BEFORE: Edward Norton directed this film about a love triangle of sorts, so I'd be remiss if I didn't include it in this week's programming, rather than in the February romance chain. And since this is the only Sabbath within Norton-thon, this is where it goes.
THE PLOT: Two friends, a priest and a rabbi, fall in love with the same woman they knew in their youth, but the religious position of both men denies them romance.
AFTER: This is an OK story, but it's a case of moving at a snail's pace towards a conclusion that may seem logical in some sense, but then when you arrive, you tell yourself that there MUST have been a quicker way to go. It's the BQE of movies. I think it set up a problem, and then got so caught up in its own rules, that it was tough to figure a way out of its own situation. THIS person can't tell THAT person a certain piece of information, but yet that's really the only thing that's going to advance the plot.
Maybe this is somewhat common, maybe people fall into relationships that they're just not comfortable talking about. You can't tell your parents or you can't tell your best friend who you're sleeping next to, for whatever reason, religious or racial or orientation, so it's just sort of hanging there like some unspoken thing. But that's really a rift in the relationship, and things can't move forward (or the movie can't reach a conclusion) until someone starts the conversation.
The problematic rules here are: the rabbi can't tell the priest that he's sleeping with their childhood friend, because that would be a betrayal of their friendship. And he can't tell his congregation, because she's not Jewish. And the priest can't talk about his feelings for her, because that would be a betrayal of his vows. The problem is, these plot roadblocks are not necessarily put there for the right reasons - it's like the highway is shut down for construction and traffic can't move forward, but it's a weekend and the road crew isn't working. So you wonder why someone didn't take the roadblocks down to let traffic through, even if it's just for the day.
As it turns out, rabbis CAN get married. By logical extension, this means they can date. I don't have much experience with the Judaism, but I always thought this (and the Christian religions with married ministers) was the smarter way to go. It's more realistic, and once you acknowledge that Judaism's been around a lot longer than Catholicism, it starts to seem like a smarter set of rules to impose on religious leaders. Look what happened to a few bad apples in the Catholic priesthood, somehow twisted into pedophiles - the rules may work for some, but clearly not for all.
And here's the big, sick joke of it all - requiring priests to be celibate (which, again, over time, often proves to not be feasible) is a relatively recent religious construct. Today people believe, perhaps mistakenly, that celibacy is somehow an offshoot of holiness, that denying someone carnal pleasures makes them closer to God. This is not only a leap in logic, it's a corruption of the original intent of the Catholic faith. Jesus said to his disciples (the closest things to priests at the time) "Be fruitful and multiply." Not "get out there and recruit", but multiply. Walk the land, spread the word, but also prosper and have children.
The concept worked, Christianity caught on, and then perhaps worked a bit too well, because in Medieval times, the church became one of the biggest land-owners in Europe, and then land seemed to be the thing that everyone was running out of. And if priests had children, those children expected to inherit land, and the churches didn't want to give any of it up, because you couldn't make more of it. So the simplest solution, long-term, was to deny priests the right to procreate. Thus the vow of celibacy was created - not a vow to God, but a vow to the real-estate interests of the Church. After a few hundred years of watching priests denied pleasure, people got it in their heads that to be celibate was to be holier, closer to God, and it's all based on a fallacy.
What else got corrupted over the centuries? Are there other clerical errors (pardon the pun) that we should know about? What about those books that never made it into the Bible? Damn editors... Who proofread this thing? Did someone accidentally write "chastity" instead of "charity"? That's some typo...
Also starring Ben Stiller (last heard in "Madagascar 3"), Jenna Elfman (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Anne Bancroft (last seen in "How to Make an American Quilt"), Eli Wallach (last seen in "How to Steal a Million"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "The Words"), Holland Taylor (last seen in "Alice"), Rena Sofer, Lisa Edelstein, with cameos from Milos Forman, Ken Leung, Susie Essman, David Wain.
RATING: 4 out of 10 karaoke machines
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