we watched this last night. i went in expecting to dislike it–the previews and reviews mostly made it seem like a whitewashing of the crusades and i thought its politics would offend me. to my surprise i quite liked it. in a way this is scott’s “anti-gladiator”. that film was far more stirring cinematically and narratively–i enjoyed it tremendously in the theater–and it wasn’t until i thought about it later that i realized that i found its “strength and honor” politics quite repellent. “kingdom of heaven” on the other hand doesn’t provide the visceral jolts or narrative releases that “gladiator” does–there’s no great revenge or other motivational plot and the action sequences are often confusing (as in “blackhawk down” i had trouble keeping track of people during the fighting)–but it is a more thoughtful film.
(some spoilers ahead)
as you may have read in the reviews, the film takes place during a lull in fighting between two crusades when jerusalem is ruled by a tolerant christian king who has established a tenuous piece with the tolerant muslim king (saladin). a number of the reviewers find the film’s political and religious statements, as voiced by the major characters, to be either anachronistic or cynical or both. here, for example, is dargis in the n.y times:
Given the presumed lofty price tag of the film, its global reach and the current state of world affairs, with warriors of different faiths and ideologies battling one another in the name of God and terrorism, this vision of the Crusades is not that surprising. Paint a majority religion with too damning a brush and you just may lose out on a nice chunk of the international movie market.
and lane in the new yorker:
he and his screenwriter, William Monahan, take desperate care not to offend, alighting on a lull between the Second and Third Crusades when Christians and Muslims were in chivalrous equipoise, and loading the saner characters with just enough historical prescience to deconstruct their own folly. “I thought we were fighting for God. Then I realized we were fighting for wealth and land,†a rueful Tiberias says. Even more self-chastening is the dying Godfrey, who advises his son to become “not what you were born but what you have it in yourself to be.†Having barely studied the period, I hadn’t realized that twelfth-century nobles favored the rhetoric of a miked-up Tony Robbins.
it seems to me that what is partly happening in these kinds of reviews is the result of a thwarting of a critical desire to mock the more offensive film that they perhaps expected but did not get. what would they like instead? that the film in fact offend? and as for the rhetorical anachronisms: even if the film is in fact historically grounded it seems clear that it is very much an intervention into contemporary middle-east geopolitics. it seems to me to miss the point to ask if this is how things really were in the 12th century–what the film may be doing instead is using the past to strategically “mis-remember” the present (if that makes any sense). scott interjects ambivalence into a genre premised on clear-cut conflicts between moral opposites–which also works as a good description of contemporary american foreign policy. his hero is neither an imposing all-powerful presence, like maximus in “gladiator”, and nor does he triumph in the conventional sense (the film ends with a negotiated surrender rather than either victory or noble defeat). this may undercut the film’s own other generic summer-blockbuster imperatives but i’m willing to credit scott (not really one of my favorite directors) with an attempt to do something thoughtful and different in the summer-blockbuster marketplace. and i find it somewhat strange that critics who usually complain about mindless action or aestheticised violence aren’t willing to do the same.
this is not to say that i don’t find anything troubling about the film’s politics as extrapolated into the contemporary middle-east. the conflict over jerusalem in the film is described as between people who did not cause the original offense (the besieged christians) and people who were not alive to be offended (saladin’s army), and a caption at the end suggests that this is true in the region a thousand years later. well, not really. palestine is not about a continuation of the crusades, but about something far more recent–the dispossession of a people, rather than some hoary, historical (pre)occupation.
so, anyone else (planning to) see it?
Well, you’ve made me curious intellectually, but I’m also afraid your post implies the film to be more bland and measured than I might have imagined.
Arnab, you make a fascinating argument about how to read the film’s “history.” And you almost tease out of the film’s knotty politics a clean clear idea (even an ideal)….but your nearly-last lines, about the film’s last (postscript) lines, re-entangles the film’s quasi-historical consciousness (or quasi-consciousness).
In short, I want to see the film as carefully exploitative of genre potential for oblique political commentary. And I like the idea that the film’s anachronisms are part of a “plot” to intervene in contemporary geopolitical sensibilities…
…but the film seems to crib liberally from any (every) hoary generic cliche it can imagine, to cobble together bits and pieces from any number of mismatched styles and distant eras. Those last sentences, the script that rolls up at film’s end situating what’s just happened in the film, noting that for another hundred years the battle over Jerusalem raged with Richard the L.-H., and then glossing a thousand years (!) to note that the battle still rages… this is indicative of a desire to be “historical” rather than historically-minded, to oblige (rather than operate on) our views of the “past” as well as our views of the “present” as if there is no difference between them, or as if differences are easily elided in narrative (or in the space of a sentence, or the casting of a screen-hero whose previous screen appearances were in quasi-historical settings in Middle Earth and the Caribbean, or in a meeting between good strong men even if they be Christian and Muslim). We see (as my companion noted, pedantically yet charmingly) French troops carrying English long-bows in the 12th century, we hear Bach alongside contemporaneous European music and recent “Middle-Eastern” chorales (and, I’d note, we also hear snippets from Graeme Revell’s soundtrack for “The Crow,” if you can believe it!), we watch sexy Queen Sibylla and queeny archvillain Guy (Guy! just one vowel coyly, Frenchily mispronounced) enact wildly-archaic characterizations that DeMille’s audience would have found familiar.
What I’m getting at, beyond that I didn’t like it, is that the film is an all-too-familiar hodgepodge of styles, plot devices, and “historical” artifacts/artifice. Its use of current geopolitics is not a new development in the genre. That usage is entirely in keeping with the generic recipe for these kinds of films. (Add all–almost any–ingredients, and stir; season liberally this season, although in prior seasons we may have seasoned conservatively.) The Near-East Historical film is always, has always been an omnivorous beast, willing/able to incorporate whatever might lather up the audience.
In fact, just like the old camel-epics, one might be able to enjoy this precisely as a disastrous collision of styles and histories. Brendan Gleeson literally prancing as he prepares to do evil, David Thewlis always smirking, Jeremy Irons positively fizzy in this version of his fatigued Englishman (maybe, in 12th-c Jerusalem, he wasn’t as worn out as he would be in 20th-c England and America). Shots stolen liberally from Gilliam’s “Time Bandits,” Python’s “Life of Brian,” “Cleopatra,” and any number of Victor Mature pictures. 19th-century theology about doctrine tacked onto righteous dialogue by right-minded 12th-century Knights. The Henry V speech, rousing the troops. In fact, do that twice. I like how it works. In fact, anything that works–that joke about getting to Jerusalem through Italy–do ’em twice, too.
It only seems to challenge genre if you don’t pay attention to this genre’s conventions. It was, in fact, surprising to me how thoroughly old-fashioned, in the worst sense, the film was…. [And, in fact, there might be something worth saying about how Western–or maybe just American–views of the “Middle East” are always this convolutedly quasi-historical, that what we are seeing is not so much a generic symptom but a cross-cultural symptom. But I don’t know enough to make any sense of that sweeping assertion.]
mike you’re right about the film’s structure and how it is a relentless genre-pastiche. but i wasn’t suggesting that it was not generic in those ways. don’t you think that it is notable that despite enacting all the familiar elements of its genre it departs from it in its choosing the moment of negotiation rather than victory or glorious defeat as its climax. it is not its overlaying of contemporary geopolitics that is notable, it is the attitude it takes to them, and the choices this dictates about its setting, that may be: the more successful genre film may have been a richard the lionheart film. this may be the only sense in which it is thoughtful. still, i am doubtless being overly generous to the film.
as for things like 12 century french soldiers carrying english longbows–does anybody really give a fuck?
Not too generous–I’m just playing devil’s advocate. I liked your reading, and you’re right about its counter-generic ending.
I’m not sure that its attitude toward contemporary geopolitics is that challenging, though… it seems to want to erase all cultural differences in a bland liberal humanist tolerance. And–where the hell were the Jews?
Longbows, yeah, I’m with you. But it bugged the guy I saw it with; he’s a theologian, so he was really just picking one solid detail to deride, when the film was so ripe with confusions about the nature and history of the religions it depicted that it boggled any attempt at critique.