One Night with the King—a new film adaptation of the Book of Esther—had me in high hopes. It showed grand sets and panoramas worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. It featured film legends Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole. It boasted a message of how one solitary person can change the future of a nation. I was unprepared for the historical goulash that it was going to present. If ever you doubt that films and filmmakers affect each other, choose back-to-back nights to watch Lord of the Rings (at least the first one), the Ten Commandments, any Disney movie with a princess, and then watch One Night with the King.

The Disney effect
How is One Night with the King Disneyfied, you ask? To start, the movie focuses not so much on what Esther does as a queen, but on how she gets there. She is a silly girl who likes to read and daydream about butterflies and snowflakes (I’m not kidding, that’s in the movie). The film also strongly pushes the concept of romantic love—a concept rather absent from the Biblical version, though used in a way that may satisfy modern audiences. Third, One Night with the King employs an overarching, mish-mashed view of history. In the film, Haman (the villain) is essentially a Nazi, swastika and all (again, no kidding). Personally, I think the biblical narrative is certainly rich enough to succeed on its own imagery without bringing Nazis into ancient Persia. However, in the film’s defense, the holocaust imagery does bring up the feelings and general context that the audience needs to understand the action of the movie, a context of global-scale genocide against the Jews.

photo courtesy Gener8xion Entertainment

The Lord of the Rings effect
Two hallmarks of the Ring trilogy occur in full force in One Night with the King—the crucial backstory about how the current situation came to be and the sweeping views of computer-generated fortresses. The Rings’ backstory details how the sinister One Ring was created thousands of years ago and how it found its way to the Shire into Frodo’s hands. One Night with the King opens with a flashback to King Saul and the prophet Samuel, setting up an unfulfilled punishment of Israel’s enemies. The escaped enemy is the wife of King Agag who should have been slaughtered in the purge of the Amalekite territory. His wife (who incidentally doesn’t exist in the biblical record; check 1 Samuel 15) gives birth to a child who passes on the hatred against the Jews down through his descendents and eventually into Haman in Susa centuries later. The backstory does a lot for the movie. The plot would hold without it, but the story of the escaped enemy allows a grander scope for the non-Old-Testament-literate among us to view the broad range of the victory for the Jews in Esther’s time. Not only were current Jews being saved, but their ancient rival was finally being punished.

The vast and often dizzying views of the city of Susa worked similarly to the backstory. The vistas showed the grand, exotic, beautiful city that ancient Susa was. Never mind that the city shown could have housed most of the world’s population from that time (the filmmakers apparently didn’t know that there were only 100 million people on the entire Earth; that’s one-third of the current U.S. population). Nevertheless, the breathtaking cinematography and panoramas give the modern audience a sense of the large scale of the locale and of the action happening. We’re not just watching a story about a Middle-Eastern country, but about the capital city in the largest empire in the world. What happens here matters everywhere.

If Charlton Heston were here
The Ten Commandments is one of the landmark films of our time and one of its chief

traits—the extensive cast—is used in One Night with the King as well. The book of Esther is essentially about four characters—Haman who hates Mordecai; Mordecai the wise uncle of Esther; Esther a Jewish girl who marries the King; and the King. One Night with the King has over a dozen speaking roles. There are royal advisors and palace staff and even a flashback to Esther’s parents. The film tries to add interest by adding characters, but they actually detract from the focus of the story. The key example is how the biblical Haman character is almost split into two characters in the film, which increases the range of action, the dialogue (how do you spread 10 pages into 2 hours of film anyway?), and the complexity of the plot—but it costs the movie its focus.

While we’re talking about the characters, let me just add as a personal note that the acting throughout was excellently done by the entire cast, though somehow I just couldn’t get past Esther being portrayed by an American named Tiffany with perfect teeth.

Esther and God
There is a fine line between Biblical accuracy and Biblical interpretation. One Night with the King walks that line like a tightrope. It generally stays near the Biblical story, but often adds

photo courtesy Gener8xion Entertainment

flourishes, palace intrigues, and a crowd of secondary characters to bring the story more in line with other current films. After all, who today would watch a story with just four characters? Wouldn’t 25 be better? That said, there are a few key interactions worth mentioning.

The Book of Esther stands alone in the Bible as the only book that does not mention God. This is not to say that the book shows a people totally estranged from God (there are plenty of those stories throughout the Old Testament), but rather, the book simply doesn’t mention God’s name. This is a subtle way of showing His vast importance, similar to how the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 describes the entrance of sin into the world without once using the word “sin.”

One Night with the King mentions God throughout, right from the opening sequence. The film keeps God behind the scenes (no angelic visions or voices from the sky here) but repeatedly has characters make decisions based on His activity in human affairs and His love for His people. Such a treatment strays from how the Bible told the story, but for good reason. Besides, in film, where you have to show your audience everything, you have to tell them everything too, which in this case means talking directly about God.

I was curious to see how the film would handle the parade of women into the king’s chambers for their one-night “audition,” so to speak. Overall, the film presented it rather playfully. The candidates were either so nervous that they threw up or so weighed down in jewels to impress the king that they couldn’t approach him. The film’s approach was to give Esther and Xerxes a prior relationship that would be built upon during her “audition.” Earlier in the movie, she is called upon as one of the few literate people in the palace to read the king’s court proceedings to him to help him fall asleep. Instead, Esther tells him a story about Rachel and Jacob falling in love. One Night with the King interpreted this part of the story with some modification but meanwhile making it more understandable to modern audiences, especially children.

The Book of Esther is largely about how God orchestrates human affairs to protect His people, even bringing key individuals into key roles. It’s hard to say if the movie is about the same topic. It seems to be at first. The opening line, spoken by a brilliantly cast John Rhys-Davies, asks “From whence comes the purpose of a person’s life?” By the closing scene in the film, I was still waiting for that question to be answered. One Night with the King seemed to shift its focus during the story from how everything works out for the good of God’s people to how Esther and Xerxes’ marriage would survive despite palace treachery.

In the U.S., where unjust laws are repealed (a la Emancipation Proclamation), viewers may have expected the movie to end with Xerxes revoking his order for Jews everywhere to be attacked and robbed on the same day. He doesn’t. In a surprise move, One Night with the King stays close to the Bible and shows the additional law sent out, which says that Jews can defend themselves on that day when they are scheduled to be attacked. It’s a surprising ending in the Bible, and it is no less surprising on screen.

Some scholars say that the concept of romantic love didn’t exist until Shakespeare. It’s true that much of the world does not base marriage on what we would call “true love” and that about half of the marriages in the world today are still arranged marriages (it’s true; look it up). Of course, those few Christians who have read Song of Songs may disagree. Nevertheless, One Night with the King employs romantic love as a driving force in the movie whereas it is notably absent from the Biblical book. Esther is chosen to be queen. That’s about all the Bible says on the matter, but the story itself attests to the lack of romantic love. If Xerxes were deeply in love with Esther, he wouldn’t mind her coming to see him in court. That’s why the drama is so high—because she is a figurehead queen. The presence of “true love” is questionable at best.

The Book of Esther is terrifically ironic. The reader always has information that the characters do not, making their decisions and actions all the more striking or even funny. There is no better example than when King Xerxes asks Haman how he (Xerxes) should honor a worthy person. Haman, thinking that the King wants to honor him, names exactly the honor he wants, not knowing that Xerxes really wants to honor Mordecai, Haman’s rival. Every reader enjoys this part of the story because of the irony, and truth to be told, the film captured this scene adequately.

The final word
There is a fine line between biblical accuracy and biblical interpretation, and One Night with the King does both adequately well. I should note here at the end that One Night with the King is not based on the Book of Esther. It is based on a fictionalized retelling of the Book of Esther called Hadassah by Mark Andrew Olsen. Taking that into account, the movie does rather well at allowing the biblical story shine through two renditions on its way to us. I recommend One Night with the King as a great movie rental when you’re in the mood for a big-scale production, but I also recommend reading about the Esther of the Bible when the credits are rolling.