The following is an unpublishing opinion piece I wrote over a year ago for a site which declined to run it. Thinking back, I think they made the right choice. Man...I was full of beans back then, wasn't I? Honestly, I don't think I can agree with everything I wrote back then. But here it is.
I have a difficult time processing my emotions over Otto Preminger’s Exodus, a sweeping 3½ hour epic about the foundation and partitioning of Israel in the late 1940s. On the one hand, it’s a tremendous cinematic achievement, stunning in scope and effusive with beauty. Featuring a screenplay by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, it unapologetically tries to maintain some semblance of objectivity towards one of the most contentious issues in post-World War Two global politics. Preminger brings his trademark distance towards his characters and their actions, frequently capturing them in medium-long and long shots with minimal edits. And although the cetacean girth of the production necessitated many scenes of lengthy exposition captured with more traditional shot-reverse-shot editing, 2, 3, and 4+ shots dominate much of the film.
Even more impressively Preminger strives to bring a three-dimensional nature to his characters—a difficult task considering many of them are by their very Zionist natures fanatics in one way or another. There is Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman), a Haganah rebel who orchestrates a massive smuggling operation of displaced Jews into Mandate Palestine. Though capable of coldness and even calculated cruelty, a portrait eventually emerges of a man desperate for peaceful pluralism between Jews and Palestinian Arabs. There is Dov Landau (Sal Mineo), a traumatized ex-Auschwitz sonderkommando seeking salvation in terrorist violence. There is Taha (John Derek), mukhtar of an Arab village near Ari’s kibbutz who risks life and limb to help his Jewish friends in the face of an Islamic mandate to kill every Jew in Palestine. Each are rich, complex characters that defy easy categorization as “good” or “bad.”
And that’s the problem. For me, at least.
Putting aside politics, the fact remains that many of the characters in Exodus are literal terrorists. And, incredibly, the film does nothing to criticize them. Despite his sympathetic backstory, Dov damns himself by carrying out the 1946 King David Hotel bombing, an attack that killed 91 innocent people. Yes, the hotel was being used to house the central offices of the British Mandatory authorities of Palestine. Yes, the attack was quickly condemned by Ari and other Zionists who sought peace via diplomatic means. But Dov is never depicted as a monster. Indeed, he gets heroic treatment later in the film when he becomes instrumental in executing the 1947 Acre Prison break which freed 28 Zionist insurgents. By the end of the film, we are expected to empathize with him as he mourns the murder of his love interest Karen Hansen (Jill Haworth).
And what of Ari’s uncle Akiva (David Opatoshu)? As one of the leaders of the Irgun, an underground network of Zionist terrorists, he should be treated as the most evil man in the film. Yet Ari goes out of his way to rescue him from British authorities after the King David bombing—which he designed and afterwards celebrated. When he is killed during his rescue, it is treated as a tragic scene of loss. Again, we are supposed to feel Ari’s pain in the loss of his uncle…but not over the deaths of 91 innocent people.
I don’t want to get into an argument about the legitimacy of Israel. That isn’t what this article is about. I’m concerned with whether or not the cinema can or should be objective when dealing with objectively evil people. Terrorism is evil. Therefore, terrorists must be evil. Yet Dov and Akiva are seen as heroes in Exodus—perhaps a bit misguided in their methods, but heroes nonetheless. It would be one thing if they were treated with some sense of moral ambiguity. But outside Ari’s feeble attempts to convince Akiva not to hurt innocent people, their terrorism exists in a vacuum, hardly challenged, barely chastised. We never even see the aftermath of their terrorism; their victims go undepicted as nothing more than a body count in news reports.
Imagine something with me. Imagine if, in the months following 9/11, the Taliban had released a movie like Exodus with British Palestine swapped with the United States and themselves with the Zionists. Imagine if one of the suicide bombers who flew one of the jets into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon miraculously survived and escaped back to Afghanistan. Imagine if one of the big emotional climaxes of the film occurred when he discovered that his wife had died during his absence. Then imagine if the film treated Osama bin Laden’s death as a great tragic moment, his relatives clutching his lifeless body as the orchestra score swelled.
I’m not trying to equate Zionism with Al-Qaeda, I’m just trying to make a point. Just because America might be allies with Israel and enemies with Al-Qaeda doesn’t mean that we can glibly accept one form of terrorism over another. Or does it? After all, wasn’t America’s revolution against Britain an act of terrorism in itself? Or what about members of the French Underground fighting back against Nazis in World War Two? Where do we draw the line between justifiable and condemnable acts of organized murder? They say that the victors write the history books. But in case anyone hasn’t noticed, the battle between Israel and Palestine hasn’t let up since the 40s when Exodus was set.
One interpretation of Exodus is that the film takes a humanist approach, recognizing each characters’ capacity for good and evil while refusing to make judgments for their actions. But I don’t buy that. Exodus is a political story based on a political novel by an author with a clear political motivation. It obviously argues for the legitimacy of the Zionist cause. In my mind, the film’s refusal to condemn equals a tacit approval. It’s a shame that 91 people died at the King David Hotel. But hey, at least it got the British out of Israel.
This kind of thinking I find repugnant and downright irresponsible. Objectivity should be a tool to make the audience question things: ideals, people, events. But there’s no questioning anything in Exodus—the Zionists are in the right. So it’s unwillingness to condemn Dov and Akiva comes across as zealous and even sociopathic. I don’t care that Dov’s heart was broken by Karen’s death—he deserves to suffer as greatly as the families of his 91 victims (although it shouldn’t have come at the expense of another innocent bystander). I don’t care about Ari’s agony over Akiva’s death. Akiva deserves to burn for all the misery and suffering he caused.
Maybe that seems harsh. But I grew up in the 9/11 era. I remember seeing the effects of terrorism first-hand on the news and in the faces of my horrified schoolmates. And all I could think of watching Exodus were the friends and families of the 91 people killed in the King David Hotel. I wish the film had done the same, even for just a moment.
At the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, Fox Searchlight Pictures bought the worldwide rights to Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (2016) for $17.5 million, the most ever paid for a film at Sundance. The film is a period drama about the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion where dozens of escaped slaves killed 55-65 white men, women, and children. I wonder how this film will treat its subject matter. After all, Nat Turner and his compatriots had every right to escape and fight back against the society that enslaved them. Their owners had it coming. But did their wives? Their children? Historical records say that Turner’s followers were indiscriminate in their killing of white people. So what of white bystanders? It’s difficult to say.
Was Turner’s rebellion more justified than the Irgun resistance? Can the evils they fought against be quantified and compared? I’m not sure. I wonder if I’m setting myself up as a hypocrite with this article for when that film inevitably comes out. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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