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Movie Review: Walk on Water

By William Sternman

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Walk on Water
Starring Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, and Caroline Peters
Written by Gal Uchovsky
Directed by Eytan Fox

Where does it all end?

In Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, the horrified Roman general gives the queen of Egypt an exasperated answer:

Do you hear? These knockers at your gate are also believers in vengeance and in stabbing. You have slain their leader: it is right that they shall slay you. If you doubt it, ask your four counselors here. And then in the name of that right, shall I not slay them for murdering their Queen, and be slain in my turn by their countrymen as the invader of their fatherland? Can Rome do less then than slay these slayers too, to show the world how Rome avenges her sons and her honor? And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

What Shaw doesn’t consider is what happens to a nation that is obsessed with revenge and to the dehumanized instruments it uses to execute its judgments.

Surely, there must come a time when the emotional need to settle the score dies down, becoming instead a mindlessly observed ritual performed by indifferent acolytes a generation or two removed from the original offense. Surely, there must come a time when a nation is better served looking to the future than brooding over the unchangeable past.

Surely, if that nation is Israel, it must be guided by the religious principles on which it was founded. “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord. And, “Thou shalt not murder.”

But cafeteria believers are always free to pick and choose among various Biblical strictures. As one wag pointed out to one of the world’s most egregious religious grazers, the gay-bashing Dr. Laura Schlessinger:“I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?” Not to mention: “I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes men unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?”

Walking on Water, an Israeli movie, does not consider these questions either.

Its “hero” is Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi), a cold-blooded, stony-faced assassin who mechanically disposes of a Hamas agent while the man is on an outing with his wife and child. The child cries at the death of his father. Eyal is unmoved.

When Eyal comes home, he finds that his wife, Iris, has killed herself. (Talk about your heavy-handed coincidences!) She leaves a suicide note, whose contents are held back until an appropriately melodramatic turning point. But I won’t force you to sit through the entire movie to find out what it says. Iris has killed herself because everything Eyal touches smells of death. She certainly knows how to prove her point, but to what purpose? (And what do you do for an encore?)

Eyal sets out on his next mission: to find and murder a former Nazi officer.

It is sixty years since the fall of the Third Reich, and the hunted monster is now a pathetic and doddering old man in his nineties. He cannot even walk on his own and he is barely kept alive by a variety of mechanical devices. He is more dead than alive, and a diabolic revenge on him might have been to just let him suffer on, rather than mercifully put him out of his misery. But revenge demands action; the subtlety of inaction is lost on the avenging angel. How can he prove he has done something if he has done nothing?

It is at this point that the writers (Gal Uchovsky et al.) and director (Eytan Fox) pull a series of surprise twists out of their cocked hats. The trouble with these surprises, however, is that while they are as unexpected as practical jokes (“Hey, lady, you dropped something. April fool!”), they are also just as unconnected to what has gone before. Soon there are so many dei ex machina being lowered from the sky that their baskets threaten to collide.

The surprise twists are supposed to resolve the action, but they do no such thing. So, as writers and directors often do when they’ve painted themselves into a dramatic corner (I call it the “desperation ending”), they tie everything up with an incredible happily-ever-after conclusion. Even the stony-faced killer is seen laughing as though he had never killed a fly, let alone a human being.

And, oh, yes, thanks to the Nazi’s gay grandson (Knut Berger), Eyal learns to overcome his super-macho distaste for “homos.” If only character transformations were as easy in real life as they are in the movies, psychiatrists would be selling apples on street corners.

But we are never convincingly shown how this cold-blooded killing machine gets the smell of death off his hands and becomes a human being. Nor are we ever told why this reformed monster shouldn’t now be just as worthy a prey for a Palestinian or a neo-Nazi hit man as the former Nazi he once pursed.

If this Israeli Robocop can somehow tap into his own humanity, isn’t it also possible that the former Nazi officer could also have done the same thing in the 60 years since the war ended?

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William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

© 2005 Me Three