Magnolia and The Prince of Egypt: Nice Cinematic Companions to the Passover Hagaddah

Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our greatest living filmmakers, and Magnolia (New Line Cinema, 1999) is among his finest contributions. Set in California's San Fernando Valley, his tragic, funny, ultimately inspiring epic explores a group of sad-sacks whose lives cross and connect in surprising ways. Tom Cruise plays an ego-maniacal motivational instructor who teaches other men to treat women like shit by manipulating them and using them only for sex. Jason Robards portrays his father, who is dying of cancer. Julianne Moore's character is a drug-addict who married the father for his money and is cheating on him with scores of men. Phillip Seymore Hoffman is the nurse who is going the extra mile to make sure the father's last days are meaningful.

A year before Magnolia graced cinema screens, DreamWorks SKG (then a scrappy upstart) competed against Walt Disney's cartoon empire with what was then the most ambitious non-Disney animated film ever made: The Prince of Egypt (DreamWorks 1998.) A beautiful, moving re-telling of the Passover story, this film caused an enthusiastic Michael Lerner to announce in his Tikkun that year that if DreamWorks never made another film, Prince of Egypt would be enough to justify the mini-studio's existence.

It's daringly dark and harsh, sacrificing the possibility of Happy Meal tie-ins for preserving the story's power. But while it keeps intact much of the Torah account's violence, it makes the liberation of the chosen people universal. In the story-telling hands of executive producers Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, and Steven Spielberg, God frees the Hebrews not simply because He does not want the Hebrews to be enslaved, but because He does not want ANY people to be enslaved. It's truly a modern Midrash.

Many conservative Evangelicals were perplexed that DreamWorks ended the film's story with the Israelites reaching the promised land, instead of continuing the climax with God's dictation of the Ten Commandments, which would have made the film a remake of the Charlton Heston classic. But they don't realize that Jews celebrate receiving the law at Simchat Torah. Passover is not about law or commandments. It is about deliverance from slavery. Freedom.

In mere days, we will sit at our families' seders and ask why tonight is different from all other nights. It's different because it's the one night we make sure we remember our humble roots. We may be comfortable now, but our ancestors were shit on. Even secular Jews who consider the Passover story to be complete fiction can agree our ancestors were treated worse than animals.

Jews were treated so badly because people are flawed, bigoted, and easily swayed into evil acts. And Jews are among those bad people; no group in the human race is immune. We all fuck up. In the Passover story, people were fucking up. They were enslaving other humans. God got the oppressors' attention with plagues: among those plagues, it rained frogs.

In Magnolia, people are fucking up. They're mistreating each other. Some higher force gets these oppressors' attention by raining frogs down upon them. Just like in the Torah, frogs fall from the heavens onto the earth, causing destruction among the oppressors and sinners. Because of this supernatural event--with its implication that some moral force is working in the universe--, almost everyone in the film changes his or her life. A deeply insecure man who was trying to steal to impress a hot gay bartender turns himself in. The Christian police officer forgives him. The emotionally wounded, sexually abused woman the police officer is falling for finds the courage to confront her monstrous father.

If Judaism is--as I believe it to be--an evolving theology and culture, then both Magnolia and The Prince of Egypt serve as modern Midrash. While the latter retells Exodus with renewed emphasis on the story's humanity, the former takes a Passover motif and uses it as a grand, spiritually transcendent epiphany for the troubled souls we spent nearly three hours with. It's cleansing and healing, morally sound and liberating.

And unlike the Charlton Heston version, the characters in Prince of Egypt actually look Jewish (before intermarriage) and Egyptian, with dark skin color and Middle Eastern features. And the scene in which God rolls back the Red Sea to drown the army is depicted as a somber event, bringing to mind the midrash about God asking the Hebrews why they are celebrating when He has just had to kill His precious children. Not to mention the film ends with scriptures from the Torah, New Testament, and Qu'ran.

Enjoy the films, and Happy Pesach!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBgV0DK_FP4&feature=player_embedded