Last weekend I re-watched The Book of Eli starring Denzel
Washington, one of my favorite action films – although lumping it into that
genre doesn’t do it justice. Labelling it a “faith-based” movie isn’t quite
right either, although it serves as a good model for how filmmakers
dealing with Christian themes can reach a wide general audience rather than
targeting believers.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, but hey, it’s a
five-year-old movie.
In The
Book of Eli, Denzel (can we agree that he’s iconic enough to go by one
name?) plays a lone wanderer in a post-apocalyptic United States, heading west on
foot with the sole remaining copy of the Bible, memorizing it at night. It is a
mission he has been carrying out for thirty years, ever since a voice commanded
him “to carry the book out west. Told me that a path would be laid out for me,
that I’d be led to a place where the book was safe. Told me that I’d be
protected against anything or anyone that stood in my path.”
And indeed he is occasionally miraculously protected
from roving gangs of killers in this lawless landscape, whom he faces down
without fear. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no
evil,” he recites to the young woman Solara (Mila Kunis), after demonstrating a
few times that evil has much more to fear from him. Solara has latched onto him
to take her away from her hometown, which is in the grip of power-mad Carnegie
(Gary Oldman) and his thugs.
Carnegie knows the power that the Bible’s
words have over people, and he desperately wants a copy with which he can manipulate
the spiritually hungry survivors of a devastated world to follow him as a
religious leader. When he discovers that Eli owns the only Bible, he tries
everything from temptations to threats, but Eli refuses to give up the book to
this false prophet. Taking it west is his single-minded purpose, and nothing
can deter him from fulfilling it.
Meanwhile, Eli returns to the Bible again and
again for wisdom and strength. “Do you really read that same book every day?”
Solara asks. “Without fail,” he replies (coincidentally, or perhaps not, Denzel
told GQ back in 2012 that he reads
the Bible every day).
Carnegie eventually manages to take the book
by force and leave a wounded Eli to die in the desert. But he discovers too
late that the Bible he took is useless to him – although I will spare you the
spoiler about why not. Suffice it to say that Eli no longer has a need for the
Bible himself, because over his thirty years’ wandering and nightly reading he
has committed the entire King James Bible to memory.
Solara helps Eli get to a community in San
Francisco where the process of rebuilding society has begun; part of that
process involves collecting, preserving, and reproducing the remaining books,
especially the classics of civilization. “We’re going to teach people about the
world they lost,” the librarian explains to Eli. Together they undertake to recreate
the Bible. Eli recites it verbatim to the librarian, who records it in a
manuscript that is then sent to the printing press.
His mission completed, Eli offers up a grateful
prayer to God for
giving me the strength and the conviction to
complete the task you entrusted to me. Thank you for guiding me straight and
true through the many obstacles in my path, and for keeping me resolute when
all around seemed lost… I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I kept
the faith.
Denzel may have deservedly won an Oscar for
his turn as a charismatic villain in Training
Day, but the man is at his most compelling in morality tales of justice,
heroism, and moral struggle. In Flight
he was Oscar-nominated as an alcoholic-in-denial whose conscience finally
wouldn’t let him lie anymore about his part in a terrible tragedy. In The Equalizer, a top-notch action
thriller which I wrote about for Acculturated here, he is a modern-day knight errant dispensing bloody justice to evil men.
In The
Book of Eli, Denzel’s character is an uncompromising, unwavering moral
force pushing through a landscape of violence, temptation, ignorance, and greed.
The sheer commitment to his spiritual purpose, the moral strength he embodied,
made for a refreshing change from the roguish anti-heroes so prevalent in
today’s television shows and movies.
Released in 2010, the movie was slightly
ahead of the curve in terms of its religious theme. “Faith-based” movies,
ranging from the low-budget God is Not
Dead to blockbusters such as Noah
and Exodus, are hot now, although
films like the former literally preach to the converted while the latter films,
made by non-believers, disrespect the converted. The Book of Eli is more successful at delivering its message
than all of them because it did
so by captivating an unsuspecting audience with a great story and a riveting protagonist
rather than by bludgeoning it with leaden preaching.
So The
Book of Eli’s lesson for filmmakers who want to deliver a message
(religious or otherwise) is challenging but simple: wrap the message in a great
story with a compelling moral hero at the center of it.
Oh, and hire
Denzel.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 4/29/15)
