The Networks Get Religion

By RICHARD CORLISS

Masada and Peter and Paul bring the Word to prime time

And on the eve of the Great Holy Day, the three elders of the network Sanhedrin came into the sight of the Lord God, and they begged for his blessing. And God said: "You do not deserve my blessing. For your local newscasters bray like the jackal in the field, and your prime-time soaps are as the balm of Gomorrah, and your sitcoms are in violation of all that is funny. And you, O elders of cathode, you lusteth after false profits." And the three elders saith unto the Lord God: "Forgive us, O Lord, but we must make offerings to the false idol Nielsen, which is an hungry beast. Give us but a sign, a word, a story idea, that we may please thee and the 2,300 houses of the children of Nielsen." And then the Lord God spoke unto them: "To you, CBS, I ordain that you shall tell of the holy mission of my messengers Peter and Paul. And to you, ABC, I say that you shall relate the story of my brave people at the Battle of Masada." And the third elder, the Pharisee of NBC, asked: "What about me, Lord?" And the Lord God said: "Sorry, Man of Silver, this isn 't your year." But for the good elders, God did part the Red Ink, and the words and pictures of the Lord were brought to the houses of the children of Nielsen.

The networks may not earn the blessing of God as Easter and Passover approach, but they surely do turn righteous. Ever since Franco Zeffirelli's 6 1/2-hour Jesus of Nazareth pulled big ratings four years ago, viewers have received annual lessons in Bible history and spiritual uplift, and have responded with the eager docility of A students in Sunday school. This year's entries in the Sanctity Sweepstakes focus on the struggle between warriors of the Word and the scheming princes of the Roman Empire. Peter and Paul (CBS, April 12 and 14) covers the crucial three decades after the death of Jesus, when a Galilean fisherman solidified his authority over the church, and a Cilician Jew spread Christ's teachings throughout the Mediterranean world. Masada (ABC, April 5-8) begins a few years later and chronicles the last desperate stand, in a Judean fortress, of 960 Jews against the more than 10,000 soldiers and Jewish captives of the Roman Tenth Legion. In achievement, though, the two shows are worlds apart: one is standard solemn biopic, the other a provocative, often eloquent drama of the near first rate.

Peter and Paul is, as the network boys would say, a natural mini-series subject: strong characters, a heroic theme, a turning point in world history. But for most of its four hours, the film is unable to bring these two charismatic men--the doctrinal rock and the doctoral spring of Christianity--to dramatic life. Paul dazzles the Diaspora with his gospel, while Peter sits home and frets, heroically, about his former acolyte's hold on the people. The script (by Christopher Knopf and Producer Stan Hough) is doggedly episodic and repetitive, and Robert Day's direction is content to illustrate rather than illuminate. Some of the casting doesn't help. Though Robert Foxworth sketches in Peter with the broad, evocative strokes of a Rouault monarch, the show really belongs to Paul--and Anthony Hopkins' annoying vocal mannerisms stop the show, and much of the dialogue, in its tracks. With Hopkins' baroque stutter, and the script's wanderlust, Peter and Paul falls victim to its own travelogorrhea.

God is capricious in prime time. In Peter and Paul, he devises a sandstorm to woo Saul of Tarsus from Judaism to Christianity; in Masada, he sends a sandstorm to protect Jews from a Roman onslaught. The facts of that onslaught are widely known. In A.D. 73 a band of Zealots, led by Eleazar ben Yair, held the rock fortress against a Roman army many times its size; when defeat was at hand, Eleazar persuaded them to commit mass suicide rather than die in battle or be taken alive. It took the "conquering" forces a year to breach the tower walls, but in ABC's eight-hour, $18 million retelling, the metaphors run rampant over Masada. The Romans in Judea are the Nazis in Europe, the English in Palestine, the Americans in Viet Nam, the Arabs surrounding modern Israel--and the Jews then are the Jews of all time, rising to a state of heroic masochism for one last cosmic laugh in the exterminator's face. And though the fate they awaited is radically different (imminent death vs. paranoid martyrdom), the rebels of Masada are also, in a way, the lost souls of Jonestown; Eleazar is an honorable Jim Jones; and Masada is a kind of Guyana: Cult of the Saved.

Eleazar's adversary, the Roman general Flavius Silva (Peter O'Toole), constructs a movable tower, with battering ram attached, that finally penetrates Masada. This too is a metaphor: for the arduous business of spectacular moviemaking. "Romans!" mutters Eleazar. "They love spectacle." So does Director Boris Sagal, whose camera eye lingers fondly on the minutiae of imperial power. Sagal hasn't the shaping sense of David Lean, who virtually denned the large-scale film in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. But Masada means to pit spectacle against itself, to use it for irony and indignation. When the Tenth Legion parades up to the fortress, it seems like a huge, overdressed, uninvited family to whom the folks inside are not at home. The building of the tower, the Zealots' defense, the ultimate Roman "victory" and Jewish "defeat" can all be seen as examples of spectacular economic and human waste.

"I have a feeling," Peter O'Toole said recently, "that in Masada, General Silva will wipe T.E. Lawrence away." On the contrary: O'Toole at his best here recalls and builds upon his star-making performance. The determination, the icy elegance and intelligence, the madness are all evident. But Silva is Lawrence 19 centuries earlier and a thousand lifetimes older. The middle-aged campaigner has seen and done too much; the grandeur has grown sere. O'Toole's simian face is now wise and ravaged, and the voice that can still explode in cadenzas of moralistic fury soon slumps into the baritone whisper of weary reason. He is magnificently tired: he leans against a Roman column as if he must support it and the burden of empire. Moving about the Judean desert on stork legs, he seems too frail to fall into bed, let alone scale Masada. That he can do both, with throw-away authority, is testament to a talent that not even a lifetime of playing Peter O'Toole--the hard way--can destroy.

When Masada isn't invoking Lawrence, it is straining for--and often achieving--the rhetorical sweep of I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theater. Writer Joel Oliansky (The Law, The Competition) has reworked the character conflict that fueled Becket and A Man for All Seasons: the battle of wits and wills between a man of God who knows that he is also a man of destiny (Eleazar) and the man of power who must understand his opponent before he annihilates him (Silva). Oliansky has also dolloped clever words on the honeyed tongues of such stalwarts of the British stage as Denis Quilley, Nigel Davenport, Timothy West and David Warner --noble Romans all. As Eleazar, Peter Strauss has the leonine look of a designated hero, and he strikes most of the right emotional keys: humorless but witty, forceful, cunning, brooding. At times he and the movie brood too much. Masada is yet another example of a mini-series half again as long as it should be. There is a reason for this: the ratings of a well-produced, strongly promoted "longform" (Roots or Shogun or Scruples) generally increase as the series progresses. The idol Nielsen must still be appeased.

--By Richard Corliss

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