I’ve long been fascinated with Hypatia, courtesy of the whole first chapter she takes up in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. She was a fiercely independent woman, and a charismatic scholar/teacher at the Library at Alexandria at the time in the 4th century when it fell to an early Christian mob and its contents burned. Eventually, she was martyred as a heretic.
It was a key moment in the fall of the Roman Empire, and in Sagan’s mind, the event that ushered in the Dark Ages.
Thus, I’ve always pictured her as a defender of reason, a Xena: Warrior Princess of scientific thought and method.
I never pictured her as Rachel Weisz. As formidable as the Oscar-winning actress is, she seems too diminutive to have commanded the respect and even obeisance of a male-run scholastic world.
Instead, Alejandro Amenábar — the director of Agora, a Spanish sword-and-sandals piece about the historical flashpoint between religion and reason (which reason ultimately lost, and may be in the process of losing again) — fashions her femininity as the secret of her authority.
As the movie begins, we see her students are smitten with her, stupefied as she proffers competing theories about the nature of the universe — from Ptolemy’s crystal spheres to Aristarchos’ crazy-talk about the Earth moving around the Sun.
Chief among her admirers are Orestes, an arrogant and high-born young man (Oscar Isaac) with a bright political future, and a slave named Davus (Max Minghella), who is courted by a brash Christian sect.
Like Sagan, Amenábar embraces Hypatia’s story as a metaphor for the brutish victory of religious Fundamentalism, and he’s not the least bit subtle about it. The Christian mobs are all dark-clad and dirty. Their Taliban-esque leaders begin issuing edicts about modest dress for women being Christ’s will. The mobs assemble outside the library and mock the pagan gods, every so often erupting into violence and tossing clean-cut scientists and teachers into bonfires.
Eventually, all that stands between Hypatia and death at the hands of the righteous is Orestes (now promoted to prefect), who imperils his own career and safety to defend her (for a while) against charges of witchcraft.
Certainly, politically, Christians were feeling their oats at this time in history (after centuries of Roman martyrdom, it must be said). Seizing upon the notion that yesterday’s oppressed is today’s oppressor, Amenábar constructs historical fiction at all angles (there’s no evidence that Hypatia and Orestes had any sort of relationship, nor that she ever gave the time of day to thoughts of a heliocentric universe).
Through it all, the actors play their roles with suspect conviction.
Considering the passions in play, Agora is strangely languid. The burning of the Library is one of the most dramatic events in Western history, the permanent destruction of much classical knowledge at the hands of a mob. But what should be a moment that puts a lump in the throat of any thinking person is just another scene.
I imagine if Agora had received a mass release, it might have engendered plenty of controversy, particularly among the oft-offended Christian right. But history is history, and it’s worth pondering how faith, in its zeal, can take a profoundly wrong turn.
(This film is rated PG)
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