I began this review in March, when we watched the films in question, but due to the relaunch of the blog, held back from posting it. Please find below my review of two very different films adapting the biblical story of Esther.
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Purim 5785, 13th of Adar. For the period of Purim, which consists of the Fast and Feast of Esther, and is celebrated through costumes and plays, we have jumped past Joseph’s journey, the Exodus, the founding of the Israelite and Judahite Kingdoms, to somewhere closer to the end of the TaNaKh’s story.
This past Friday and Saturday were the marked days for the observances associated with the holiday Purim, which was in Jewish tradition, founded by Queen Esther to mark the Jewish people’s successful self-defense against an organized State-sanctioned series of attacks. So we watched the 1999 film Esther, part of The Bible Collection, and the 2006 film One Night With the King.
One of these films we liked immensely more than the other, and one of them we ended up watching on 2x speed because it was just bad. The bad one was in fact the 2006 Hollywood film with a 20$ million budget, rather than the 1999 made for TV movie. Because we watched both, I’m going to depart from the usual format of these reviews and instead do a bit of compare and contrast.
Up front though I do want to say Esther continues to do what the previous Bible Collection films have done and very successfully creates an atmosphere that is lived in, feels authentic to the period (as authentic as it can feel to a modern audience), and doesn’t quite feel like anything else.
Image: Esther comforts a young girl brought into the King’s Harem to be a concubine.
The cast was phenomenal, and despite a short run time, clocking in at 90 minutes, at no point did I feel like any of the major players were left out to dry.
I’m going to note things that both films attempted, and then describe how successful either one was or wasn’t.
The Biblical story of Esther is fairly simple and well known in places influenced by Christianity and Judaism, though the importance the story has culturally is very different for most modern Jews than for Mainstream Christians.
In broad strokes the biblical book of Esther tells a story set during the height of the First Iranian Empire (known as Persia in the West, thanks Greece [i mean Hellas]!) when a portion of the Jewish population was living in captivity away from their native land.
The Iranian King Ahasuerus, at the suggestion of his male courtiers, throws a feast. His wife, the Queen Vashti also throws a feast. In this way we have a feast for the male courtiers and female courtiers. The male courtiers suggest to Ahasareus, as a way of showing how powerful he is, that he order Vashti to present herself to be seen at the King’s feast. Vashti refuses, and the male courtiers demand she be exiled lest the women of Iran learn that women disobeying their husbands is to be tolerated. A search for a new Queen is launched, by kidnapping women from throughout the Empire and bringing them into the King’s harem.
Hadassah is a Judahite woman living in the Empire who is taken from her guardian, her aunt-uncle Mordecai to join the Harem.1 2 In order to ensure her safety, Hadassah takes the name Esther and pretends she is not from the captive Judahite community. Around the same time, Mordecai, who works as a royal scribe, encounters the courtier Haman and refuses to bow to him as Haman expects. Haman then determines to kill Mordecai, and erase whatever culture gave him the audacity to refuse to bow.
Esther is chosen as Queen, because she was found pleasing to the King. Mordecai then overhears a plot to kill the king, and sends word to Esther, who is able to prevent the assassination.
Haman continues to gain the King’s favor and is made Vizier and given the power of the King’s seal. He then orders, with the King’s permission, that anyone who wishes can attack and eradicate the Judahites in their homes and businesses on the 13th of Adar. The king, who is suffering from insomnia, has the chronicles of his reign read to him. Reminded that Mordecai saved his life, he orders Mordecai honored publicly and has Haman do the honoring. This upsets Haman, who orders a gallows built for Mordecai so he can kill them even sooner than the 13th of Adar.
Mordecai learns of the proclamation, and plots with Esther to find a way to save their people.
In a reversal of the story’s opening, Esther appears before the King in public unbidden, which is against the law. However, he shows her his favor and grants her any request she may ask. She invites him and Haman to a feast she will throw. At the feast, she requests their presence at a second feast.
Image: Esther, Haman, and Ahasuerus gathered at Esther’s feast.
At this second feast Esther pleads that her people’s lives be saved and reveals she is Judahite and that Haman has plotted to eradicate her and her own. Angered by this, Ahasuerus orders Haman hung on the gallows built for Mordecai and promotes Mordecai to Vizier. Due to the nature of royal law, that any proclamation made with the king’s seal cannot be revoked, Esther and Mordecai have to get creative in saving their people. They write their own proclamation and give the Judahites permission to act in self-defense and kill anyone who seeks to destroy them on the 13th of Adar.
When the 13th of Adar rolls around, and the assholes of the Empire line up to kill their Judahite neighbors, emboldened by Esther’s proclamation the Jews fight off their attackers and kill them and their accomplices.
Expansion on the Biblical Narrative
Both film versions add to the narrative, but in different ways that reflect different agendas.
Esther:
- Here the King is Ahasuerus, as it is in the Hebrew of the book of Esther, a name that is equivalent to the Greek rendering, Artaxerxes. The film uses the ancient identification of Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes the First to inform some of the social background.
- Right off the film starts with more expansion of Queen Vashti’s role and her reasons for refusing to attend the King’s festival. She doesn’t wish to be paraded around as one of his objects in front of his drunk courtiers as she is the Queen.
- Hadassah is established as the headstrong yet dutiful daughter-niece of Mordechai, a scribe.
- Mordecai is a prominent member of the Judahite community and is friends with the priest-in-exile, Ezra. Their relationship is used to explore the Biblical tensions surrounding Jewish-foreigner intermarriage, with Ezra representing a position of strict Judahite only marriage and Mordecai showcasing a more open and realistic attitude towards inter-communal relations. Once Esther is taken by the royal guard to become part of the King’s haram, she is shown as compassionate and courageous, willing to care for other scared women and assert herself in the face of authority figures.
- There are additional scenes following Haman and his plotting, mostly to round him out as a character.
- Esther and Mordecai’s elevations into leadership flow directly into Ezra being able to lead the Judahite exiles who wish to leave, out of Iran and back to Palestine.
One night with the King
- The King here is Xerxes the Great, known for his wars with Greece and in Hollywood appeared in the comic-book movie 300.
- Vashti refuses to attend the King’s banquet as a political protest against the war his courtiers are pushing him to prosecute
- Hadassah and a boy named Benjamin are a couple with plans to leave for Jerusalem as soon as Mordecai says it is safe. It is when attempting to execute their escape from Iran that they are both separately captured for the King’s purposes. Hadassah (Esther) for the haram, and Benjamin as a eunuch.
- The film focuses a lot more on what Esther does that grabs the King’s attention, making her a story teller sharing Hebrew tradition with him.
- Haman’s narrative is … the weirdest of expansion. They’ve built on Haman’s biblical heritage as an Agagite, a descendant of the Canaanite Agag people, and given him an anti-Jew vendetta. Five hundred years before, Haman’s people were slaughtered on the orders of the Israelite Prophet-Judge Samuel, with his ancestor, the Queen, as the only survivor. She made a medallion for her son, and it was passed down through the generations along with a pledge to destroy those who destroyed them. Where it gets weird though is what the medallion looks like:
Image: A gold medallion of a stylized swastika with a snake wrapped around it.
- Throughout the film Haman also leads a number of late night torch-lit rallies that are likely meant to evoke the rallies of the German National Socialist Party before it came to power.
- Mordecai is given a lite flirtation with one of the women who works in his household, but other than that his character isn’t changed much.
I appreciate the attempt from the One Night with the King filmmakers to elaborate on the politics, and give characters motivations that inform interpersonal rivalries; however, it’s done in an extremely clunky fashion. Is the movie an anti-war war film with a conspiracy to kill the king if he doesn’t go to war, is it the story of Haman’s failed proto-N*zi revenge, or a romance film in which Esther’s first love is ripped away from her and she must learn to find a new connection with the King?
Individually these could have been compelling narratives, but together they leave the film feeling disjointed and with characters feeling like they are in different films. There is potential here for three rather interesting takes on the Esther narrative, but I can’t help but wonder if the Evangelical-Christian priorities of the creators of the original novel and the film aren’t at the heart of its issues. The is especially apparent in their expansion of Haman’s narrative who has been made into a proto-N*zi through the use of explicit N*zi imagery. He’s given a legitimate reason for being angry at the Judahite descendants of the Israelites, which dangerously confuses the relationship between anti-Jewish attitudes and N*zis and comes close to absolving Haman of his hatred and actions. This is almost to be expected however, as Evangelical-Christians are deeply anti-Jewish, and highly supportive of the kind of anti-Jewish fascism promulgated by H*tler; many still – whether consciously or not- hold the Jewish people at fault for the Roman Imperial execution of the Palestinian Rebel Leader, Jesus the Christ.
As a result, it is my opinion that of the two films Esther tells a narrative that is more faithful to the text and the spirit of the story as it appears in later Sarah and Hajaric3 traditions. This is managed without a massive budget, as simply one of a series of well done made-for-tv biblical adaptations. No need for a Hollywood budget, name actors like John Noble or James Callis, or massive sets that often felt more for show than something people used. The more intimate focus of Esther meant that it didn’t need the grandiose sets to sell its version of an ancient time and place, and this supported a storytelling that didn’t need extraneous plotlines to fill out the narrative. Esther’s story was enough.
- Throughout I use Judahite rather than Jew or Judean, to emphasize the temporal difference between the ancient Semitic worshipers of Adonai living in Iran and modern Rabbinic Jews. While the foundations of modern Rabbinc tradition can be traced to this era, people then and people now are different. ↩︎
- The hebrew word used in Esther text often translated Uncle or Cousin is feminine, allowing for a gender variant readings of Mordecai ↩︎
- I am indebted to Taya Mâ and Sheikh Ibrahim Baba for the term Sara and Hajaric Traditions as an alternative to “Abrahamic Traditions”, as it displaces the Patriarch from the central position and highlights the multiple and women and water centered nature of our faiths. ↩︎