There’s more than one way to sing tragically

I’m not a great opera guy. My one great opera adventure involved my wife, our friend Bruce and a late-night excursion out to the suburbs of Rome for an amateur-night production of, I think, “Rigoletto.” Of course, amateur night even outside Rome is like a Florentine cappuccino: It’s still Italian and, therefore, the best in the world. Our adventure began actually when the opera was over and, miles from our respective hotels, we found ourselves stumbling along a dark highway, trying to wave down a taxi. It seems funny now, but that night, in the dark, in a country where we knew enough of the language to order food (and wine), far off the regular tourist radar, tired, wet and hungry, it seemed like … well, like a bad opera.

So, OK, Penny Woolcock’s adaptation of John Adams’ controversial opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which played today during the second day of the Spokane International Film Festival, isn’t bad opera. At least, it doesn’t seem bad to someone who doesn’t know “Rigoletto” from “La Traviata.” What the film does seem like is a cinematic curiosity, a modern hybrid or arts in which the music serves little more than as an excuse for the actor/singers to warble their stories, often unintelligibly.

Based on the story of the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruse ship Achille Lauro, in which four Palestinian terrorists held the ship hostage and eventually murdered and American tourist named Leon Klinghoffer, “The Death of Klinghoffer” offers a surprisingly even-handed view of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, the modern version of which is in its sixth decade. The Jews are portrayed as they always are, a people who fled mostly from a Europe that murdered 6 million of them and persecuted the rest. Trouble is, they returned to a land that was already occupied. Displaced, the people who became known as Palestinians fought back.

In Woolcock’s movie, and presumably Adams’ opera, the terrorists in “The Death of Klinghoffer” are shown — aside from one obvious sociopath — as human beings and not the usual caricatures. The tragedy is that the quartet of AK-47-wielding men make a series of desperately unfortunate choices. What they end up doing solves nothing and, as the captain of the ship (Christopher Maltman) says, actually harms the very cause that they have pledged themselves to fight. I’m not sure what Adams, much less Woolcock, wanted to say as a larger message. For me, though, the movie simply mirrors the way of today’s world: We’re faced with one polarized group set against the next, each so obsessed with its version of a so-called truth that the resulting struggle ends up becoming more important than the idea from which it was born.

That’s an idea that’s been put to music before. I think the guy’s name was Verdi.