Starring: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleason and Liam Neeson
Director: Ridley Scott
Rated: M15+
THERE is no doubt some Hollywood saying about how even a great director cannot overcome a fundamentally flawed script.
And if I knew what it was, this would be the perfect introduction to Kingdom of Heaven.
Working uphill against leaden dialogue, too much of the wrong sort of historical detail and too many variants of Henry V’s Crispin’s Day speech, director Ridley Scott still manages to construct a beautiful, elegant and thought-provoking film.
Our hero, Balian (Orlando Bloom), begins the film as a lowly village blacksmith but soon meets the father he never knew, a nobleman, Sir Godfry (Liam Neeson), and is quickly elevated to knight crusader.
In the space of a couple hours, he travels to Jerusalem, befriends the king, impresses the knights, has a brief affair with the king’s sister, improves agricultural techniques and ultimately saves the people of Jerusalem, somewhat single-handedly, against a massive army of Saracens.
Visually, it is a beautiful and epic journey. Scott gives us a wonderfully dusty portrait of Jerusalem as a silken, Arabian oasis.
He handles the large-scale battle scenes with a craftman’s skill and guides his knights and damsels through a winning range of self-reflection, grief, wonder, victory and loss.
To my mind, Kingdom of Heaven is good entertainment, but …
I suspect that most reviewers, at this point in their studies of the film, will offer some variation on the idea that Orlando Bloom is no Russell Crowe; that he lacks the gravitas and girth required to fill a gladiator’s shoes.
But I will argue the problem isn’t Bloom.
His performance is short-changed by the screenwriter, William Monahan, who cannot seem to pare Balian’s melancholy search for faith and redemption to a single, charged moment, but instead dilutes it through several generic speeches meant to rally some troops and save others and then sprinkles in enough silly platitudes to wound any hero.
Moreover — and it may be more the fault of director and editor than screenwriter — the film wants to reduce chronological time to the service of events.
The result is a hurried sense of incompleteness, as if someone in the projector room keeps skipping ahead to the next part of the film.
But in spite of its flaws, Kingdom of Heaven succeeds marvellously as contemporary allegory.
The film’s balanced, if sometimes overly PC treatment of Muslims and Christians should provoke welcome discussions about our own time’s battles over parched earth in the Middle East.
You might start that conversation with this observation: The face and character of war would be greatly improved (ie reduced) if our own contemporary kings were forced by chivalric code to stand on the battlefield themselves.
