The Last Temptation of Balian: Review of Kingdom of Heaven.
On Thursday, 21 July, I managed to see Kingdom of Heaven, the epic English-German-Spanish movie production of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf's ("Salah al-Din Yusuf's," or Saladin's) conquest of Jerusalem from Western and Northern European Crusaders on Friday, 2 October 1187, directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down) with a screenplay by William Monahan; this is the first screenplay of Monahan's that has been produced. I saw the last showing of Kingdom of Heaven on the last night of its run at a local dollar show (technically, the local dollar-fifty show), on the theory that it's almost always better to see an epic movie on a big screen, even if it's only three or four king-sized bed sheets tacked to a wall; the screen might've been almost that big.
So, what can you say about historical movie lollapaloozas? They're big; yep. They're long; gotcha. (Kingdom of Heaven clocks in at nearly two-and-a-half hours -- the minimum running time for any movie epic worthy of the name.) Lots of extras in funny-looking, old-timey clothes; check. (Although, for the last five years at least, many of those extras are likely to be CGI'ed bodies rather than actual people: no pesky unions to deal with; no gripes about the caterers or portable toilets to politely endure. "Hey, J.B., why can't we just CGI everybody?!") Stiff, stilted dialogue; right. At least a couple of big, wall-banging, epic-type action set pieces; uh, yeah, okay, if we must -- but the insurance premiums are murder. Adherence to any semblance of historicity? Wellllll.... not so much. 'Sides, most American audiences freakin' hate history, anyway.
The sort-of good news to anybody who, like me, happens to care about how badly a movie mangles its history: Kingdom of Heaven does far less violence to history than Scott's absurd (and absurdly overrated) sword n' sandals epic Gladiator did; Kingdom of Heaven actually uses the names of more actual, historical personages than Gladiator did, even if the characters going by said monikers bear little or no resemblance to said personages. The bad news is, the trimming and "smoothing down" of the historical accounts performed by Kingdom of Heaven makes the history not merely more simplified, but more boring as well.
The latter tends to be a failure of all-too-many movie epics, which is probably a big reason why they finally went out of fashion, for all of Hollywood's fulminations against that dratted idiot box, television.
Onward, if you dare, to the SPOILER ZONE....
Kingdom of Heaven opens somewhere in France, in 1183 (if memory serves), where a young woman is being buried; the priest (Michael Sheen) pilfers the small cross of gold she wears around her neck and instructs the gravedigger to chop off her head, as she is a suicide, and thus unworthy of a Christian burial. While many parts of western Europe, at least, maintained a horror of suicides at least until the end of the 19th century -- England in particular had a deep revulsion for suicide, as it was apparently the only European country to have a law (a common law, but a law nonetheless) against even attempting suicide, and the ritual desecration of a suicide's corpse (in England this typically amounted to burying a suicide "under the high road, preferably at a busy crossroads...pinned to the ground by driving a wooden stake through the chest;" Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture; translated by Lydia G. Cochrane [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1999; p. 36]) was not fully struck from the books until 1880, and was the very last European nation to decriminalize suicide, which it finally did on 21 March 1961 -- the desecration of a suicide's corpse tended to be more flamboyant in the various French kingdoms of the Middle Ages than in England: "an ordinance of the municipal government of Lille in the thirteenth century," for example, stipulated that "a female suicide’s body is to be burned" (Minois, pps. 34-5), with more grisly treatment being accorded to male suicides.
The woman proves to be the wife of an apparently literate (he has a motto inscribed on one of the beams of his shop: "What man is a man if he does not make the world better?") blacksmith named Balian (Orlando Bloom), who has been ostracized by his village, apparently because his wife killed herself after the death of their child. (This ostracization of a suicide's next of kin seems to be more or less accurate; in England, for example, the suicide's relatives were obliged to watch the desecration of his or her corpse.) Balian soon is faced with a party of a dozen or so men -- Crusaders returning to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, led by Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), Ibelin being a feudal holding in the Kingdom of Jerusalem that bordered the Mediterranean Sea and whose castle lay roughly 50 miles west of the city of Jerusalem -- whose ostensible mission is to get their horses shod, providing Balian with something of a windfall; however, Godfrey chose to avail himself of Balian's services for a somewhat more personal reason, as Balian is the bastard son that he never knew as well as being his last surviving kin and heir. Godfrey offers Balian a place in his party and a claim on his goods and chattels, and talks up the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a place where a man can make it on his own merits, not on the accident of his birth; but Balian, briefly exhibiting a kind of post-modern surly adolescent resentment towards his absentee sire, spurns his offer. When the skeevy priest shows up after the party has ridden off to attempt to convince him to leave the village, as no one wants him there, allowing Balian to spot his dead wife's cross hanging around his own neck, Balian murders him, and in the struggle sets fire to his own shop. With his final ties to the village gone up in smoke, Balian rides hard to catch up with Godfrey's party.
Balian is given cursory weapons instruction by Godfrey and a strapping Nordic giant named Odo (Jouko Ahola), but soon a sheriff's party accosts the Crusaders and demands custody of Balian for having murdered a priest. Balian admits to the truthfulness of the charge and offers to go with them, but Godfrey refuses, asserting his right as a member of the nobility to take Balian under his protection -- or, at least, not to have to relinquish him to someone of lower rank. (This kinda-sorta kicks merry hell out of his earlier malarkey about Jerusalem being simply splenderific because you didn't have to bow and scrape before every inbred pinhead with a title, doesn't it?) The party appears to go away quietly, but then ambushes the heavily-armed Crusaders, and while Godfrey, his friend of the Order of the Hospital of St. John (David Thewlis; the character is never named, simply referred to as "Hospitaler," British spelling "Hospitaller"), Odo, a knight of Saracen origins named Firuz (Eriq Ebouaney; he played the title character in the 2000 Lumumba), as well as the rest of the party all fight on Balian's behalf, the losses are heavy: Odo and Firuz are killed, and Godfrey himself takes a wound that eventually proves fatal. Balian is left in a position rather akin to that of Matt Damon's character in Saving Private Ryan, and the unlawful battle leaches all traces of adolescent-minded rebelliousness from him. Godfrey doesn't survive long enough to return to Jerusalem, although he does manage to administer a highly modified knighthood ceremony to Balian before breathing his last. He also gives Balian his signet ring and sword, that his friends and followers might know him.
Balian embarks for Jerusalem from the Sicilian port of Messina, but a heavy Mediterranean gale shipwrecks him; miraculously, he wakes up on a deserted shore, discovers that only a single horse also survived the wreck, is forced to do battle with a mounted and gloriously caparisoned Saracen (though whether Arab, Turk, Kurd, Egyptian, or Persian is left unsaid), whom he manages to slay, and takes captive the more plainly garbed man (Nasser Memarzia; Millions) whom he takes to be his slain opponent's retainer, but whom all but the most naïve of moviegoers will recognize to be a great and puissant lord in his own right. Balian's courteous and considerate treatment of his captive -- and his granting of his freedom (saying, as he does so, that he was a slave once, and thus will never own any slaves himself) and bequeathing him the shipwrecked horse that was the cause of the quarrel -- will serve him in good stead later.
Wandering around in the city of Jerusalem, Balian is soon spotted by some of Godfrey's retainers, who recognize their lord's sword; they quiz him to verify that he is not merely a thief, and take him to the Marshal of Jerusalem, Tiberias (Jeremy Irons). Balian's identity as Godfrey's heir is accepted, and he is granted custody of Godfrey's smallholding, and the rare privilege of a brief audience with Jerusalem's young and leprous king, Baldwin IV (Edward Norton), who is covered head to toe and whose features are concealed by an emotionless mask, apparently of silver. Balian also discovers that the Hospitaller preceded him to Jerusalem, and is talking with him when he incurs the spite of Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas: Broken English, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, xXx, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; "Guy" is pronounced in the French manner, rhyming with "ghee"), the husband of King Baldwin's sister, Sibylla (Eva Green) and heir apparent to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Balian discovers his father's land to be in a state of disrepair, and soon has his retainers and serfs digging a well. (Why they would let a desert fiefdom remain without water, even in the absence of their lord, is a point that is never addressed.) Somewhere in all of this, Guy's young and spirited wife, Sibylla -- and Baldwin's elder sister -- notices Balian with favor and contrives excuses for their paths to cross.
Tiberias is a rarity among the "Franks" (as the inhabitants of the Middle East thought of the Crusaders, regardless of their countries of origin; the word used was Franj) in that he is not interested in bloodletting and rapine for the glory of the Christian God or for personal aggrandizement -- or both, as seems to be the case of the Knights Templar, certainly as exemplified by Reynald de Châtillon (Brendan Gleeson, chewing the scenery in full-on Saturday matinee villain mode) and the conniving Guy de Lusignan; while Tiberias remains a trusted councilor and de facto regent to Baldwin, Baldwin is weak, and there are many who would dearly love to push back against "the infidel," no matter that their chief general, Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) is said to have 200,000 troops ready to besiege the city of Jerusalem itself. In the meantime, Balian and Sibylla have a furtive assignation that seems to affect the princess far more than it does Balian.
Reynald and his Templars slaughter neighboring Muslim villagers and caravans; Reynald even manages to capture and do horrible, off-screen things to Saladin's sister (Giannina Facio, who must be a favorite of Ridley Scott, given the fact that she has appeared in his five most recent movies, including KoH), up to and including taking her life, which in turn makes Saladin all the more avid to drag down the walls of Jerusalem. Reynald is captured and imprisoned by Baldwin's troops, as well as publicly humiliated by Baldwin, but this does nothing to break his power, as Balian is nearly slain in an attack on his demesne, instigated by Guy and Reynald. Though the ailing Baldwin attempts, with the aid of Tiberias, to convince Balian to marry his sister (when Balian asks what of her current husband, Guy de Lusignan, Tiberias replies that Guy would be "disposed of"), Balian declines, saying that he'd not be the cause of Guy's downfall and presumed death, no matter their personal animosity for each other. Tiberias is frankly disgusted by this show of nobility, though Baldwin takes it with a bit more equanimity and respect. Baldwin soon expires, and Guy is crowned King of Jerusalem. As king, Guy sets a much more belligerent policy towards his "infidel" neighbors, and sets Reynald free. Guy and Reynald soon sally forth on an ill-advised expedition against Saladin but, because they'd not troubled to secure an adequate water supply, are soon dangerously weakened by thirst and heatstroke, and prove to be easy pickings for Saladin's forces. Guy and Reynald are captured and brought before Saladin, but when Guy refuses Saladin's offer of water, Reynald snatches it from his hands, greedily guzzling it, only to find that Saladin's courtesy was not extended to the man who slew (and apparently worse...) his sister. Reynald is summarily dispatched, and Guy's manly fortitude wilts.
This leads up to Saladin's siege of Jerusalem and Balian's valiant defense of same; he makes it painfully plain that he's not defending it for the sake of the lords, the Cross, or even for the queen, his erstwhile love Sibylla, but for the common people. Tiberias decamps with all of his men, having had his fill of lost causes; Balian knights every man and boy able to wield a weapon and manages to fight Saladin's forces to a draw. Balian negotiates a truce whereby everybody is permitted to leave Jerusalem with their lives and dignity intact. Balian returns to his French smithy -- the frame of which is, incredibly, still standing, along with that vow etched into the crossbeam -- accompanied by a chastened and demure Sibylla, who has disavowed all her former worldly titles and pomp. Balian is soon sought out by another party of Crusaders bound to "rescue" Jerusalem, but Balian begs off, insisting that he's only a blacksmith. Told by one of them that he's the king of England -- and he is, being Richard Coeur de Lion (Iain Glen, who also played Capt. John Hanning Speke in the muddled and dull movie of Richard Francis Burton and Speke's expedition to find the source of the Nile, Mountains of the Moon) -- Balian again denies any connection with Jerusalem. Richard's small party rides off, to what would come to be known as the Third Crusade (1189-92).
So: is Kingdom of Heaven a good movie, or not?
Well, the answer to that depends on how interested you are in the time and place it depicts, or in huge battle sequences, or even in Ridley Scott-directed movies in general. If any of these particulars appeal to you, then yes, you should see Kingdom of Heaven at least once. Otherwise....
First, the good points: Kingdom of Heaven looks great; but then, I haven't seen a movie directed by Ridley Scott that didn't look great. He cares enough to hire costumers, set designers, special effects technicians, make-up artists, etc., who will do their utmost to realize and enhance his vision.
The siege of Jerusalem is a wowser (even if I'm not entirely convinced of the historical accuracy of the flaming and exploding projectiles hurled at the city by Saladin's trebuchets), and easily the best of the battle sequences in Kingdom of Heaven; the scene where Balian manages to engineer the toppling of several of Saladin's siege towers at once is in and of itself nearly worth the price of admission.
The stand-out scene for me, however, was when Reynald was brought before Baldwin a captive, and Baldwin took off his glove -- exposing his leprous flesh for the first time -- and demanded that Reynald give him "the kiss of peace." Reynald, who is played as being at least half-crazed by Brendan Gleeson, proceeds to slobber all over Baldwin's hand as if he was trying to vacuum the ring off his finger -- and maybe one or two fingers along with it. Outraged and revolted (hey, guys, just how low do you have to go to turn a leper's stomach...?), Baldwin proceeds to strike Reynald repeatedly with his scepter, nearly collapsing with the effort. The whole thing comes off as foreplay from a particularly unsavory subgenre of Klingon porn, and is the only time that Kingdom of Heaven crackled with energy, surprise, otherworldliness: a sense that damn near anything could happen. But then it slipped back into earnest respectability.
There's also a Natacha Atlas song over the end credits: not her best, but worth a listen.
That said, I remain unconvinced that Scott's alternating between slow and fast motion in his action sequences works, unless the intent is to distance the audience from the action (as the bird's-eye view scenes are clearly intended to do; one in particular pulls so far back that the writhing, struggling bodies are reduced to vague blobs, like bacteria or paramecia on a microscopic slide); I also disliked this effect in Gladiator. If Scott is attempting to show how combat can distort one's time sense, he'd do well to take a look at some of Oliver Stone's movies, particularly Born on the Fourth of July, which boasts some of the most harrowing, visceral "you are there" staged combat footage I've ever seen; it makes the much-ballyhooed Normandy landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan look like puppet theatre. In any case, Scott has done nothing to change my opinion that slow motion and accelerated motion effects should be sparingly used, if at all. On the whole, the battle sequences have less tension than those of, say, Spartacus -- or even parts of Troy.
I also dislike using CGI for arterial sprays and other battle effects: the hand-to-hand combat sequences in Kingdom of Heaven pale in comparison to those in John Boorman's condensed Arthurian epic Excalibur (which was one of Liam Neeson's first movie roles: he played Sir Gawain).
On a related note, I was disappointed when Sibylla, at her brother Baldwin's funeral, pulls off the mask concealing his ravaged face, reacts with shock and dismay, and the camera lovingly showed us his face. For me, Eva Green's reaction was enough; yes, that was a swell make-up job (or was it simply a cast head? I didn't detect any breathing, so I don't know if Edward Norton had to spend umpteen hours in the make-up chair for this shot or if they were able to just make a fake head), but it was too much: it robbed the character of the dignity that Norton had worked so diligently to cloak him in. It was almost as though Scott or his producers (of which he was one) didn't trust the audience to know what leprosy could do to a person; as though they felt that the shot of Baldwin's ungloved hand wouldn't be enough for most moviegoers, that they would want to see more. It's always better to leave an audience wanting more than to gorge them with too damn much, and of all the gross make-up effects in Kingdom of Heaven, this one was simply too damn much.
Kingdom of Heaven at times looks as though footage from an especially upscale advertising campaign -- perhaps for a perfume -- was intercut into it; I got this same feeling in parts of Gladiator as well. While I realize that Ridley Scott got his start directing commercials, he would do well to not hearken back to his salad days quite so enthusiastically in his mainstream pictures.
I could weep with frustration at the waste of some of the acting talent: while Brendan Gleeson is a big, imposing fellow (Braveheart, Gangs of New York, Troy), he can act (The Butcher Boy, I Went Down, The General, The Tailor of Panama); and anyone who was hoping for a meatier role for Eva Green after catching her in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is sure to walk out of Kingdom of Heaven disappointed. Yes, Eva Green looks great in the clothes they've picked out for her (and, as anyone who's seen The Dreamers can attest, she looks great out of them too; ba-da-bom); but here she's saddled with a character who becomes less interesting the more virtue she acquires. Towards the end, during the siege, she gives herself a delousing-type haircut to disguise herself that leaves her looking like a medieval, punk rockish Jean Seberg or Mia Farrow; and you don't have to be a militant feminist or a "woman with a 'Y'" (so-called because such women heartily disavow anything to do with men; hence they spell "woman" as "womyn") to see her renunciation of all of her titles and holdings (it's mentioned in passing that she's not just the queen of a fallen kingdom, she also has other lands in the Middle East) and her meek subservience to Balian as extraordinarily regressive, and "romantic" only to someone with the sensibilities of a Robert Bly. The not-so-subtle message here is, if a woman isn't willing to hide behind a man and stay in the kitchen or on the farm, there's no telling what might happen to her. (Of course, with rotters like Reynald or Guy roaming around, there's no telling what might happen to her even if she does "mind her place.")
Come to that, Sibylla's attraction to Balian is unconvincing; to put it kindly, Orlando Bloom and Eva Green don't show much on-screen chemistry, and one can't imagine a woman as spirited as Sibylla is first presented as falling deeply in love with such a cold fish as Balian. Yes, Balian is still meant to be suffering greatly from the loss of, in short order, his child, his wife, and the father that he never knew; but he's also made it abundantly clear that he's come to Jerusalem for forgiveness for his sins, to attempt to regain connection with his deity, and, as such, one is at least mildly incredulous that Sibylla managed to lure him into the sack at all. Bloom may well have been perfectly cast as a mostly stoic elfin warrior in The Lord of the Rings; he sure doesn't give any indication that much of anything moves him here, for all his self-professed desire for expiation and to do good works. If Kingdom of Heaven is laudable because it doesn't present its Muslim characters as rabid, death-crazed fanatics, it still shows traces of the old "Orientalist" mentality that drove the likes of Edward Said to distraction: namely, the tenants of Godfrey and Balian's land are too stupid or too lazy to think of digging a well until Balian shows up and issues the needful metaphorical kicks to their backsides. (This plays in to Godfrey's Objectivist spiel to Balian, touting Jerusalem as an elitist playground, where men are men and the women are grateful.)
Balian himself is essentially a cipher, but a fraught one: on the one hand he's made to mouth platitudes guaranteed to please the secular humanistic liberals in the audience when, during his negotiations with Saladin, he threatens to burn Jerusalem to the ground, including all of the holy places "that drive men mad," be they Christian, Jewish, or Muslim (to which Saladin replies, with near Pricean suavity, that perhaps it would be better if he did in fact carry out this scheme -- in marked contrast to the historical Saladin's devout Sunni faith and constant warfare against various Shi'ite sects, including that of the Assassins); on the other, he's made to shout "Let them come!" in tub-thumping echo of George W. Bush's infamous (and grossly egregious) battle-cry, "Bring it on!" It's as though Monahan and Scott didn't want to risk alienating either "red" or "blue" Americans, and so they made their hero spout slogans from either side of his mouth which were guaranteed to please both factions.
Further weighing down Balian's character is his half-assed, inconsistent emulation of Jesus. At times Kingdom of Heaven plays like an overlong specialty Christian video transposing the "WWJD" (What Would Jesus Do?) mental exercise to Crusading times -- albeit one with swell production values, to be sure. Balian's good intentions are telegraphed by that blasted motto -- "What man is a man if he does not make the world better?" -- carved into the roof beam of his smithy (which, miraculously, yet stands when Balian and his humbled and drab lover return to "France"), but in case we don't get the point, he seems to repent almost at once to ever succumbing to Sibylla's charms, and conspicuously strikes a Jesus Christ-pose when fending off her subsequent advances, chin tilted heavenward, arms splayed cruciform fashion. (Whatever mild sympathy I had for this straw man pretty much evaporated in this scene.) Sibylla excoriates him after learning of his refusing her hand in marriage, telling him, "Did you ever think of doing a little evil in order to do a greater good?;" but of course she comes 'round to his way of thinking before the movie's end.
The ending, which has Balian fending off Saladin's massive army just long enough to win his respect and enable him to negotiate a bloodless surrender of the city, is supposed to be a triumph of Balian's credo: he's saved the little people, after all, and they didn't even have to resort to apostasy -- as the cowardly Patriarch of Jerusalem (Jon Finch) urges them to do. However, the fact that Balian scats back to France with his humbled queen in tow like a serving wench is actually an abdication, a renunciation of it: Balian's copped out, and in his prim snubbing of one of history's greatest gits, England's King Richard II, he's thrown away his chance to ameliorate the sufferings of the common people whom he's professed to feel so acutely for: Richard was nowhere nearly as chivalrous or courteous as Saladin, and didn't give a second's thought to breaking his own pledge not to massacre his prisoners -- unlike Saladin. Had Balian really given a fig for anything outside the confines of his oh-so-noble brow, he would've hied himself (and Sibylla, if she was willing) back to Jerusalem, to try to soften Richard's conduct as much as possible. He didn't have to know anything about Richard in order to realize that, as an African proverb has it, "When elephants make love, the grass gets trampled:" meaning that it was the common people who were at greatest risk from the depredations of this next Crusade, and who were the least able to defend themselves from it. Basically Balian's attitude at the end is, "I did my tour, Jack; now sod off." Or, to quote an Arab proverb that is very much in keeping with the inward-looking and/or chiliastic strains of Christianity (which essentially entered the world as a doomsday cult: something all thinking people should keep in mind when pondering the resurgent right wing of Christianity in the U.S., as exemplified by such folks as Tim LaHaye, calling upon Christians return to their religion's "fundamentals"): "The world is a carcass, and those who seek it are dogs." (This is hardly a message that our present-day neo-conservatives, who claim to be so enamored of "big picture history," will embrace.)
In short, Kingdom of Heaven, while usually pretty to look at and occasionally entertaining, is a muddled, rather dull, and on the whole, unconvincing mess which tells one far more about present-day geopolitical attitudes than the time it purports to portray. While I recognize the need to condense, edit and simplify, I don't understand why some of the alterations were made here: presenting the Templars as little more than bigoted brigands; David Thewlis claiming, on the movie's web site, that Hospitallers were "essentially" pacifists; failing to do more than hint at the political, ethnic and religious complexities that Saladin had to juggle in order to keep his coalition together (or noting that Saladin was a Kurd, not -- no matter how much Saddam Hussein wished otherwise -- an Arab); grossly over-inflating the numbers of his troops (two million's even bigger than two hundred thousand; if all you want to do is bedazzle the uninformed moviegoer with huge numbers, why didn't you give Saladin two million troops?), and grossly under-representing the toll that disease would necessarily take on a body that large; not even mentioning the Shi'ite sect known as the Hashishiyun or Hashshashin or Hashishin, which was corrupted in English as "Assassins," when they caused Saladin and the Crusaders so much grief; not mentioning the bone-deep antipathy many of the Crusaders had for the Byzantine Greeks (the "Franks" who went on the First Crusade were so taken with their Turk opponents that they imagined themselves to be, together with the Turks, descendants of the Trojans who were perfidiously slaughtered by the double-dealing Greeks; this mindset would ultimately culminate, in 1204, of the sacking of the Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople by Roman Catholic Christians of the Fourth Crusade, who, once satiated with plunder and blood, wouldn't even deign to set foot in the Middle East), who, whatever their faults or the difference in their modes of worship expressed by the Great Schism of 1054, were still their co-religionists; no mention of the deep ambivalence that many in the West felt towards the Holy Land, and the unwillingness of a great many of its nobility to do more than make the quickest of possible pilgrimages and then hasten back to Europe; the failure to sketch more than two factions at the Jerusalem court; etc., etc.
There are plenty of great and troubling stories to be had from the Crusades; but you'll not find them in Kingdom of Heaven.
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EDITED on Saturday, 30 July 2005 to add a wee Arab proverb.
So, what can you say about historical movie lollapaloozas? They're big; yep. They're long; gotcha. (Kingdom of Heaven clocks in at nearly two-and-a-half hours -- the minimum running time for any movie epic worthy of the name.) Lots of extras in funny-looking, old-timey clothes; check. (Although, for the last five years at least, many of those extras are likely to be CGI'ed bodies rather than actual people: no pesky unions to deal with; no gripes about the caterers or portable toilets to politely endure. "Hey, J.B., why can't we just CGI everybody?!") Stiff, stilted dialogue; right. At least a couple of big, wall-banging, epic-type action set pieces; uh, yeah, okay, if we must -- but the insurance premiums are murder. Adherence to any semblance of historicity? Wellllll.... not so much. 'Sides, most American audiences freakin' hate history, anyway.
The sort-of good news to anybody who, like me, happens to care about how badly a movie mangles its history: Kingdom of Heaven does far less violence to history than Scott's absurd (and absurdly overrated) sword n' sandals epic Gladiator did; Kingdom of Heaven actually uses the names of more actual, historical personages than Gladiator did, even if the characters going by said monikers bear little or no resemblance to said personages. The bad news is, the trimming and "smoothing down" of the historical accounts performed by Kingdom of Heaven makes the history not merely more simplified, but more boring as well.
The latter tends to be a failure of all-too-many movie epics, which is probably a big reason why they finally went out of fashion, for all of Hollywood's fulminations against that dratted idiot box, television.
Onward, if you dare, to the SPOILER ZONE....
Kingdom of Heaven opens somewhere in France, in 1183 (if memory serves), where a young woman is being buried; the priest (Michael Sheen) pilfers the small cross of gold she wears around her neck and instructs the gravedigger to chop off her head, as she is a suicide, and thus unworthy of a Christian burial. While many parts of western Europe, at least, maintained a horror of suicides at least until the end of the 19th century -- England in particular had a deep revulsion for suicide, as it was apparently the only European country to have a law (a common law, but a law nonetheless) against even attempting suicide, and the ritual desecration of a suicide's corpse (in England this typically amounted to burying a suicide "under the high road, preferably at a busy crossroads...pinned to the ground by driving a wooden stake through the chest;" Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture; translated by Lydia G. Cochrane [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1999; p. 36]) was not fully struck from the books until 1880, and was the very last European nation to decriminalize suicide, which it finally did on 21 March 1961 -- the desecration of a suicide's corpse tended to be more flamboyant in the various French kingdoms of the Middle Ages than in England: "an ordinance of the municipal government of Lille in the thirteenth century," for example, stipulated that "a female suicide’s body is to be burned" (Minois, pps. 34-5), with more grisly treatment being accorded to male suicides.
The woman proves to be the wife of an apparently literate (he has a motto inscribed on one of the beams of his shop: "What man is a man if he does not make the world better?") blacksmith named Balian (Orlando Bloom), who has been ostracized by his village, apparently because his wife killed herself after the death of their child. (This ostracization of a suicide's next of kin seems to be more or less accurate; in England, for example, the suicide's relatives were obliged to watch the desecration of his or her corpse.) Balian soon is faced with a party of a dozen or so men -- Crusaders returning to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, led by Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), Ibelin being a feudal holding in the Kingdom of Jerusalem that bordered the Mediterranean Sea and whose castle lay roughly 50 miles west of the city of Jerusalem -- whose ostensible mission is to get their horses shod, providing Balian with something of a windfall; however, Godfrey chose to avail himself of Balian's services for a somewhat more personal reason, as Balian is the bastard son that he never knew as well as being his last surviving kin and heir. Godfrey offers Balian a place in his party and a claim on his goods and chattels, and talks up the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a place where a man can make it on his own merits, not on the accident of his birth; but Balian, briefly exhibiting a kind of post-modern surly adolescent resentment towards his absentee sire, spurns his offer. When the skeevy priest shows up after the party has ridden off to attempt to convince him to leave the village, as no one wants him there, allowing Balian to spot his dead wife's cross hanging around his own neck, Balian murders him, and in the struggle sets fire to his own shop. With his final ties to the village gone up in smoke, Balian rides hard to catch up with Godfrey's party.
Balian is given cursory weapons instruction by Godfrey and a strapping Nordic giant named Odo (Jouko Ahola), but soon a sheriff's party accosts the Crusaders and demands custody of Balian for having murdered a priest. Balian admits to the truthfulness of the charge and offers to go with them, but Godfrey refuses, asserting his right as a member of the nobility to take Balian under his protection -- or, at least, not to have to relinquish him to someone of lower rank. (This kinda-sorta kicks merry hell out of his earlier malarkey about Jerusalem being simply splenderific because you didn't have to bow and scrape before every inbred pinhead with a title, doesn't it?) The party appears to go away quietly, but then ambushes the heavily-armed Crusaders, and while Godfrey, his friend of the Order of the Hospital of St. John (David Thewlis; the character is never named, simply referred to as "Hospitaler," British spelling "Hospitaller"), Odo, a knight of Saracen origins named Firuz (Eriq Ebouaney; he played the title character in the 2000 Lumumba), as well as the rest of the party all fight on Balian's behalf, the losses are heavy: Odo and Firuz are killed, and Godfrey himself takes a wound that eventually proves fatal. Balian is left in a position rather akin to that of Matt Damon's character in Saving Private Ryan, and the unlawful battle leaches all traces of adolescent-minded rebelliousness from him. Godfrey doesn't survive long enough to return to Jerusalem, although he does manage to administer a highly modified knighthood ceremony to Balian before breathing his last. He also gives Balian his signet ring and sword, that his friends and followers might know him.
Balian embarks for Jerusalem from the Sicilian port of Messina, but a heavy Mediterranean gale shipwrecks him; miraculously, he wakes up on a deserted shore, discovers that only a single horse also survived the wreck, is forced to do battle with a mounted and gloriously caparisoned Saracen (though whether Arab, Turk, Kurd, Egyptian, or Persian is left unsaid), whom he manages to slay, and takes captive the more plainly garbed man (Nasser Memarzia; Millions) whom he takes to be his slain opponent's retainer, but whom all but the most naïve of moviegoers will recognize to be a great and puissant lord in his own right. Balian's courteous and considerate treatment of his captive -- and his granting of his freedom (saying, as he does so, that he was a slave once, and thus will never own any slaves himself) and bequeathing him the shipwrecked horse that was the cause of the quarrel -- will serve him in good stead later.
Wandering around in the city of Jerusalem, Balian is soon spotted by some of Godfrey's retainers, who recognize their lord's sword; they quiz him to verify that he is not merely a thief, and take him to the Marshal of Jerusalem, Tiberias (Jeremy Irons). Balian's identity as Godfrey's heir is accepted, and he is granted custody of Godfrey's smallholding, and the rare privilege of a brief audience with Jerusalem's young and leprous king, Baldwin IV (Edward Norton), who is covered head to toe and whose features are concealed by an emotionless mask, apparently of silver. Balian also discovers that the Hospitaller preceded him to Jerusalem, and is talking with him when he incurs the spite of Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas: Broken English, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, xXx, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; "Guy" is pronounced in the French manner, rhyming with "ghee"), the husband of King Baldwin's sister, Sibylla (Eva Green) and heir apparent to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Balian discovers his father's land to be in a state of disrepair, and soon has his retainers and serfs digging a well. (Why they would let a desert fiefdom remain without water, even in the absence of their lord, is a point that is never addressed.) Somewhere in all of this, Guy's young and spirited wife, Sibylla -- and Baldwin's elder sister -- notices Balian with favor and contrives excuses for their paths to cross.
Tiberias is a rarity among the "Franks" (as the inhabitants of the Middle East thought of the Crusaders, regardless of their countries of origin; the word used was Franj) in that he is not interested in bloodletting and rapine for the glory of the Christian God or for personal aggrandizement -- or both, as seems to be the case of the Knights Templar, certainly as exemplified by Reynald de Châtillon (Brendan Gleeson, chewing the scenery in full-on Saturday matinee villain mode) and the conniving Guy de Lusignan; while Tiberias remains a trusted councilor and de facto regent to Baldwin, Baldwin is weak, and there are many who would dearly love to push back against "the infidel," no matter that their chief general, Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) is said to have 200,000 troops ready to besiege the city of Jerusalem itself. In the meantime, Balian and Sibylla have a furtive assignation that seems to affect the princess far more than it does Balian.
Reynald and his Templars slaughter neighboring Muslim villagers and caravans; Reynald even manages to capture and do horrible, off-screen things to Saladin's sister (Giannina Facio, who must be a favorite of Ridley Scott, given the fact that she has appeared in his five most recent movies, including KoH), up to and including taking her life, which in turn makes Saladin all the more avid to drag down the walls of Jerusalem. Reynald is captured and imprisoned by Baldwin's troops, as well as publicly humiliated by Baldwin, but this does nothing to break his power, as Balian is nearly slain in an attack on his demesne, instigated by Guy and Reynald. Though the ailing Baldwin attempts, with the aid of Tiberias, to convince Balian to marry his sister (when Balian asks what of her current husband, Guy de Lusignan, Tiberias replies that Guy would be "disposed of"), Balian declines, saying that he'd not be the cause of Guy's downfall and presumed death, no matter their personal animosity for each other. Tiberias is frankly disgusted by this show of nobility, though Baldwin takes it with a bit more equanimity and respect. Baldwin soon expires, and Guy is crowned King of Jerusalem. As king, Guy sets a much more belligerent policy towards his "infidel" neighbors, and sets Reynald free. Guy and Reynald soon sally forth on an ill-advised expedition against Saladin but, because they'd not troubled to secure an adequate water supply, are soon dangerously weakened by thirst and heatstroke, and prove to be easy pickings for Saladin's forces. Guy and Reynald are captured and brought before Saladin, but when Guy refuses Saladin's offer of water, Reynald snatches it from his hands, greedily guzzling it, only to find that Saladin's courtesy was not extended to the man who slew (and apparently worse...) his sister. Reynald is summarily dispatched, and Guy's manly fortitude wilts.
This leads up to Saladin's siege of Jerusalem and Balian's valiant defense of same; he makes it painfully plain that he's not defending it for the sake of the lords, the Cross, or even for the queen, his erstwhile love Sibylla, but for the common people. Tiberias decamps with all of his men, having had his fill of lost causes; Balian knights every man and boy able to wield a weapon and manages to fight Saladin's forces to a draw. Balian negotiates a truce whereby everybody is permitted to leave Jerusalem with their lives and dignity intact. Balian returns to his French smithy -- the frame of which is, incredibly, still standing, along with that vow etched into the crossbeam -- accompanied by a chastened and demure Sibylla, who has disavowed all her former worldly titles and pomp. Balian is soon sought out by another party of Crusaders bound to "rescue" Jerusalem, but Balian begs off, insisting that he's only a blacksmith. Told by one of them that he's the king of England -- and he is, being Richard Coeur de Lion (Iain Glen, who also played Capt. John Hanning Speke in the muddled and dull movie of Richard Francis Burton and Speke's expedition to find the source of the Nile, Mountains of the Moon) -- Balian again denies any connection with Jerusalem. Richard's small party rides off, to what would come to be known as the Third Crusade (1189-92).
So: is Kingdom of Heaven a good movie, or not?
Well, the answer to that depends on how interested you are in the time and place it depicts, or in huge battle sequences, or even in Ridley Scott-directed movies in general. If any of these particulars appeal to you, then yes, you should see Kingdom of Heaven at least once. Otherwise....
First, the good points: Kingdom of Heaven looks great; but then, I haven't seen a movie directed by Ridley Scott that didn't look great. He cares enough to hire costumers, set designers, special effects technicians, make-up artists, etc., who will do their utmost to realize and enhance his vision.
The siege of Jerusalem is a wowser (even if I'm not entirely convinced of the historical accuracy of the flaming and exploding projectiles hurled at the city by Saladin's trebuchets), and easily the best of the battle sequences in Kingdom of Heaven; the scene where Balian manages to engineer the toppling of several of Saladin's siege towers at once is in and of itself nearly worth the price of admission.
The stand-out scene for me, however, was when Reynald was brought before Baldwin a captive, and Baldwin took off his glove -- exposing his leprous flesh for the first time -- and demanded that Reynald give him "the kiss of peace." Reynald, who is played as being at least half-crazed by Brendan Gleeson, proceeds to slobber all over Baldwin's hand as if he was trying to vacuum the ring off his finger -- and maybe one or two fingers along with it. Outraged and revolted (hey, guys, just how low do you have to go to turn a leper's stomach...?), Baldwin proceeds to strike Reynald repeatedly with his scepter, nearly collapsing with the effort. The whole thing comes off as foreplay from a particularly unsavory subgenre of Klingon porn, and is the only time that Kingdom of Heaven crackled with energy, surprise, otherworldliness: a sense that damn near anything could happen. But then it slipped back into earnest respectability.
There's also a Natacha Atlas song over the end credits: not her best, but worth a listen.
That said, I remain unconvinced that Scott's alternating between slow and fast motion in his action sequences works, unless the intent is to distance the audience from the action (as the bird's-eye view scenes are clearly intended to do; one in particular pulls so far back that the writhing, struggling bodies are reduced to vague blobs, like bacteria or paramecia on a microscopic slide); I also disliked this effect in Gladiator. If Scott is attempting to show how combat can distort one's time sense, he'd do well to take a look at some of Oliver Stone's movies, particularly Born on the Fourth of July, which boasts some of the most harrowing, visceral "you are there" staged combat footage I've ever seen; it makes the much-ballyhooed Normandy landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan look like puppet theatre. In any case, Scott has done nothing to change my opinion that slow motion and accelerated motion effects should be sparingly used, if at all. On the whole, the battle sequences have less tension than those of, say, Spartacus -- or even parts of Troy.
I also dislike using CGI for arterial sprays and other battle effects: the hand-to-hand combat sequences in Kingdom of Heaven pale in comparison to those in John Boorman's condensed Arthurian epic Excalibur (which was one of Liam Neeson's first movie roles: he played Sir Gawain).
On a related note, I was disappointed when Sibylla, at her brother Baldwin's funeral, pulls off the mask concealing his ravaged face, reacts with shock and dismay, and the camera lovingly showed us his face. For me, Eva Green's reaction was enough; yes, that was a swell make-up job (or was it simply a cast head? I didn't detect any breathing, so I don't know if Edward Norton had to spend umpteen hours in the make-up chair for this shot or if they were able to just make a fake head), but it was too much: it robbed the character of the dignity that Norton had worked so diligently to cloak him in. It was almost as though Scott or his producers (of which he was one) didn't trust the audience to know what leprosy could do to a person; as though they felt that the shot of Baldwin's ungloved hand wouldn't be enough for most moviegoers, that they would want to see more. It's always better to leave an audience wanting more than to gorge them with too damn much, and of all the gross make-up effects in Kingdom of Heaven, this one was simply too damn much.
Kingdom of Heaven at times looks as though footage from an especially upscale advertising campaign -- perhaps for a perfume -- was intercut into it; I got this same feeling in parts of Gladiator as well. While I realize that Ridley Scott got his start directing commercials, he would do well to not hearken back to his salad days quite so enthusiastically in his mainstream pictures.
I could weep with frustration at the waste of some of the acting talent: while Brendan Gleeson is a big, imposing fellow (Braveheart, Gangs of New York, Troy), he can act (The Butcher Boy, I Went Down, The General, The Tailor of Panama); and anyone who was hoping for a meatier role for Eva Green after catching her in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is sure to walk out of Kingdom of Heaven disappointed. Yes, Eva Green looks great in the clothes they've picked out for her (and, as anyone who's seen The Dreamers can attest, she looks great out of them too; ba-da-bom); but here she's saddled with a character who becomes less interesting the more virtue she acquires. Towards the end, during the siege, she gives herself a delousing-type haircut to disguise herself that leaves her looking like a medieval, punk rockish Jean Seberg or Mia Farrow; and you don't have to be a militant feminist or a "woman with a 'Y'" (so-called because such women heartily disavow anything to do with men; hence they spell "woman" as "womyn") to see her renunciation of all of her titles and holdings (it's mentioned in passing that she's not just the queen of a fallen kingdom, she also has other lands in the Middle East) and her meek subservience to Balian as extraordinarily regressive, and "romantic" only to someone with the sensibilities of a Robert Bly. The not-so-subtle message here is, if a woman isn't willing to hide behind a man and stay in the kitchen or on the farm, there's no telling what might happen to her. (Of course, with rotters like Reynald or Guy roaming around, there's no telling what might happen to her even if she does "mind her place.")
Come to that, Sibylla's attraction to Balian is unconvincing; to put it kindly, Orlando Bloom and Eva Green don't show much on-screen chemistry, and one can't imagine a woman as spirited as Sibylla is first presented as falling deeply in love with such a cold fish as Balian. Yes, Balian is still meant to be suffering greatly from the loss of, in short order, his child, his wife, and the father that he never knew; but he's also made it abundantly clear that he's come to Jerusalem for forgiveness for his sins, to attempt to regain connection with his deity, and, as such, one is at least mildly incredulous that Sibylla managed to lure him into the sack at all. Bloom may well have been perfectly cast as a mostly stoic elfin warrior in The Lord of the Rings; he sure doesn't give any indication that much of anything moves him here, for all his self-professed desire for expiation and to do good works. If Kingdom of Heaven is laudable because it doesn't present its Muslim characters as rabid, death-crazed fanatics, it still shows traces of the old "Orientalist" mentality that drove the likes of Edward Said to distraction: namely, the tenants of Godfrey and Balian's land are too stupid or too lazy to think of digging a well until Balian shows up and issues the needful metaphorical kicks to their backsides. (This plays in to Godfrey's Objectivist spiel to Balian, touting Jerusalem as an elitist playground, where men are men and the women are grateful.)
Balian himself is essentially a cipher, but a fraught one: on the one hand he's made to mouth platitudes guaranteed to please the secular humanistic liberals in the audience when, during his negotiations with Saladin, he threatens to burn Jerusalem to the ground, including all of the holy places "that drive men mad," be they Christian, Jewish, or Muslim (to which Saladin replies, with near Pricean suavity, that perhaps it would be better if he did in fact carry out this scheme -- in marked contrast to the historical Saladin's devout Sunni faith and constant warfare against various Shi'ite sects, including that of the Assassins); on the other, he's made to shout "Let them come!" in tub-thumping echo of George W. Bush's infamous (and grossly egregious) battle-cry, "Bring it on!" It's as though Monahan and Scott didn't want to risk alienating either "red" or "blue" Americans, and so they made their hero spout slogans from either side of his mouth which were guaranteed to please both factions.
Further weighing down Balian's character is his half-assed, inconsistent emulation of Jesus. At times Kingdom of Heaven plays like an overlong specialty Christian video transposing the "WWJD" (What Would Jesus Do?) mental exercise to Crusading times -- albeit one with swell production values, to be sure. Balian's good intentions are telegraphed by that blasted motto -- "What man is a man if he does not make the world better?" -- carved into the roof beam of his smithy (which, miraculously, yet stands when Balian and his humbled and drab lover return to "France"), but in case we don't get the point, he seems to repent almost at once to ever succumbing to Sibylla's charms, and conspicuously strikes a Jesus Christ-pose when fending off her subsequent advances, chin tilted heavenward, arms splayed cruciform fashion. (Whatever mild sympathy I had for this straw man pretty much evaporated in this scene.) Sibylla excoriates him after learning of his refusing her hand in marriage, telling him, "Did you ever think of doing a little evil in order to do a greater good?;" but of course she comes 'round to his way of thinking before the movie's end.
The ending, which has Balian fending off Saladin's massive army just long enough to win his respect and enable him to negotiate a bloodless surrender of the city, is supposed to be a triumph of Balian's credo: he's saved the little people, after all, and they didn't even have to resort to apostasy -- as the cowardly Patriarch of Jerusalem (Jon Finch) urges them to do. However, the fact that Balian scats back to France with his humbled queen in tow like a serving wench is actually an abdication, a renunciation of it: Balian's copped out, and in his prim snubbing of one of history's greatest gits, England's King Richard II, he's thrown away his chance to ameliorate the sufferings of the common people whom he's professed to feel so acutely for: Richard was nowhere nearly as chivalrous or courteous as Saladin, and didn't give a second's thought to breaking his own pledge not to massacre his prisoners -- unlike Saladin. Had Balian really given a fig for anything outside the confines of his oh-so-noble brow, he would've hied himself (and Sibylla, if she was willing) back to Jerusalem, to try to soften Richard's conduct as much as possible. He didn't have to know anything about Richard in order to realize that, as an African proverb has it, "When elephants make love, the grass gets trampled:" meaning that it was the common people who were at greatest risk from the depredations of this next Crusade, and who were the least able to defend themselves from it. Basically Balian's attitude at the end is, "I did my tour, Jack; now sod off." Or, to quote an Arab proverb that is very much in keeping with the inward-looking and/or chiliastic strains of Christianity (which essentially entered the world as a doomsday cult: something all thinking people should keep in mind when pondering the resurgent right wing of Christianity in the U.S., as exemplified by such folks as Tim LaHaye, calling upon Christians return to their religion's "fundamentals"): "The world is a carcass, and those who seek it are dogs." (This is hardly a message that our present-day neo-conservatives, who claim to be so enamored of "big picture history," will embrace.)
In short, Kingdom of Heaven, while usually pretty to look at and occasionally entertaining, is a muddled, rather dull, and on the whole, unconvincing mess which tells one far more about present-day geopolitical attitudes than the time it purports to portray. While I recognize the need to condense, edit and simplify, I don't understand why some of the alterations were made here: presenting the Templars as little more than bigoted brigands; David Thewlis claiming, on the movie's web site, that Hospitallers were "essentially" pacifists; failing to do more than hint at the political, ethnic and religious complexities that Saladin had to juggle in order to keep his coalition together (or noting that Saladin was a Kurd, not -- no matter how much Saddam Hussein wished otherwise -- an Arab); grossly over-inflating the numbers of his troops (two million's even bigger than two hundred thousand; if all you want to do is bedazzle the uninformed moviegoer with huge numbers, why didn't you give Saladin two million troops?), and grossly under-representing the toll that disease would necessarily take on a body that large; not even mentioning the Shi'ite sect known as the Hashishiyun or Hashshashin or Hashishin, which was corrupted in English as "Assassins," when they caused Saladin and the Crusaders so much grief; not mentioning the bone-deep antipathy many of the Crusaders had for the Byzantine Greeks (the "Franks" who went on the First Crusade were so taken with their Turk opponents that they imagined themselves to be, together with the Turks, descendants of the Trojans who were perfidiously slaughtered by the double-dealing Greeks; this mindset would ultimately culminate, in 1204, of the sacking of the Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople by Roman Catholic Christians of the Fourth Crusade, who, once satiated with plunder and blood, wouldn't even deign to set foot in the Middle East), who, whatever their faults or the difference in their modes of worship expressed by the Great Schism of 1054, were still their co-religionists; no mention of the deep ambivalence that many in the West felt towards the Holy Land, and the unwillingness of a great many of its nobility to do more than make the quickest of possible pilgrimages and then hasten back to Europe; the failure to sketch more than two factions at the Jerusalem court; etc., etc.
There are plenty of great and troubling stories to be had from the Crusades; but you'll not find them in Kingdom of Heaven.
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EDITED on Saturday, 30 July 2005 to add a wee Arab proverb.