THE BOOK OF ELI: Go (Spaghetti) West, My Post-Apocalyptic Son

There’s a lot of talk going around about the reli­gious angles of The Book Of Eli.  Fanboys and crit­ics are argu­ing if it takes these angles far enough, if it’s just a cheap add-on to spice up an action flick and whether or not the film can jus­tify this con­tent.  Rest assured, there is plenty to be dis­cussed and Your Humble Reviewer will cover it.

But first, the plot must be addressed.  Eli (Denzel Washington) is a loner roam­ing his way across post-apocalypse America.  In his pos­ses­sion is a book that he will let no one see.  He con­sid­ers it his mis­sion to take the book out west.  Unfortunately, he stops for sup­plies in a small town belong­ing to Carnegie (Gary Oldman).  This man rules his towns­peo­ple through fear and intim­i­da­tion as he plots to build an empire from the ashes — and it just so hap­pens that he cov­ets the book in Eli’s pos­ses­sion.  Thus, the stage is set for a bat­tle of wills, much blood­shed and a whole lotta reli­gious symbolism.

Brace your­self for a minor spoiler: in case you couldn’t guess, the book the plot revolves around is a Bible.  Eli wants to pro­tect it until it can be deliv­ered to its des­tiny while Carnegie wishes to have it so he can have the proper “words” needed to con­trol the hearts and minds of his bud­ding empire.  The use of a Bible is a brave choice on the part of writer Gary Whitta because it opens the film up to many attacks: some will write the film off as a com­mer­cial for Christianity, some reli­gious zealots will miss the finer points of the film’s mes­sage as they fix­ate on the use of the Bible, etc.

All this Bible talk unfor­tu­nately obscures the film’s real agenda.  The Book Of Eli is a med­i­ta­tion on the con­cept of faith: why it is impor­tant, the costs that come with it, how it can be manip­u­lated in the wrong hands and how it can blind the peo­ple who have it from see­ing what is in front of them.  In this con­text, the use of the Bible makes per­fect sense because it is an instantly rec­og­niz­able sym­bol — both of faith itself and of how it can be mis­in­ter­preted (will­fully or honestly).

Of course, such mes­sages mean lit­tle if they lack a good vehi­cle to push them for­ward.  Thankfully, The Book Of Eli has been directed with great élan by The Hughes Brothers.  They han­dle the bone-crunching action scenes with con­fi­dence and use mul­ti­ple tech­niques to give each its own char­ac­ter: one bat­tle between Eli and a gang of maraud­ers is han­dled in a sin­gle, daz­zling back­lit shot while an epic shootout near the end makes effec­tive use of carefully-timed cam­era moves to sell its chaos (includ­ing a great shot where the cam­era goes directly towards the bar­rel of a fir­ing Gatling gun).

However, The Book Of Eli isn’t all flash and fury.  The Hughes Brothers also get fine per­for­mances to flesh out the con­tours of their alle­gor­i­cal tale.  Washington gives a focused, tightly con­trolled per­for­mance as the cau­tious hero while Gary Oldman uses a mix of oily charm and scar­ily single-minded anger to breathe life into his slea­zoid entre­pre­neur arche­type.  Mila Kunis has less to do as the unwanted side­kick Eli picks up but she gives the role the proper ingénue inno­cence needed.  The real sur­prise in terms of act­ing is a gem of a sup­port per­for­mance from Jennifer Beals: she has only a few scenes as Carnegie’s ‘kept woman’ but gives them a richly emo­tional qual­ity, one achieved mostly through carefully-deployed and con­trolled facial expressions.

The Hughes Brothers also have fun with the script’s genre-bending ele­ments.  For exam­ple, they get in the appro­pri­ate post-apocalyptic visu­als (includ­ing a blink-&-miss-it ref­er­ence to A Boy And His Dog).  However, the neat­est thing about The Book Of Eli from this stand­point is that it is essen­tially a spaghetti west­ern: a stranger on a silent mis­sion comes to town, is derailed by a cor­rupt town boss and forced to fight count­less hench­men to restore order and con­tinue his jour­ney.  The direc­tors play this angle up in a big way, giv­ing it the same haunted, dusty feel spag-western fans asso­ciate with Django or Keoma (com­plete with occa­sional touches of eccen­tric gal­lows humor).

These genre ele­ments bother some crit­ics. Some are even say­ing it’s hyp­o­crit­i­cal to deal with reli­gious themes in a vio­lent action film.  To these eyes, such attacks miss the point because this is how the lan­guage of genre works: it shakes the audi­ence up with a vis­ceral approach, using famil­iar sto­ry­telling con­cepts to get instant access to the viewer’s sub­con­scious, and then lets the ideas car­ried by these iconic ele­ments sink in.  The Book Of Eli mixes the kinetic and the sym­bolic to get the viewer’s men­tal wheels turn­ing.  It’s not meant to give you a final­ized, eas­ily digestible mes­sage.  Instead, it asks you to pon­der these ideas and your rela­tion­ship with them.

That’s a gutsy move for a Hollywood flick to make — and it makes The Book Of Eli a wor­thy addi­tion to the post-apoc cin­ema canon.