'Simon Magus' covers a lot of mythic ground in fable fashion

'Simon Magus' covers a lot of mythic ground in fable fashion

Friday, May 11, 2001

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Holy fool. Mad visionary. Mystic outcast. Simon Magus (Noah Taylor) is a mumbling, shambling loner living on the outskirts of the Jewish quarter of a small village in 19th-century Poland in this "tale from a vanished world."

MOVIE REVIEW

SIMON MAGUS

DIRECTOR: Ben Hopkins

CAST: Noah Taylor, Stuart Townsend, Embeth Davidtz, Sean McGinley, Amanda Ryan, Rutger Hauer, Ian Holm

RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes

RATING: No rating, some dark themes but no objectionable language

or violence

WHERE: Varsity

GRADE: B-

Barred from his community church for making up his own nonsense prayers, the village elders fear that this "cursed child" is possessed and the superstitious seek out his dreams and visions, but few accept him.

His torment brings about visits from a demonic figure (Ian Holm) who urges him to evil and drives him to seek solace in the Christian religion, where an anti-Semitic German merchant (Sean McGinley) tempts him with food and acceptance in return for spying on his people.

This dark, sad fable of faith, family and tolerance is the most compelling facet of Ben Hopkins' "Simon Magus," but just one of the threads in this tale.

An ambitious Jewish smith, Dovid (Stuart Townsend), struggles to build a railway station to bring commerce to the dying town and, in the process, woo the lonely widow (Embeth Davidtz) he loves. The land belongs to a poetry-loving squire (Rutger Hauer) who, starved for culture in this hamlet, agrees to consider his offer in return for Dovid reading the squire's book of verse.

Taylor's intense performance gives Simon's fevered battle with faith and his desperate need for cultural contact a tragic dimension missing from the film's familiar stories of romantic misunderstandings and religious intolerance.

Beautifully realized and lovingly photographed, Hopkins' film creates an almost allegorical world out of time. The storybook village could be out of the Middle Ages but for the steam engine that puffs through the countryside.

At its best, "Simon Magus" celebrates the magic of art and the transcendent power of acceptance. It should be a revelation in a world where religion competes with superstition and tradition battles modern ideas, but for all it's warmth and wonder, it carries little more power than a storybook fable.