Patrick Stewart’s role in Hunting Elephants makes an intriguing detour through his screen career: an English actor with grand manners and dwindling resources, drawn into an Israeli bank-robbing scheme. Reshef Levi’s 2013 comedy brings him together with Sasson Gabai, Moni Moshonov, and Gil Blank in a story about people who have been dismissed, isolated, or left behind. The casting supplies the initial curiosity. Their competing reasons for wanting another chance supply the more interesting movie.
The film’s premise and principal cast are documented in the [Miami Jewish Film Festival’s program](https://miamijewishfilmfestival.org/films/2014/hunting_elephants). My reading is that its strongest idea concerns usefulness: a boy and three older men discover that abilities with little value in their ordinary lives can become essential to one another.
Spoilers follow for the setup, character relationships, and selected comic scenes. The accompanying images are interpretive illustrations, not film stills.
Jonathan’s robbery begins with a failure he cannot repair
Jonathan, played by Gil Blank, loses his father, who works in bank security. The bank subsequently refuses the family compensation on a technicality. His mother, Dorit, must manage both bereavement and financial insecurity, while Jonathan begins spending time with his estranged grandfather, Eliyahu, at a retirement home.
That sequence gives the proposed robbery an emotional purpose before it becomes a logistical exercise. Jonathan cannot reverse his father’s death. He can, however, direct his anger toward a building, an institution, and a problem that appears solvable. For a clever child overwhelmed by loss, planning offers the comfort of cause and effect.
The distinction matters. Intelligence does not protect Jonathan from helplessness; it makes helplessness especially humiliating. A scheme offers him something grief cannot: a next step. Read this way, his participation is less a fantasy of suddenly becoming an adult than an attempt to find a situation in which knowing something makes a difference.
His familiarity with the bank’s security also gives the caper a painful connection to his father. Information once shared within their relationship becomes useful after that relationship has been cut short. The same knowledge can therefore function as a practical advantage and an emotional burden.
Dorit exposes the limits of the revenge fantasy
Dorit, played by Yael Abecassis, gives the story a more immediate measure of injustice. Someone still has to keep the family going. In the film’s published English dialogue transcript, her response to the bank’s explanation is wonderfully direct: The whole document is fine print! That line captures the absurdity of asking a devastated family to treat procedural language as a sufficient moral answer. [Published dialogue transcript](https://www.scripts.com/script/hunting_elephants_10396)
Her developing relationship with the bank manager, Dedi, complicates Jonathan’s view of her. From his position, the man associated with the family’s mistreatment becomes an intolerable presence in its private life. From hers, survival requires decisions that cannot wait for her son to approve them.
The film’s broad comic framework risks simplifying this tension into an obstacle for the boy. Yet Dorit’s perspective makes the premise more uncomfortable and more worthwhile. Revenge can feel clarifying to the person imagining it while leaving someone else responsible for tomorrow’s ordinary necessities.
This is where character-centered criticism needs to resist automatically adopting the protagonist’s judgment. As in our discussion of love, responsibility, and possession in Wildwood, caring about a family member does not necessarily mean understanding that person’s choices.
Eliyahu and Nick want to matter again
Eliyahu, played by Sasson Gabai, and his friend Nick, played by Moni Moshonov, bring experience of bank robbery into the unlikely partnership. Their past gives the plot its practical foundation, but their present circumstances give it emotional friction. They occupy a setting in which other people increasingly organize their days and assess their needs.
For Eliyahu, becoming useful to Jonathan does not require an instant transformation into a gentle grandfather. His stubbornness and combative authority remain part of the bargain. That makes their connection more interesting than a simple exchange of youthful innocence for elderly wisdom.
A shared project can create intimacy before either participant knows how to express affection. Planning gives these characters something to discuss besides what has gone wrong between them. It also allows competence to become a form of care: helping someone can be easier than apologizing to them.
Nick’s participation broadens that idea beyond the family. Friendship and companionship are resources, too. The group’s appeal lies in the way its members supply different kinds of confidence, even when none would make a reassuring leader on his own.
Patrick Stewart turns vanity into a working skill
Stewart plays Lord Michael Simpson, Jonathan’s English great-uncle and an actor in financial trouble. His theatrical self-regard becomes a particularly effective comic tool because he treats circumstances as opportunities to perform. Asked to imagine criminal participation, his priorities remain magnificently professional: I’ve never played a bank robber. Then comes the revealing question: Is it a big part? The exchange is quoted in [Roger Moore’s contemporary review](https://rogersmovienation.com/2015/05/06/movie-review-hunting-elephants/).
Those questions contain a miniature character study. Michael processes danger through casting. Before considering whether he should participate, he wants to know how much attention participation will bring him. His vanity is funny because it is so consistent.
But performance also gives him something the group needs. A robbery depends on managing other people’s impressions, and an actor understands the difference between being convincing and being truthful. The quality that makes Michael exhausting company can become a practical contribution.
That reversal is the strongest reason to revisit Stewart’s role. Michael does not need to abandon theatricality to become useful. He needs an audience whose attention has consequences. Our analysis of the difficulty of turning a comic persona into a protagonist explores a related problem: how a recognizable routine can acquire emotional stakes.
The comedy’s looseness is both attraction and limitation
The film includes Michael’s music-hall performance at the retirement home and a flashback to a Star Wars-themed Hamlet. These sequences, described in [Hannah Brown’s retrospective](https://www.jpost.com/international/article-913347), underline how much space the movie gives its performers to entertain.
My reservation is that the premise asks for two different kinds of attention. Jonathan’s grief demands emotional continuity; the older characters’ comic turns invite us to enjoy interruptions. The pleasure of a flamboyant routine does not automatically deepen the loss around it.
For viewers drawn to ensemble comedy, that looseness may be an advantage. For those expecting an intricate heist or sustained psychological realism, the character business is likely to matter more than the mechanics. The most productive approach is to watch how each participant defines success: financial relief, revenge, renewed authority, or simply another chance to command a room.
What the caper ultimately reveals
The deeper attraction of Hunting Elephants is its fantasy of recovered agency. Jonathan’s intelligence, Eliyahu and Nick’s experience, and Michael’s theatricality become valuable through cooperation. None erases the others’ weaknesses. Together, however, they can imagine acting on the world instead of merely enduring it.
The Shakespeare-and-space-opera gag adds an overt intertextual joke rather than a hidden Easter egg. Stewart’s association with Shakespeare and Star Trek makes the collision especially playful, although the fictional production borrows from Star Wars. Its larger relevance belongs to Michael: even an embarrassing performance is an attempt to remain visible.
That desire unites the ensemble. Money provides the objective, but being recognized provides the emotional reward. The film becomes most affecting when its unlikely criminals suggest that having something left to offer—and someone willing to accept it—can be a powerful reason to begin again.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 30, 2026 at 17:05:02 PDT (Los Angeles time)
