This TV movie was next in the series of Biblical television miniseries/movies from Turner Network Television after the two-part miniseries Abraham. This one is just a TV movie, not a miniseries; it’s only one episode of ninety minutes in length. The story of Jacob and his dysfunctional family is a really good one, but this adaptation never really gets going in my opinion.
At first, Matthew Modine seems like a weird choice for a Biblical patriarch, but then Jacob was a schemer and a manipulator and a cheat; Old Testament yuppie might be a good way to describe him, so Modine ends up working okay, but he doesn’t really have the gravitas he needs for the last third or so of the film. Sean Bean is charismatic, crude and compelling as Esau, the brother that Jacob cheats out of his inheritance, though he’s underused due to the arc of the story. The less said about Lara Flynn Boyle as Rachel, Jacob’s love-interest, the better; she’s very wooden and blank and doesn’t work at all. Of course, one of the great twists in the story of Jacob is when he, the great con artist, meets his match and gets conned by the character of Laban; and this movie has a particularly wily Laban in the great character actor Giancarlo Giannini. And, hey, is that Christoph Waltz in a tiny bit part? Yes, it is. Wow. Anyway, there are things this movie gets right and some of the cast is good, but the movie never really explores all the dysfunctional angles it could have and its love story is hampered by a weak and uncharismatic Rachel. This one is bookended by two really great miniseries, Abraham & Joseph, but it just doesn’t have much on the ball itself. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – some good performances can’t save a script that fails to really exploit this classic Biblical story for all that it’s worth; there are good moments here, but on the whole, pretty mediocre. 2 ½ stars.