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Part of the selling point of this movie is its anachronistic rock score: Queen, David Bowie, AC/DC, and Sly and the Family Stone all blast their way through fourteenth century jousting tournaments. It’s fun and funny. The problem is that director Brian Helgeland doesn’t go far enough with it. The music doesn’t affect the aesthetics of the rest of the movie one way or the other. It doesn’t mean anything to the story or the characters’ lives particularly. We have one moment when the crowd is banging their seats and clapping their hands along with “We Will Rock You”. There’s another moment when at a ball the knights and ladies start jamming to David Bowie’s “Golden Years”. But that’s it. The characters don't exactly behave like we generally think of Dark Ages types behaving but this feels more like lazy writing than an active choice. When the movie needs to express love it falls back on stilted dialogue, when crunch time comes it resorts to good old fashioned movie music to provide the obligatory emotional button. If you removed the rock music from the movie you’d have the exact same film – spirited but conventional Hollywood fluff where the audience knows the entire plot, including how it will end, almost as soon as the movie starts. This is not inherently a bad thing. These movies have their place and their audience too. Sometimes all you want is for the good guy to win and get the girl at the end. But the melding of time periods has potential. If you're going to use a conceit like this you have to go nuts with it. Pull out the stops. You're already inviting ridicule and outrage from the sticklers, you might as well give them an apoplectic fit. Brian Helgeland perhaps didn’t give himself enough credit, enough creative lee-way to do all the things he really wanted to do. Or maybe he just hadn’t thought it all the way through. One gets the feeling that his first idea for the film was the medieval crowd chanting in the stands “We Will Rock You”. He thought, “Oh, neat!” and that was as far as he got with the idea.
| It’s too bad. He’s good at creating characters, good at generating camaraderie and empathy and stages action sequences ably enough. You like the characters in the film. The hero, faux-knight William Thatcher – “Ulrich von Lichtenstein of Gelderland”, no less -- (Heath Ledger), is surrounded by his rag-tag little posse which includes Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of The Canterbury Tales(a rousing performance by Paul Bettany), two hilarious squires (Alan Tudyk and Mark Addy) and a female blacksmith (the charming Laura Fraser). This little group is more the movie than the warmed over plot. How these rough-and-tumble rustics support and wrangle each other, fight, laugh, cheer, and write love letters together, is what the movie is really about. Their common cause, the glue that holds them all together, of course, is Ledger’s William and Ledger has the charisma to pull it off. You understand why these really very sensible people (except actually, for Chaucer) would follow William on his crazy dream to become a knight even though he is by birth a peasant. William is the visionary, the engine, and his dream and his passion will make all of their lives better. They believe in him. That the cast can sell this and it doesn’t stick in the audiences’ throat is the major accomplishment of the film. Likewise, the sub-plot involving Prince Edward, the Black Prince (James Purefoy) could be cloying, manipulative, but it’s not because the rapport between the prince and William is so gently crafted. When the denouement comes it feels like a natural part of the story, not artifice. |
Shannon Sossamon as Lady Jocelyn is less successful. She seems mired between the conflicting styles of the film in a way that the rest of the cast manages to nimbly navigate. She is a beautiful woman, certainly, but doesn’t have a lot of magnetism and doesn’t seem particularly acute. You could see being attracted to her. William is such a cool guy though, that his being captivated by her is a little baffling. I spent most of the movie hoping he’d go for Laura Fraser’s much spunkier and more interesting Kate. Rufus Sewell, a strange if versatile actor, is carving out for himself a niche as a specific type of bad guy. When he plays “arrogant” it doesn’t feel forced. I don’t know the man so I’m chalking it up to good acting. His Count Adhemar feels like he’s dangerous because he is smart, because he is perceptive about the human condition.
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| The jousting sequences are exciting enough. It’s jousting after all, there’s only so much to it. Not being a seasoned fan of the sport I found it difficult sometimes to tell who won if somebody didn’t actually fall off of their horse but maybe that’s just me. The jousts felt dangerous and painful and difficult, that's what's important. It's not something we see a whole lot of and that alone gave it some oomph. You could see how it might be bloodlust-inducing in a crowd of thousands. This was where the anachronistic take would have shone the most. It could draw a straight line between this time period and our own, making connections between the two societies obvious – and engaging -- where otherwise they might not be. It’s not like you don’t get the connection – you do. But you know it going in and once the first rock song and joust is had there’s nothing more new the movie has to say. You're waiting to be dazzled -- and it never happens. Still, you root for William and his off-beat band of buddies to succeed. They’re a loyal group. You hope that one day you have such a group of friends surrounding you, cheering you on, working so selflessly to help you achieve your dreams. |
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