Kingdom of Heaven

[rm]

Of the recent batch of epics, Kingdom of Heaven comes closest to getting it right and manages in the process to show us why epics are so incredibly difficult to solve. The film also highlights some of Ridley Scott's little pet obsessions (apparently including wheat, children's toys and the burial of talismans), and is particularly interesting in that regard in the context of his other films.

There are two key problems with epics, both of which afflict Kingdom of Heaven. The the film is coherent enough for us to realize this is a genre problem as opposed to a script/director problem a la Alexander, Troy and to a lesser extent King Arthur (which wasn't actually sure it wanted to be an epic and suffered in an entirely different fashion and with a smaller budget than the other examples).

Problem 1: Epics tend to want to be about epics. Epics, like all stories, have to be about individual characters for us to care. Those characters can be places, if the places are deliberately made characters and it is the story of the place you are telling from the beginning to the end of the movie. Kingdom of Heaven sometimes thinks it is the story of Jerusalem, often to great effect, but this isn't actually what the movie is actually about it, it's not its emotional core -- and while one could easily argue it should have been -- ultimately some of the most poweful moments in the film are actually digressions from it.

Problem 2: Assuming we've gotten past problem one, the epic must be about a central figure who is the embodiment of the great struggle the film portrays. Unfortunately for much epic subject matter, these subjects are young men (this film, Alexander, Troy and also notable here -- Gangs of New York). Young men in films like this are Hot Guy of the Moment. And while Orlando Bloom has much more power and skill here than I would have expected, he jsut can't convincingly make the speeches that need to be made convincingly for an epic to succeed. Without that great booming timber of a voice, it just doesn't happen. I hate to be all "can no one other than Peter Jackson make an epic?" but look at the pre-battle speeches there, and then tell me why _no one_ _no one_ else seems to be able to cast their films to make that stuff work.

More general review stuff:

Liam Neeson is so great. I just always want to give him a hug.

The leper King of Jerusalem is the greatest thing I have ever seen (OMG, that was Ed Norton? I have to stop making fun of him, RIGHT NOW). I wanted the whole movie to be about him. I wanted to know his story, more about the childhood, the mask... everything about his moments in the film are just spectacular -- visually, performance-wise, the script. Utterly, utterly compelling. It also raises the question, that maybe the undiscovered approach to epics is the story of the boy next door -- by which I don't mean an Every Man, but the guy tangental to or preceeding the narrative who is so utterly critical to it -- the one who sets in motion or observes. I mean... what's Alexander's story through the eyes of Hephaistion -- not as some romance novel dreck, but as the war story epic it should be? What's it like to be nearly left behind, possibly carried along and to see your very significant place in an even larger tale? How do you remind yourself to breathe? Please, tell me about these men (and I have reason to suspect that if I ever make or write films from the nt-in-front-of-the-camera-side-of-things, it is this that will be my little thing I can't get away from in the stories I will feel compelled to tell).

Wow, Jeremy Irons, I haven't liked you in a long time.

Brendon Gleeson -- what was that little dance? You rock, man.

David Thewlis, I want to give you a hug too.

Martin Csozkas or however your name is spelled. The more over the top you are the better.

Hey, Dr. Bashir! You were really great. Who knew. Go you.

the cinematography -- OMG -- gorgeous gorgeous battle shots. Hello.... paging Oliver Stone, this is how you shoot a battle; note the lack of subtitles. There's also this great thing where shots go back and forth between clear and quickly cut and dusty and slow... and so the audience is shifted back and forth from the immediacy of the experience of the characters to the reminder that this is all stuff now in the distant memory of the world. One of the things that makes Ridley Scott films so great is how they say "this story is important because this story is trivial and ever happening".

Score -- good, but not the thing I wanted it to be.

the film is historically screwy, but at least manages to make the issues of religion murky and internally divided -- which is nice to see. However, in doing this, the film manages to have lots of bad guys, lots of good guys, almost no one who's right about pretty much anything, lots of people to root for and/or respect -- and while that's all lovely -- hi, it's an epic, and we need to feel the slaughter is so senseless that we root against that in and of itself (Black Hawk Down does this nicely), or we have to have actual bad guys to hate (Gladiator nails this). Here, we're just like "woah, fucked up."

I think in the wake of 9/11 we've become confused about how to tell the story of cities that have wounds; we believe, mistakenly, that the wound is the whole story, the only story. This film tries so hard not to fall into that mess, you can't help but notice it.

I know a lot of you guys don't like Gladiator, and I think the criticisms of the film as exceptionally made pulp are pretty valid, but that film does all sorts of stuff this film should have done and didn't. It gives us clear good guys and bad guys. It gives us a hero that has the physical and vocal weight to be a leader of men. And it makes us understand the emotional pain the hero is in a visceral way -- here all we get is a look at the source of the pain, after she's dead -- no insight in the relationship or her nature is provided, and the religious motivations attached to her death are at least 50% alien to anyone in the audience, if not more so. This is a grave mistep. I'm just not engaged with the emotional struggle of the film's central character.

Very well made film, certainly worth seeing, but I wanted more from it, and I think to have gone to any of the several places the film needed to go or could have gone to lay us on the floor would have been unthinkable in the face of subject matter and politics.

Comments

[sergeant3.livejournal.com]

Mind if I drop in and get a view of home every now and then?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Not at all. Feel free.

[sergeant3.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

I was quite pleased (http://www.thecreativeguy.com/index.php/weblog/comments/see_what_you_want_to_see/) with the film, but I did leave ready to see the uncut version -- due, I understand, on DVD -- which restores 80 minutes to the picture. Adding that much into the narrative will likely flesh out those things for which there wasn't enough time in the theatrical cut. I suspect we'll get quite a bit more on Baldwin IV and his sister, as there seems to be some space there for a secondary plotline.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Excellent informational tidbit, which answers teh question I was asked last night when discussing the film on the phone with someone, "So are you buying the DVD?"

[patashoqua.livejournal.com]

Is it true that Brendan Gleeson looked like an inflatable Christina Aguilera?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yes, there was a Hair Dye Issue. Or perhaps those were bloodstains. We're unsure.

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

Great review! My main problem with it is that even if I hadn't known in advance how much he cut out, I'd have still been able to tell that it was missing a lot. I really hate that, because in addition to feeling the loss of exposition and wanting more emotional information about the characters, I feel cheated. There's no way I was going to wait until the DVD came out; you just don't with a historical epic. And so I paid my $9 (and will again this afternoon when I see it with the slash crowd) for an incomplete film. And that sucks.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Do we actually know what the cut footage contains?

[splix.livejournal.com]

Great review. I am SO with you on the king. I adored him. I saw the film with my two sisters, and when the funeral scene came and his sister lifted his mask off, my little sister grasped my arm, and I saw tears in her eyes. If they develop his story in the DVD, I would be delighted.

FWIW, while that was Edward Norton's voice (and what a voice! Didn't its soft resonance give you chills?) I don't think that was his body - the actor under the mask was too lanky, WAY too thin.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Apparently it was Norton, although that was my gut instinct too... but he is actually a very lanky guy most of the time -- he's jsut gotten beefed up for a lot of the film roles we think of him in.

[splix.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's interesting then. Yeah, I guess I think of him in stuff like American History X and so on, where he's sort of brawny.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Remember how slight he is in Primal fear... i mean... much younger then too... but I've seen stuff regarding rehearsals and screentests that mention him, so I think it really was him.

[rufus.livejournal.com]

I <3 the King of Jerusalem. It certainly *sounded* like Edward Norton. And seemed to move like him. I'm very excited that there will be an extended dance remix DVD to fill in the holes.

Am in total agreement about the lack of voice -- Orlando was just not *loud* enough. (And there was a good deal of mumbling overall, I found -- lines being swallowed a good deal.)

Also, watching _Kingdom of Heaven_ and _King Arthur_ back to back led me to thinking about how Hollywood is commenting on the "culture war" in general and on Christianity on the march, in specific.

I haven't watched _Gladiator_ for a while, and I haven't seen _Alexander_ at all; need to remedy those things.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Also, watching _Kingdom of Heaven_ and _King Arthur_ back to back led me to thinking about how Hollywood is commenting on the "culture war" in general and on Christianity on the march, in specific.

Yup, and with a timidity that serves neither art nor statement.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

The most exasperating thing about Ridley Scott is the way in which he's making movies that brush lightly against issues that absolutely cut to the core of life in these times (sometimes to the point of prescience, as when we see a petulant emperor figure sweeping away the remnants of empire to make room for his playpen. What a different reception it might have got, had it come out about a year and a half later), the whole Jerusalem/religious tolerance thing being an obvious example. He's always been about the background environment, the glancing look, the allusive moment, the too-fascinating minor character (Gaff in Blade Runner, say), occasionally at the expense of his narrative. (That forest in Legend, for example; the movie, until Tim Curry comes along, feels like too much of "Ooo- pretty pictures!" Well, except the unicorns.) I never quite warnmed to this movie's main story- partially because of the whole bending over backwards to be fair, partly because of, well, Orlando Bloom. (I can't think of a character in that age range who's held an epic together fully since Lawrence of Arabia.

Weird with the score, too; there were cues from half a dozen other soundtracks (including Blade II in there. Did he simply fall in love with his temp tracks?

For me, the problem I had with Gladiator wasn't pulpiness, per se; I just felt that the film's overall structure was a bit too familiar in a Fall of the Roman Empire sort of way, and it was only in the small, peripheral moments (Commodus idly spinning his sword) that the movie fully breathed, and found its own life. If Ridley Scott can ever make his main characters as interesting as the peripheral figures, he'll be another Coppola.

[rm.livejournal.com]

All of which argues that Black Hawk Down is his best film because it _only_ contains minor characters.

[irish-rose25.livejournal.com]

I really don't have a leg to stand on when reviewing movies, compared to you and many other posters here, but...

Black Hawk Down was by far one of the best movies I've ever seen. Gripping in a rather horrifying way.

(Then again, I did watch it only two days after learning two of my friends were shipped to Iraq)