If you love the sheer, sensuous richness of color, texture and motion that defines movies at their most primal, Ridley Scott's the director for you. As early as "The Duellists" (1977), his first feature film after a long career making TV commercials, Scott seemed able to reach out into cinematic space to manually shade and shape heroic action, epic weather and fall of light.
"Kingdom of Heaven," his first effort in this vein since "Gladiator" (2000), focuses on the Crusades, Europe's religiously inspired pillaging of the Middle East (1100-1300), a period of historical excess that offers ample room for Scott's visual opulence.
"Kingdom of Heaven" starts on a cross-staked hill overlooking a gray, frosty landscape - it's France in 1184 - where a weasely priest takes a moment to cop a silver crucifix from a suicide's corpse, before ordering the sinner's head cut off. You can almost feel the winter air knife into your lungs, smell the cleric's musty black robes, touch the rough weave of the dead woman's shroud.
And when a line of mounted men wends its way toward that bleak promontory, you know in your bones that a story is on the way. This is Scott's cinematic evocation of "Once upon a time...," and it draws us, like wide-eyed children, into the magic of fiction.
Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), a legendary Crusader on his way back to Jerusalem, has come to claim his bastard - village blacksmith Balian (Orlando Bloom) - as legitimate son. Orlando's Balian, introducing the furrowed brow and intensely righteous stare that he will wear throughout the film, at first declines to be claimed. Then, widower, newly fathered son and priest-killer in swift succession, he suddenly finds himself at liberty to join dad on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, seeking a "new world at the end of the world."
A movie about the Crusades comes at a nervous moment in American history, what with our problematic invasion and occupation of Iraq, and widespread Muslim hatred of our imperialist, infidel ways. Add to geopolitical reality the fact that movies must recoup huge budgets by selling big overseas, and therefore must be palatable to a world of more than red or blue states. To further spice the complicated mix of making and selling films, consider that backers require a hot young hunk to sell tickets to the dominant demographic.
Sad to say, despite its indisputable visual splendor, "Kingdom of Heaven" fails to rise above all of these off-screen influences.
First off, as several reviewers have noted, the film is so embracing of almost everyone's character and motive that, despite monumentally bloody battles - and few surpass Scott in conveying the terrible beauty and horror of combat - it's difficult to do more than just watch, caught between rooting for largely admirable Christians and sympathetic Muslims.
And it's a bit jarring to have the principals announce that war is an accident in which they have been forced to participate. Especially when afterward, amid mountains of dead, it's hearty handclasps all around and bon voyage back to Europe.
By and large, Christian clergy take the worst beating in "Kingdom" (on the Muslim side, only a single fanatic disturbs Saladin's eminently civilized court). First there's the larcenous cleric who decapitates Balian's dead wife. Then, in Messina, port of embarkation for the Crusaders, priests hang about on streetcorners to promise passing knights that "to kill an infidel is not murder ... it is the pathway to heaven." When Jerusalem comes under Saladin's brutal siege, the city's highest-ranking churchman morphs into a cartoon of craven hypocrisy.
And it's the Knights Templar - that legendarily fanatic religious order, egged on by a noble who would be King of Jerusalem - who deliberately spoil the fragile peace forged by far-seeing Saladin (Syrian star Ghassan Massoud) and King Baldwin (an unbilled Edward Norton).
As Reynald, red-maned, often blood-drenched leader of the Templars, Brendan Gleeson suggests some berserker god of war, a witless instrument of chaos and atrocity. Marton Csokas plays Guy de Lusignan, Baldwin's ambitious brother-in-law, to the preening, sneering hilt. Precipitating slaughter as if it were an afternoon's amusement, Guy orders mad-hatter Reynald to "give me a war!"
"Kingdom" is at some pains to show how similar are the adversarial faiths, for good or ill, but the film's heroes - Godfrey, Balian, Saladin, Baldwin - are secular humanists to a man. They stand above the lunacy to which Scott's god-lovers are prone, adhering to the notion that a man should do practical good and that the example of that goodness will make others better. Every man a knight, his father teaches Balian, a motto that must inflame those who would fine-tune every man's rank and worth on earth, and in the kingdom of heaven.
During a major battle that takes up at least a half-hour toward the end of the film, masses of soldiers fight in such close quarters they can barely wield their weapons. Scott orchestrates a visceral rhythm of slow and fast motion, noise and silence, dance and drudgery. The camera rises slowly, to gaze down at the indistinguishable combatants, heaving like some primeval monster struggling to rise. God's view of humankind? Or a director's disinterested gaze, efficiently framing a handsome shot, symbolic enough to encourage critical comment.
"Kingdom of Heaven" suffers most because of the cipher at its center. In "Gladiator" Scott had a single-minded narcissist who passionately incarnated a larger-than-life character. As Maximus, Russell Crowe was so wholly and charismatically there that he authenticated the imaginary, computer-enhanced movie-world around him. In contrast, Orlando Bloom will always be an elf, a good-looking wisp, too slight and limited in expression to measure up to the kind of space, weight and masculine allure Scott's glamorous heroes project.
In Jerusalem, Balian is immediately upstaged by the physical authority of scarred Tiberias, the king's right-hand man (Jeremy Irons), a weary warrior ready to gravel out wisdom and affection to any son of Godfrey. King Baldwin himself - a slender figure gracefully swathed in embroidered linens, his leprosy-eaten face hidden behind a silver mask delicately sculpted into the noble lineaments of a beautiful young man - commands center stage with an ease Balian never manages. And Baldwin's sister Sibylla (gorgeous Eva Green, from Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers"), who's given to dressing up like a high-fashion sheik and dashing into Balian's courtyard mounted on an enormous stallion, looks as if she could have the wisp for dinner, and still be hungry.
Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" lost much of its force after its opening scenes, when Priest Vallon, Liam Neeson's mythic Irish streetfighter, went down, and the movie had to be carried on the narrow shoulders of his son, played by wimpy Leonardo diCaprio. So, too, in "Kingdom of Heaven": when Neeson disappears, a great fire goes out of the film. His "parfit, gentil" knight should have been the hero to stand up to Massoud's darkly beautiful Saladin. Massoud's intensity, his silences, his lethal courtesy make him the center of every scene. Like Neeson, he is large and the camera loves him. In contrast, wispy Bloom wilts and recedes.
"Kingdom of Heaven" is second-rate Scott, shamelessly recycling imagery and plot turns from "Gladiator," and its star isn't up to the director's world-spanning vision. Without a credible hero as fulcrum, the movie machine stalls and all the visual beauty and dramatic power of vast armies and heroic postures becomes pointless. But "Kingdom of Heaven" sins most by reflecting too much of today's world, in which the worst are full of passionate intensity and the best lack all conviction.
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