Maybe “Kingdom of Heaven” is just one epic too many for me; these same tricks don’t work anymore. I’ve had enough of the shaky camera work, changing frame rates, and wild editing during battle scenes. I’ve had enough massed armies and unsaturated blue-and-grey cinematography. I’ve heard enough about heroes having bland issues with fathers they don’t know, horses they have to calm, and girls they have to tame. I liked the slow-motion dirt flying through the air in “Gladiator” and “Black Hawk Down.” I’ve seen men lift the sword of their fathers. I’ve had enough of heavyset, one-dimensional villains chewing scenery behind phony accents and thick beards. Honestly, I think Brendan Gleeson has the exact same “give me a war” conversation in “Kingdom of Heaven” as he had, playing the exact same character, in “Troy.” I need to hear exotic Middle Eastern voices wailing over “philosophized” (i.e.: slow-motion) violence about as much as I need to hear a solo trumpet over a World War II soldier.
Ridley Scott, as I explained earlier, practically invented the genre, yet, despite what our expectations might be, his return to it does not revitalize it or show his impersonators “how it’s done.” He only emphasizes how stagnant the genre has become and how its course has been run. One of the things that made “Alexander,” mess that it is, so refreshing is that Stone actually brought new tricks to the table. Forests in India can magically transform into Hell? I’ve never seen that before!
And what is “Kingdom of Heaven” about, anyway? Maybe that’s something else of which I’ve had enough. I’m tired of the way people stand and talk to each other in these movies: the same shot-reverse shot of faces against wide backdrops as they elliptically exchange faux-profundities. All discussion of religion, conscience, and Euro-Arab relations in “Kingdom of Heaven,” when not spoken by Captain Obvious, is so impossibly oblique that It Could Mean Anything. (For an example of Captain Obvious: does the wheezing recluse in the metal mask, wrapped from head to foot in cloth and limping around, really need to say “I am a leper?” Didn’t we know that from watching “Braveheart?”) Because Americans of all stripes, politics, and faiths are becoming so vitriolic about not “wasting their time” hearing opinions that don’t already match their own, except when they want to get incensed, the only way to recoup the cost of such a film is to make it Mean Anything To Anybody.
“Kingdom of Heaven” alternately shows the Middle East situation as being “really complicated” or takes the low-brow movie view of history, which is to say that everything bad is the work of a few “bad apples.” No, not the work of giant cultural urges, or economics, or national character, but simply a few guys who are really mean. The bad apples are, of course, the glowering, menacing, one-dimensional villains I mentioned before. They are the “bad Christians”—the Knights Templar, who were good in “National Treasure”—who want the Holy Land just for Christians, as opposed to the “good Christians” who inherited the Holy Land from earlier Crusaders, and who want to keep Jerusalem an open city for all religions. In this way, Jerusalem is basically no different than any town in the Old West: sheriffs try to keep the peace between two rival families of ranchers, gamblers, or whatever. “Kingdom of Heaven” lacks much historical context: we aren’t confident whose side we should be on because we don’t know what Jerusalem was like before the Crusaders showed up and we don’t know what it will be like when Muslim badass Saladin takes over. My wife assures me Saladin (played reliably in dignified-villain mode by Ghassan Massoud) ran Jerusalem as openly as the Crusaders did, and I know better than to argue with her.
Is it “a mirror of today’s politics?” The Holy Land has been disputed for so long in basically the exact same way—oil partially replacing holy sites—that I think a movie set there that doesn’t “mirror today’s politics” might be more worthy of applause. If “Kingdom of Heaven” is trying for prescience, it should at least indict the right contemporary figures. The one mention of the pope in “K of H” is to describe him as a warmonger, which he certainly was in the 12th century. But in the 21st John Paul II was picked as “Man of the Year” by www.antiwar.com for his protests against both Gulf Wars. No, the pope mention is merely to sound “edgy” and stir things up.
But because Ridley Scott is such a slick professional, it is not the meaning of the movie that interests him anyway. It is the craft of making a sharp, delicious picture. Debating what it means is, in a way, futile. Or maybe I’m just crabby because, after forming working opinions of “The Sacrifice,” “Eyes Wide Shut,” and “The Thin Red Line,” I couldn’t figure out something at a multiplex.
Yet there is plenty in “Kingdom of Heaven” to appreciate. Even if we’ve seen this cinematography before, so often and so recently, it does look good, and it’s hard not to appreciate the ease with which Scott puts so much in motion, even if it’s sometimes sluggish. As the young Crusader, Orlando Bloom (of “Troy”) does well by saying little. Both his biological father (Liam Neeson) and his father in Christ (David Thewlis) are such effective actors that they bring philosophical weight to their underwritten roles. Eva Green of “The Dreamers” is once again lusted after by two different men to a degree that I could not comprehend, but she looks great with freckles. The most interesting character is her brother, the leper king of Jerusalem (an uncredited Edward Norton), although I can’t remember why. Maybe it’s because his mask is so cool.
I’ll end by saying that we’re only about four months away from Terrence Malick’s “The New World.” If Malick’s previous films are any indication, “The New World” wants very much to deserve mention in the same sentence as “Lawrence of Arabia.” It looks to be a true epic, not a soap opera, not a revenge flick, not an action movie, shot on 70mm and without visible computer effects. Frenetic editing and massed armies will be replaced by ponderous moods and ambient shadows, and glimmering, faked castles will be replaced by woods shot so reverentially that they feel like old churches with minds of their own. Like “Kingdom of Heaven,” it will probably confront one of the great misuses of Christ; in this case, the destruction of the indigenous cultures of the Americas. As I expressed this to my wife after “Kingdom of Heaven,” she made fun of me by waving her arms and wailing “Only Terrence Malick can save us!”
Finished Friday, June 3rd, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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