SITE RATING: 6/10
SITE
REVIEW: An
earnest, often handsome, but ultimately
messy and unfocused documentary by Utah
filmmakers Lee Groberg and Mark Goodman, Handel's
Messiah feels like three different
films, all getting in each other's
way. The first film is a
beautifully-filmed historical re-enactment
of Handel's life, with rich costuming,
location filming in Europe, good-to-excellent
acting, and elegant, if occasionally florid
voice-over work by actress Jane
Seymour. The second side of the film
is a pure documentary, with interview
segments with various musical experts,
including John Rutter, Paul McCreesh, and
various professors, opera producers, and
others, give informed, sometimes enlightened
commentary on Handel's life, works, and
personality. The third part of the
film is the most intrusive, with various
choirs from around the world breaking in to
offer their own interpretations of Messiah's
Hallelujah chorus, with styles ranging from
Rock to World Music, to more traditional
performances. These performances,
interesting as they are, are thrust into the
narrative in jarring cuts that not only
break the narrative flow of the documentary,
but stylistically are so remote from the
17th-Century reenactment as to give an air
of absurdity to the proceedings.
Jarring too is the evangelical bent the
narrative takes, which is an outgrowth of
the documentary's attention to Charles
Jennins' libretto, but seems to push it's
own agenda, apart from the oratorio.
In addition to the main feature, there are
several bonus featurettes, which expand and
elaborate on the themes found in the main
documentary, including "The Making of Messiah,"
"The Message of Messiah," "The Musicality of
Messiah," "Hallelujah Chorus performances"
and others. A film that seems to have
tried to hit too many bases and do too many
things, in the end, it doesn't do any of
them nearly as well as I would have hoped.
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