The only thing you can say about the squandered opportunity “O Jerusalem” is: “Oh, brother, how corny!”
The low-budget, shabby-looking, horribly acted indie deals with a fascinating moment in modern history — one that has also turned out to be among the most pivotal ever in terms of lasting consequences.
Unfortunately, this docudrama constructs the “docu-” around such a hokey fictional drama that it makes the Israeli war of independence into a joke.
Old Hollywood’s glamorizing Paul Newman epic “Exodus” covered the same territory, the birth of a controversial nation: from the notorious bombing of the King David Hotel as protest against Britain’s inhospitable colonial rule over the Middle East to the United Nations’ official decision to subdivide the region, to the initial conflagration that broke out as all the surrounding Arab countries then attacked the much smaller ragtag force of Jewish freedom fighters.
With such raw material, “O Jerusalem” could have been a ripping David-and-Goliath war movie as the survivors of the Holocaust founded a homeland against all odds.
Or, it even might have told the same story from the Palestinian point of view, something we haven’t seen much of in Western cinema.
But the attempt here is to try to recount the saga from both sides, only clumsily. The filmmaker ends up making the main characters, the Zionist idealist Bobby Goldman (J.J. Feild) and the Palestinian idealist Said (Saïd Taghmaoui), into best pals from their days together as students in New York. Their journey becomes like all those trite American Civil War productions as the two — brother against brother — must face off from opposite sides.
But here the conceit is made even worse and more soap opera-like by the contrivances of director-writer Elie Chouraqui. In his lame screenplay, the friends-turned-enemies coincidentally meet not once but twice alone in different battles at just the crucial moment. The overwrought plotting includes several poorly written death scenes, with deaths right on cue, marked by overwrought wails and trite dialogue. This amateurishness undermines any chance for the audience to feel anything.
The two recognizable character actors on board, Ian Holm as first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and Tovah Feldshuh as his future successor Golda Meir, can’t do much to help. These great, famously colorful historical figures are made hollow in the writing.
As is all of “O Jerusalem.”
‘O Jerusalem’
*
Starring: JJ Feild, Saïd Taghmaoui, Ian Holm, Tovah Feldshuh
