New from The Movie Snob
Agora (C). This swords-and-sandals epic from the director of The Others barely made it onto my radar screen, but once I learned about it I made sure to see it. Rachel Weisz (The Shape of Things) stars as Hypatia, a brilliant scientist and mathematician living and teaching in Alexandria, Egypt in the late 4th century. The city, it seems, is continually in political turmoil as the Roman Empire approaches its expiration date. At first the city is divided among pagans, Jews, and Christians. Soon the pagans (who include Hypatia and most of the educated folks) and the Christians provoke each other into genuine civil war; the overconfident pagans are whipped by the more numerous Christians, and the famed Library of Alexandria is destroyed by the Christian mob. Things settle down for a while, but as the Christians continue to consolidate their power it is only a matter of time before the Jews and the few remaining pagan holdouts (like Hypatia) feel their wrath. Although it is perhaps just possible that the director is actually slyly sounding a warning about Muslim fundamentalism and what folks have to look forward to if Islamists gain control in more countries than just Iran, I think the movie was intended to be just what it appears–a hatchet-job on Christianity.
The character development is poor, and the battle sequences and depictions of ancient Alexandria are not particularly spectacular, so the movie’s main interest is historical. Which necessarily raises the question of historical accuracy. How much do we really know about these battles and the life and death of Hypatia, and how accurate is this movie overall? Was Alexandria’s bishop, later canonized as St. Cyril and revered as a Doctor of the Church, the intolerant zealot and schemer he is made out to be? Late 4th century Alexandrian history is not exactly common knowledge these days, and I hope I may be forgiven a little skepticism that the Spanish film-makers went into this project bias-free. The recent book Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart actually devotes a whole chapter to this very episode in history, and he concludes that the earliest historical sources tend to contradict much of the Agora account. Of course, he may be a partisan too, and most of us lack the time, inclination, and knowledge of ancient languages we would need to figure out how accurate Agora is for ourselves. So let’s just close this review by paraphrasing something I think Roger Ebert said in a review of Chocolat or some similar movie–wouldn’t it be remarkable to see a movie in which the Christians are the happy, life-affirming people, and the pagans are the dour, killjoy types? I’m not holding my breath.