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Bale’s Take on Moses: Schizophrenic, Barbaric, Mercurial

Every time a big-name Hollywood director announces he’s going to tackle a familiar biblical story, I hold my breath.

On one hand, it’s exhilarating that these scriptural epics are getting mainstream screen time—not to mention eye-popping budgets and special effects to retell these tales on the grandest cinematic scale possible.

On the other hand, when a director isn’t coming at a biblical narrative with the perspective a reverent believer might have, there’s justifiable reason for wariness: They simply do not embrace the same worldview as those who cherish such sacred stories. Directors like Darren Aronofsky (Noah) and Ridley Scott (Exodus: Gods and Kings) may bring a creative point of view as relative outsiders to our tradition. But there can also be a fine line between creative and heretical when it comes to the way they choose to frame these biblical sagas.

I’ve yet to see Exodus: Gods and Kings, which splashes into theaters tomorrow. (Check out Paul Asay’s review once it’s published.) But listening to some of those involved talk about the movie, it seems pretty clear that their worldview has deeply influenced this portrayal of Moses’ remarkable biography—and not in ways that make me want to rush out and see it.

Specifically, actor Christian Bale—who’s perhaps best known for his turn as Batman in the Dark Knight movies and who plays Moses here—has been talking about what he thinks of the Old Testament patriarch he portrays. In an interview with the U.K.’s Guardian, he said, “I think the man was likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life. … He was a very troubled, tumultuous man and mercurial. But the biggest surprise was the nature of God. He was equally very mercurial.”

In a subsequent interview on ABC’s Nightline, Bale added, “[Moses] was so much more human than I had ever imagined … had all sort of temptations and indulgences that he had grown up with. [He was] absolutely seen as a freedom fighter for the Hebrews, but a terrorist in terms of the Egyptian empire.”

 Schizophrenic. Barbaric. Troubled. Tumultuous. Mercurial. Terrorist. Those are the words Bale uses to describe Moses, the man one presumes Bale got to know a bit better as he played him. To be sure, Moses was far from perfect, a murderer who at times vented anger in self-destructive ways. The biblical story is clear when it comes to Moses’ character flaws; it doesn’t try to minimize those moral failures. Thus, I don’t expect—or even want, for that matter—a movie about Moses to be a sanitized, spiritually correct hagiography.

Still, when I hear someone use words like the ones Bale voiced above to describe an important biblical character, I can’t help but wonder how well he really grasped the core narrative. Did he really get it? The Daily Beast’s Candida Moss pondered exactly that question (among others) in her article, “Christian Bale: One Man’s Moses Is Another Man’s Terrorist.” She writes,

“Since all we know about Moses is based on the Bible, it’s natural enough that Bale’s research for the role would have started there. One suspects that Bale didn’t read so closely. In the Bible, Moses does kill a guy—the Egyptian slave master who is beating an Israelite to death. Disturbingly violent, sure. Barbaric? Maybe, in a righteous sort of way. You’d think Batman would understand. Outside of that one encounter, however, Moses is pretty meek. After killing the Egyptian he runs away for years, becomes a shepherd, starts a family. He doesn’t think he has what it takes to free the Israelites. Even when he does reluctantly return to Egypt, his main actions are hitting water with a stick, throwing ashes into the air, holding his arm out toward the sky, and waving his staff over the sea. Unlike all the trailers and screen shots for the movie, in the Bible Moses never holds a sword or wears armor.”

Moss suggests that Bale and Scott project their 21st-century values onto the Exodus story in other ways, too. The result, she says, may be a movie that misrepresents important theological understandings with regard to how God related to His people and to Moses. She says:

The problem with Bale’s attitude to Moses is that it’s anachronistically modern. He turned to an ancient collection of religious texts—texts build on the premise that human events are manipulated by supernatural forces—and decided to evaluate it using modern concepts: freedom fighter, terrorist, schizophrenia. … With his anachronistic attitude toward the biblical story, Bale is just following the lead of his director. When it came to shooting the famous parting of the Red Sea, Ridley Scott elected to show a tsunami splitting the waters. In explaining his decision, Scott added that he remained nonplussed after watching the Cecil B. DeMille epic The Ten Commandments as a child: ‘I didn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d better come up with a more scientific or natural explanation.’

I have no doubt that Ridley Scott and Christian Bale will deliver an engaging, provocative and visually spectacular story. But given the worldview Moss describes, I’m not expecting Exodus: Gods and Kings to be the kind of faith-infused film that galvanizes my deepest Christian convictions.