Propheteering

The Prince of Egypt lacks the spirit

by Peter Keough

THE PRINCE OF EGYPT. Directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells. Written by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook. With the voices of Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, Danny Glover, Jeff Goldblum, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Steve Martin, and Martin Short. A DreamWorks Pictures release. At the Campus, Harbour Mall, Holiday, Showcase, Tri-Boro, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.

The times call out for a prophet, a visionary, a voice of moral authority and righteousness, and the people at DreamWorks think a singing and dancing cartoon Moses is the ticket.

Maybe so, but a few memorable songs (Hans Zimmer seems to have left his inspiration behind in his former Disney office), some vivid characters, and a bit of genuinely funny banter might help. Although visually striking and often ingenious, The Prince of Egypt will not restore your faith in movies or religion. The familiar tale (the prologue helpfully refers you to the Book of Exodus for the full details) benefits little from its glib contemporary spin, posing the founder of the Western religious tradition as a spoiled yuppie who finds God and his purpose in life despite his worst intentions. Sometimes the stark fundamentals of the original Scripture are enough.

Voiced by Val Kilmer, who like every other actor in this film is indistinguishable, Moses escapes as a baby from a genocidal purge of Hebrew infants at the hands of the ruthless Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart) when his mother deposits him in the river in a basket. A less than haunting ballad -- "Deliver Us" -- accompanies his progress downstream through various near-misses with fishing nets and hippopotami to the luxurious arms of the Queen (Helen Mirren), who adopts him as her own. A quick cut is made to the callow Prince as an adult, racing Ben Hur-style with his adopted brother (a modification of the Bible in what Jeffrey Katzenberg describes as his "editing" of God) Rameses (Ralph Fiennes, typecast again as the villainous, oddly attractive persecutor of Jews à la Schindler's List), the pair raucously desecrating towering monuments in their path.

Talk about wayward youth. Yet what impresses here is the way a giant stone nose crashes surreally through a wooden scaffold, and the lapidary elegance of the artists' renderings of ancient Egypt. Kilmer doesn't register as a high-spirited scapegrace with a lot of learning to do. And neither does Fiennes as his comrade and rival for their father's austere affection.

Fortunately, the imagery more often than not speaks for them. In one of the film's most brilliant and engaging episodes, Moses sleeps and his dreams take the form of the two-dimensional paintings on a tomb wall, in which he's pursued by soldiers and the abomination and lie of his hidden past life are revealed. Horrified, he confronts his father, who dismisses the murder of thousands with the chilling comment, "They were just slaves." Moses is unmollified, however, and he flees to the desert before the Burning Bush directs him to return and lead his people to the Promised Land.

That's plenty of archetypal material to draw on, but the makers of The Prince of Egypt opt to be inoffensive rather than profound, and the story becomes as two-dimensional as the wall paintings but not as intriguing. They tap-dance around the issue of Zionism in the hope of not antagonizing Arabs. And the fact that Jerry Falwell has high praise for the film indicates the depth of its theology.

This is just a cartoon, of course, so maybe we shouldn't expect it to be more than entertaining and occasionally moving. Which it achieves when it dares to deal with the less warm and fuzzy aspects of the tough Old Testament tale. The plagues are rendered with elegant restraint and palpable dread, the death of the first-born sons of Egypt in particular marking one of the film's few climaxes of emotion. And then there's the parting of the Red Sea, which is spectacular not only in its scope and detail but deeply touching in its dramatization of the gulf between Moses and the person who is perhaps the only love of his life, Rameses.

The human element, though, is largely absent, not to mention the divine. Nearly all the characters -- Michelle Pfeiffer as Moses's fiery Midianite wife, Tzipporah; Jeff Goldblum as his feckless brother Aaron; Steve Martin and Martin Short as a pair of colorless high priests -- have the unfortunate flat affect of the ants in A Bug's Life. Only Sandra Bullock brings a little spunk to her role as Moses's sister Miriam. In the end, Moses dutifully delivers the law to his bland nation, but someone should have underlined the Third Commandment: "Thou shalt not take the word of the Lord in vain."