(Director’s Cut)
**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent, Alice Playten, and Billy Barty.
Directed by Ridley Scott & written by William Hjortsberg
1985 PG
The monster takes the girl to his dark lair and the boy must rescue her. Maybe the world is at stake, too, maybe not. It’s a story as old as the hills with no shortage of life left in it. “Legend” takes the fairy tale and translates it into a large budget, stylish adventure film, with mixed results.
“Legend” is first and foremost a marvel of art direction. Its storybook woods, with their glowing caves, pools, and dungeons, are breathtaking. The entire forest is a soundstage built to look like an Arthurian painting by a Pre-Raphaelite, with glints of gold in every tree and flower, with no shortage of breezes to fill the air with dandelions and down. Fitting right in are unicorns and goblins, and a loathsome beast living in a castle of permanent gloom, filled with tunnels and traps and belching fires. The monster is the Lord of Darkness, played by Tim Curry, as encased in makeup and costume design that is nothing short of stunning. His plan is straight out of one of those big picturebooks of Grimm or Anderson that good fathers read to their children at night: destroy the last of the unicorns and bring forth eternal night. To lure the unicorn he needs a mortal pure of heart (Mia Sara) to tame it. Soon the unicorn and the girl are prisoners in his demonic palace, and it’s up to Jack the Woods Boy (Tom Cruise) and his elves, dwarves, and sprites to rescue them both. This is a fine storybook story, although Jack resolves more of his problems with brute force than the cunning that is typical to the genre.
“Legend” is a fabulous-looking fairy tale that, for all its stunning production values and art direction, I found curiously unable to grip me. Fairy tales, by their nature, are typically populated by one-dimensional characters that do not translate well into the three dimensions required by films, novels, and plays. “Legend” makes the mistake of leaving its characters flat but treating them like they are multidimensional; there’s not much even the best actor can do with a character that is completely pure and, therefore, completely shallow. If its people were developed traditionally, with flaws and pathos, then its treatment would have fit, but then “Legend” would not be a fairy tale. I have the sneaking suspicion that to function as a fairy tale the best approach would be to strip away ninety percent of the dialogue and replace it with a stream of omniscient narration, as if we were being told the story by a single speaker, the way we’ve always absorbed fairy tales. Director Ridley Scott has made a valiant effort and a complete, unforgettable success on the visual level, arguably one of the best-looking films of the past fifty years. Perhaps some audiences will find the simplicity and shallowness of his characters to be congruent with fairy tales, but I was left feeling more distanced than I would have preferred.
Finished May 25, 2002
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