Monument, a new feature film opening in theaters around the US on March 20, is a fact-based drama about an interesting, little-known story: How Israeli architects were tasked with building a monument to honor South Lebanese Army (SLA) soldiers who were killed in the first Lebanon War.
A notable aspect of the movie is that it features a genuine movie star, Oscar-winning Jon Voight, known for iconic roles in such films as Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance, and Coming Home, and more recently in the television series, Ray Donovan, in a leading role, which is perhaps not a surprise in that Voight has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel.
The story has added resonance now, as Hezbollah pounds Israel with missiles in the current war, and it makes sense to look back at how Hezbollah has evolved in the quarter-century since the events portrayed in the film took place.
But it is marred by a stilted, cliché-filled screenplay. The characters debate the issues in a way that explicates the different points of view on the Israeli political spectrum.
But the dialogue, it is written in a way that few lines sound as if a human being would actually utter them. It’s a botched opportunity to portray the complex reality of the diversity of the Israeli political spectrum and the conflict among Lebanese factions.
But the actors portraying the father-and-son architects Yaakov Rechter (Voight) and Amnon Rechter (Joseph Mazzello, who was in Jurassic Park as a child, and has appeared in such films as The Social Network) give good performances.
So, despite the dialogue, I came to care about the characters. The film follows the convention where everyone speaks perfect English with Hebrew accents, except for Lebanese characters.
Voight has more of a Yiddish accent than a Hebrew one in some scenes, but he gives the character believable gravitas.
The movie opens in 1999, when Israel was still in charge of the security zone in southern Lebanon, along Israel’s northern border, following the war in Lebanon that began in the 1980s and was waged to stop Hezbollah and other Palestinian factions from bombing Israel.
Yaakov, who was one of Israel’s leading architects and who built a major firm (he was also the father of musician Yoni Rechter, although the movie does not mention this), is a towering figure in the film.
As the movie begins, Yaakov is suffering from cancer and is thinking about his legacy. He has an old-school approach to his work and leans right in his politics.
When his firm is approached by Uri Lubrani (Alon Aboutboul, in one of the late actor’s last unreleased roles), a diplomat working on strategies for maintaining order in the still-troubled area along the Israeli border, to build a monument to honor fallen SLA soldiers, Yaakov is honored.
He also sees it as an opportunity to work with his son Amnon, a young architect who works at his firm and is struggling to prove himself and get out from under his father’s shadow.
So, Yaakov steps back, and Amnon, a father raising baby twins with Osnat (Aviv Pinkas), who has put her career on hold, moves into the forefront of the project.
But Amnon is conflicted about the whole idea of the monument.
“The security zone should be the war zone, and our presence should be called what it is, an occupation, and the Lebanese army should be called our proxy militia, Lebanon is our Vietnam. Our government constantly undermines the very ideals they claim to promote,” he tells his father.
'We live our lives around people committed to our destruction'
Yaakov responds, “I disagree with every word you say. This is a war zone… We live our lives around people committed to our destruction… We make mistakes, of course we make mistakes, we’re human beings.”
But he allows Amnon to take the lead, and his son comes up with the idea that the monument should honor everyone in Lebanon, not only the heavily Christian SLA.
The real drama of the movie is his fight to convince his father of his point of view, and Yaakov is gradually persuaded, saying, “God willed that there will be many religions but there is one eternal light that embraces us all.”
Those who enjoy movies about architects, such as The Fountainhead and The Brutalist, will be interested in the scenes when he comes up with ideas for how the monument should look, and he creates a truly beautiful design.
That it occurs to no one that an Israeli-designed monument to the SLA would be a prime target for Hezbollah strains belief, but apparently this is what really happened.
Many of the debates among the characters represent very real fissures in Israeli society, but there is something artificial about the clunky dialogue that I fear will completely turn off anyone who is not already fascinated by these issues.
Watching a demonstration on television, Osnat says, “Israel’s mandatory draft is like a potential death sentence. I’m feeling like the national womb, producing cannon fodder.”
Many mothers may feel that here, but only someone trying to make a point for US audience would express it so baldly. Israelis tend to speak more in a kind of shorthand.
While the dialogue features a great deal of exposition, I don’t think it truly explains the complexity of the conflict among the various factions in Lebanon.
I imagine that US audiences will be mystified as to why the SLA seems to have so little control over Hezbollah.
The movie feels as if it were made by outsiders with great feeling for Israel but limited experience in the country, and in fact the director is not Israeli.
Monument was directed by Bryan Singer, one of Hollywood’s top directors, who made such blockbusters as the X-Men series, as well as Bohemian Rhapsody and The Usual Suspects.
He has left Hollywood and reportedly has been spending much of his time in Israel in the last few years. His departure from America follows a series of accusations that he sexually assaulted boys going back to 1997.
In 2019, The Atlantic published a lengthy article detailing new allegations and Singer accused the magazine of publishing a “homophobic smear piece.”
None of the cases have come to trial and several were dismissed for lack of evidence. The screenplay for Monument is apparently the first work in English by Alena Alova, who has previously written in Russian.
There is a powerful story in Monument, which is obscured by the problems with the script.
At one point, Amnon tells Osnat, “Something is gnawing at me, it’s for him, I want to create something beautiful before he goes, so he knows that the time he took out of his life to teach me was worth it.”
Something seems to have been gnawing at the filmmakers behind this movie, too, but it’s hard to see how their vision will connect with international audiences, or teach them anything.