THE BOOK OF ELI’S POSTAPOCALYPTIC THEOLOGY IS A LITTLE WARPED
By Nick Pinkerton
Miami New Times
/the-book-of-eli-s-postapocalyptic-theology-is-a-l ittle-warped/
Jan 12 2010
FL
Directed by Allen and Albert Hughes. Written by Gary Whitta. Starring
Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, and Malcolm McDowell.
Rated R.
The Book of Eli, Allen and Albert Hughes, Denzel Washington, Gary
Oldman, Mila Kunis, Malcolm McDowell
Directors Allen and Albert Hughes were raised by an Armenian mother
and an African-American father. With such a background, it would
be difficult not to have feelings about the church. The Hugheses’
fourth film, The Book of Eli, centers on the Christianity that was
at the margins of their previous films — hypocritically misused
by Bokeem Woodbine’s bush-crazy Marine turned pulpit-pounder turned
stick-up man in Dead Presidents, and the sanctimonious grandparents
in Menace II Society.
"I don’t think God really cares too much about us, or he wouldn’t have
put us here… Look where we stay at." Thus spoke Menace’s O-Dog,
referring to Crenshaw Boulevard, not so different from Presidents’
Vietnam and ’70s Bronx, and From Hell’s Whitechapel. In The Book of
Eli, the whole world is a blasted ghetto. It’s 31 years after the
scorched-earth apocalypse. As in The Road, The End has terminally
desaturated the world’s palette. Only a few tattered product placements
have survived. Denzel Washington wanders endless alkali flats under a
leaden sky that never opens up to rain. On the road since Year Zero,
Eli has become an expert at using his wickedly quick machete arm to
ward off roving bands of highwaymen from his precious cargo: the last
copy of the Bible.
The other copies have been destroyed as taboo, since religious
conflict inspired the nuclear holocaust. That’s not impossible to
believe, though it taxes credulity that a fragmented society that
can’t dig freshwater wells has been able to destroy every other copy
of the most ubiquitous book in the Western world, undoing all the
Gideon’s good work. As does the disciple Eli attracting Solara —
a badly miscast Mila Kunis, who looks like she’s spending a semester
abroad in the postapocalypse from her fashion school’s co-op program.
As does Eli’s zoning out to his iPod during night watches in the
hazardous wasteland (a twist-ending revelation makes this particularly
ridiculous).
It’s water and a battery charge that lure Eli down the Main Street of
a repopulated ghost town. The Hugheses play up the spaghetti-Western
element, as Denzel’s stranger strolls into a saloon owned by Gary
Oldman, the town’s corroded, lizard-like first citizen, Carnegie
(neither Dale nor Andrew deserve this defamation). Carnegie is one
of the few survivors, like Eli, old enough to remember the lost world.
His saloon is the lobby of an abandoned movie theater that he has made
his headquarters. Accordingly, he’s interested in resurrecting lost
forms of mass mind control — Oldman is introduced reading a biography
of a great cinephile, Mussolini. It’s with cynical messianic intent
that he’s been scouring the countryside for a Good Book, which sets
up a showdown with true believer Eli.
The Hugheses once had a black-comic sense to match their guignol
impulses (every line of Menace is a potential inside joke). Here,
that sense is evident only in a roadside stop-off with some unhinged
survivalists, an elderly American Gothic couple played by Michael
Gambon and Frances de la Tour. This opens into a firefight showing off
the Hugheses’ other strength, their allegiance to uselessly beautiful
tracking shots, here scuttling in and out of a besieged frame house
as it’s shot to pieces. The rest of the rote splatter-violence has
Denzel whirlwind lopping heads through philistine hordes, sequences
only good for insight into what PS3 games the Hugheses were playing
in preproduction (screenwriter Gary Whitta’s previous credits are,
aptly, in videogames).
It remains to be seen how the clergy, often overeager to accept tribute
from popular culture, will receive this gory simony. Nobody reads
the Roman Catholic writings of Francois Mauriac or Pilgrim’s Progress
anymore, so I guess you take it where you can get it, but The Book of
Eli’s plastic parable isn’t much more advanced than Insane Clown Posse
theology. Eli eventually summarizes a lifetime of scriptural study as
"Do more for other people than you do for yourself" — an idea hardly
unique to Christ — while an ending that combines Fahrenheit 451’s
Book People and Malcolm McDowell in an insupportable mustache seems
to downplay the importance of Eli’s cargo.
Eli himself resoundingly fails to follow the Good Samaritan’s example
when witnessing a roadside hijacking; the most that can be said is
that he remains chaste without visible effort (ostensible villain
Carnegie at least shows an evangelical spirit). Our hero is mostly an
Old Testament smiter of the wicked, finally — unless I forget when
Christ said, "You lay that hand on me again and you will not get it
back" at the Garden of Gethsemane.