!" the "Last Lullaby" is sung by Moses' Mother Yocheved (the voice of Israeli pop superstar Ofra Haza). She sings to the baby Moses enjoining the basketeer to try to remember this last lullaby 'cause it'll have to last. Beginning with Hebrew words of comfort, she continues in English:

"Hush now my baby. Be still, love. Don't cry.
Sleep as you're rocked by the stream.
Sleep and remember my last Lullaby
- so I'll be with you when you dream"

In the audience, tears flow like . . . well . . . like the Nile as young Miriam, after following the basket and seeing the queen take the baby into the Pharaoh's house, ends the lullaby and sings:

"Brother, you're safe now and safe may you stay,
For I have a prayer just for you.
Grow baby brother, come back some day,
come and deliver us too."

But before he becomes a deliverer, he becomes The Prince of Egypt. This gives us what DreamWorks considers to be the substance of the story. As distinct from the bitter perennial rivalry between Moses and his adopted brother Ramses in The Ten Commandments (last time I’ll mention it) the two putative siblings are here the closest of princely brothers. When Moses discovers the truth of his heritage, his life changes; and to say this changes the relationship of the brothers is an understatement of biblical proportions.

The filmmakers over at DreamWorks went through numerous script revisions and felt that the best version was this story of two brothers, in a perhaps thinly veiled metaphor for brotherhood of nations. Ralph Fiennes plays Moses’ adopted brother Ramses, who succeeds his father as Pharaoh. His chiseled accent is perfect, as is his palette of emotions: the warmth he feels for his brother, his respect and awe for his father, his devotion to his culture, his regal pride, and his palpable pain in the perceived betrayal of a brother who goes out to the desert and returns with a command from an unknown deity.

Fiennes' acting bursts out of the screen and makes for an almost uncomfortably sympathetic Egyptian scion. The part has humor and strength and gives us some inkling of what’s at stake when one sits on a throne. This, along with Moses’ apprehension at afflicting his former brother, kingdom and subjects, makes of the story the tale of two brothers the DreamWorks team was shooting for.

A casualty of this focus is Jeff Goldblum as the voice of Aaron in a disappointingly truncated role. Aaron, whom Moses discovers is his long-lost brother, has had his role in the story radically diminished.

This, it would seem, in order to focus on Moses' relationship with Ramses, his other brother. While the most substantive departure from the biblical account is the absence of Aaron, it's all the more disappointing when coupled with its limitation of the role of Jeff Goldblum, whose subdued humor and brackish diffidence go sadly underused. While the bible describes him as Moses' partner and spokesman, here Aaron could almost be described as a "non-supporting character."

In this simplified version he is not only deprived of much of his own personality, but, early on, is invested with some of the characteristics of absent desert insubordinates and Moses-critics Dathan and Korach, presumably because someone thought the pain of another brother losing faith would cut more deeply.

As for the hero, he’s a milder Moses. That’s fine, but the non-violent approach, while laudable, seems vaguely non-committal and raises just the faintest specter of a political correctness being imbued over the edge of necessity.

The animation is truly like nothing ever seen before. After learning the truth of his birthright, in a startlingly beautiful sequence, Moses dreams in - one supposes - the prevailing medium of the time. His nightmare features himself as well as the Pharaoh, his family and the other Hebrews as animated full-color hieroglyphic wall paintings. Not only is the look of these colored drawings moving on 3D-looking stone walls an absolute inspiration, the drama of the dream itself is overpowering as his nightmare gathers vague memories and recent revelations into a frightening tableau.

After he leaves Egypt, Moses takes up with the family of Jethro, Sheikh of Midian, whose particularly eligible daughter Tziporah (Moses' future wife) is played by Michelle Pfeiffer. The part accomplishes wonderfully what rival Disney seems to find so elusively difficult: having a woman be strong for an actual reason - like strength of character - instead of as some random sortie into an ill-defined battle of the sexes. Pfeiffer carries the part beautifully, and takes the character from an unflappably tough desert-dweller to a glowing newcomer among her husband’s people. She suffuses the part with strength and dignity. She also does her own singing, as did Fiennes.

Danny Glover plays Jethro, the big-hearted desert priest, while Brian Stokes Mitchell does the singing for the same part. In the song "Look at Your Life Through Heaven’s Eyes," Moses’ future father-in-law teaches the former prince an important lesson: to look at a tapestry and see how each strand can have no perception of how it fits into the whole.

As a shepherd in Midian, Moses follows a strayed lamb only to find a sepulchral rock formation containing a burning bush. Here he encounters the King of the Universe, who commands that he return to Egypt with a mission.

He doesn’t want the job. In fact, he avoids it like the plagues, but the Lord of his ancestors is insistent. And the stage is set for Moses’ return to the land of his birth.

PYRAMID SCAM
In a couple of roles not quite up to the quality level of the rest of the film, Steve Martin and Martin Short play two Egyptian High Priests. Of this film’s beautiful array of songs by Steven Schwartz, the only dud is the ill-conceived and relatively predictable "You’re Playing with the Big Boys Now," which the pair performs in response to Moses’ report from the desert. The Egyptian pantheon of empty animal-headed deities ends up looking like a freak show punctuated by their own abrupt staccato nomenclature. Still, the number serves as an inferior prelude to the private reunion of the two princes who grew up together in the palace only to pursue very different paths.

Sandra Bullock here has a dream role as the grown up voice of Moses’ sister Miriam. She’s a rock of strength and encouragement, this hearty character, even carrying a tambourine into the Exodus, while modestly seeming to forget that she inspired and encouraged her brother all along.

The miracles, the plagues and, of course, the splitting sea, are all unusually bright new uses of animation. Over the years, cried tears have been considered notoriously flawed and fake-looking in the medium, either too cartoony or too light, too milky or too watery. Here a mixture of 3D modeling and standard methods achieves a look of depth and reality. But tears aren’t the only liquid portrayed credibly here. There’s water - lots of it. From the undulating Nile - a busy thoroughfare conveying the baby Moses safely past crocodiles, fishermen and barges - to the stupendous splaying of the red sea in a landmark work of animation.

One of the most impressive things about The Prince of Egypt is the old-fashioned way it handles certain issues. Once upon a time in Hollywood, intimacy, violence and other delicate subjects were expressed by a closed door, a close-up of a gun, or other indicia. Here, such issues are handled in a way that you can bring your children to (unlike Disney's Hercules, where the hero ends up swimming with corpses in the underworld). For example, rather than showing Egyptian children dying miserably during the last of the ten plagues, there are scenes like a boy walking into a house carrying a clay jar. We hear a faint moan and the jar crashing to the ground. A flopped hand expresses death in a way that shows far more finesse than . . . say . . . a severed head might.

Helen Mirren plays the queen, Moses’ adopted mother, while Seti, (Pharaoh senior) is played by Patrick Stewart. Both parts are small, and needed very big actors to fill them out. And they do.

While The Prince of Egypt is neither a perfect recounting of a bible story nor an entirely contemporary piece of pop culture, it succeeds at being one of the most outstanding pieces of family entertainment in years. It will win Academy Awards and will be considered a classic for many many years to come.