by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
watched the film Kingdom of Heaven, officially dated 2005 (the year it was officially released), though
apparently it took quite a long time to make, including 15 months on the
editing alone. We were watching it on a full-screen DVD of the original
144-minute theatrical release, which director Ridley Scott disowned; later
there was a 194-minute “director’s cut” which got a brief theatrical release in
road-show format (which meant that some of those extra minutes were taken up by
a pre-film overture, an entr’acte for an intermission, and exit music, so there
were only about 45 minutes of added footage and much of that was taken up with
a subplot involving the son of one of the leading characters). The film begins with
title cards explaining, “France, 1184. It is almost 100 years since Christian
armies from Europe seized Jerusalem. Europe suffers in the grip of repression
and poverty. Peasant and lord alike flee to the Holy Land in search of fortune
or salvation. One Knight returns home in search of his son.” The knight who’s
searching for his son is Godfrey de Ibelin (Liam Neeson, who delivers by far
the most authoritative performance in the movie but regrettably is killed only
half an hour in), and the son he’s searching for is Balian (Orlando Bloom, who
got the script while he was wrapping up his role as Paris in Troy; he wasn’t keen to do another historical epic as
his next film but took the role for the chance to work with Ridley Scott), the
hero of this tale to the extent it has one.
Godfrey is riding off to join the
Second Crusade — the one that took place about a century after the first one,
which established the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem in the middle of the
otherwise Muslim Middle East, to defend said kingdom against Muslim armies led
by Saladin (Ghassan Massoud), more correctly known as Salah al-Din and a hero
among Arabs then and now for his successful reconquest of Jerusalem even though
he wasn’t himself an Arab, but a Kurd. Godfrey wants Balian to join him, but
Balian is working as a blacksmith — because of the impending crusade he’s doing
a land-office business making swords for the would-be warriors — and he’s also
upset because his wife has just committed suicide following the death of their
child. But when the local priest comes by and starts prattling about how Mrs.
Balian consigned herself to hell by killing himself, Balian gets super-upset
and shoves the obnoxious priest into his forging fire, thereby killing him and
giving him a need to get out of town quickly. So he joins the Crusade, not only
as an escape but also in hopes that if he fights for the Christians against the
infidels in the Holy Land God will forgive him for his murder of the priest.
Godfrey teaches Balian how to handle a broadsword (and I give Scott points for
showing a sword technique that relies mostly on brute strength and force
instead of the fencing exhibitions we got in 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s movies
set in this era — though I suspect the real innovator here was Orson Welles in
his film Chimes at Midnight, whose depiction of medieval war was probably closer to the sheer
random brutality of the real thing than those in most movies) and how to fight
in a battle, but then gets ambushed and killed.
Bailan goes to the Holy Land and
meets King Baldwin IV (Edward Norton, who at his own request was unbilled in
the original theatrical prints but his credit was added for the DVD and Blu-Ray
releases), who’s wearing an iron mask and a hooded cape to conceal the fact
that he has leprosy. At one point Baldwin challenges Balian to a game of chess,
and (referencing Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal) I joked, “A knight plays chess with a masked,
hooded figure — where have we seen that before?” Balian also meets Queen Sybilla (Eva Green), who’s Baldwin’s sister rather than his wife, but who was formerly the
lover of Balian’s father Godfrey and later becomes the lover of Balian himself.
(Ironically we were watching this the same day I’d read a “Miss Manners” column
in the Los Angeles Times featuring
a letter by a woman who’d begun a sexual relationship with her late husband’s
son by another woman and defended it by saying they were, after all, not
biological kin and she hadn’t been involved in raising him — but her own kids
from the same father had cut themselves off from contact with her and Miss
Manners agreed with them, calling her new relationship “icky.”) The big problem
with Kingdom of Heaven is it’s
just slow-moving and dull; writer William Monahan’s script alternates between
ponderous exposition scenes and grotesquely gory battles. Monahan takes a few
feints at some Grand Statements about religion, many of them through the
character of the Patriarch of Jerusalem (David Thewlis) and his willingness to
proclaim as “God’s will” whatever the Crusaders want to do at any given moment
— notably the scene in which the principal villains of the piece, Guy de
Lusignan (Marton Czokas) and Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson), order the
Crusader army to attack a peaceful, unarmed caravan of Arab traders and
massacre it.
Guy wants to replace Baldwin IV as king of Jerusalem as soon as
Baldwin croaks from leprosy, and to that end he breaks the modus vivendi between Christians, Muslims and Jews that Baldwin
had established. This provokes Saladin to attack and a war in which, bereft of
their allies the Knights Templar of Malta, also known as the Hospitallers (the
origin of the words “hospitality,” “hospital” and “hospice”) and headed (in
this film, anyway) by a character just called “Hospitaller” and played by David
Thewlis, the Christian armies are slaughtered by Saladin’s forces. First
Saladin takes out the Knights of Malta and then, having finished them off, lays
siege to Jerusalem — and Balian finds himself commanding the defense of the
city until the Muslims’ seemingly invincible weapons, burning projectiles fired
from catapults as well as flaming arrows from bows, destroy much of the city
and the Muslims’ siege towers finally breach its walls. Saladin offers all the
Christians in Jerusalem safe passage to ships that can take them to Europe (in
historical fact, at least according to an imdb.comc contributor, Saladin only
gave safe passage to those who could afford the fees he charged; the ones who
couldn’t were sold into slavery) and, in an ending that remarkably anticipates
the end of Mockingjay, the
final story in the Hunger Games cycle, by about a decade, Balian and Sybilla end up together in his old
blacksmith’s shop in France literally watching their garden grow as the Crusades continue without them — in a
cameo appearance Richard the Lion-Hearted (Iain Glen) shows up hoping to
recruit Bailan to rejoin the Crusades, and Balian keeps repeating that he’s
just a blacksmith but gives Richard the same directions Godfrey had given him
(“You keep going past where the people speak Italian until you hear people
speak something else”) at the start of the film. For the most part Kingdom
of Heaven is surprisingly dull — so
much so that I can’t imagine a version of this film that’s 50 minutes longer (though apparently much of the extra running time
is taken up with a plot involving Sybilla’s son, who doesn’t exist in the
version we saw) — and it’s the sort of maddening film whose ending is beautiful
and moving enough one wishes it had a better, worthier preface leading up to
it.
As much as intellectual cinéastes love to hate Cecil B. DeMille, his 1935 film The Crusades remains the best movie ever made about them (just
as his 1920 film The Affairs of Anatol was far better than Stanley Kubrick’s semi-remake, Eyes Wide Shut), stepping right up to and tackling the themes of
ecumenism this film tiptoed around — when Loretta Young tells the assembled
multitudes on both sides of the religious divide that they’re both worshiping
the Supreme Being and “what does it matter if we call him Allah or God,” that
hammers home the silliness of the whole conflict far better than anything Scott
and Monahan could come up with in this lumbering behemoth of a film. It doesn’t
help that Orlando Bloom, a fine actor in the right sort of role, really isn’t
cut out to be an action hero (even though he worked out and bulked up 20 pounds
to play Balian), but then the only actor in this film who really makes an
impression is Liam Neeson and he’s killed way too early. I also suspect Kingdom of Heaven has some Zeitgeist issues; the project was kicked off just a couple
of years after the 9/11 attacks, which were not only horrific in themselves but
renewed a lot of people’s conviction that there was an existential war between
Christianity and Islam and 9/11 was just the latest Muslim attack in it. The
film was produced with the personal assistance of a Muslim monarch, King
Mohamed VI of Morocco, who apparently is a personal friend of Ridley Scott and
provided full cooperation of the Moroccan government in finding him locations
and extras. But articles attacking the film started appearing on Muslim Web
sites, saying it was going to be yet another Western movie making the
Christians the good guys and the Muslims the bad guys, and Mohamed VI got
worried enough about Ridley Scott’s safety he ordered a detachment of the
palace’s own bodyguards to protect him. As it stands, Kingdom of Heaven is perched uneasily between an attempt to present
the story ecumenically and be fair to both Christians and Muslims, and a post-9/11
call to the barricades for Christians to defend themselves in the worldwide
battle with those cunning, dastardly, cowardly Muslim — with an ending that,
like the one in the Hunger Games cycle that’s almost a direct copy of it, sends the message that
activists of all sorts are unscrupulous
bastards and the best thing you can do for yourselves and other people is to
ignore all movements claiming to be
changing the world and just live your lives and grow your gardens.
