King Arthur

 

Year:  2004

Filming:  Color

Length:  126 minutes

Genre:  Action/Adventure/Drama/History

Maturity:  PG-13 (for intense battle sequences, language, and sexuality)

Cast:  Clive Own (Arthur), Ioan Gruffudd (Lancelot), Keira Knightley (Guinevere), Mads Mikkelson (Tristan), Ivano Marescotti (Bishop Germanus), Hugh Dancy (Galahad), Joel Edgerton (Gawain), Stephen Dillane (Merlin), Ray Winstone (Bors the Younger), Stellan Skarsgard (Cerdic), Til Schweiger (Cynric)

Director:  Antoine Fuqua

Personal Rating:  2 Stars

***

    The Arthurian Cycles have been done to death on the Silver Screen. Bottle-blonde enchantresses, Halloween wizards, and made-in-Taiwan swords sticking out of papier-mâché stones are all too common in the world of fantastical remakes, and they begin to go stale pretty quickly. Innovative interpretations have almost become a separate sub-genre, eager to add a new pinch of pixie dust to revitalize the tales.

   In this particularly unusual film, it was decided that an historical approach should be taken in depicting Arthur on film. Great concept, but making it a reality presented a host of new developmental problems that involved creating a new and far less worthwhile mythology involving disenchanting pseudo-knights, sadistic monks, and a face-painted, girl-power heroine straight out of action comics.

    Clive Owen stars as Arthur, a Roman officer for commanding a band of veteran Dalmatian mercenaries who have been forced to serve the interests of Rome since they were young boys. Stationed in Britain, they are famed for successfully crushing Celtic rebellions and upholding Pax Romana. However, when Rome calls back her legions from the British Isles, the Dalmatian Knights are finally given leave to return to their homeland in the steppes of Russia. But there is a catch. Bishop Germanus, typically shifty with a slick Mediterranean accent, insists that they first trek north into the mountains to rescue a Roman family from invading Saxons.

    Arthur is more than willing since they are his compatriots, but his subordinates, including his best friends Lancelot, played by Ioan Gruffudd, feel that they have been cheated. Nevertheless, they agree to follow their leader into the unknown, and ultimately wind up fighting both Celts and Saxons in the process of completing their mission. When they finally arrive at their destination, they discover that the Roman nobleman they are supposed to be rescuing has been brutally maltreating the local populace, including a bunch of druids locked up in the basement for long-term incarceration to “save their souls”. In this bunch, Arthur discovers a tough little Celt named Guinevere, played by Keira Knightley, who he rescues.

    Sure enough, they meet up double-header cheesy father-and-son villain team, Cerdic and Cyrnic, Saxon warriors with weird voices who engage Arthur’s men in a big battle over a frozen lake. With the help of Guinevere, who turns out to be a pretty good archer, Arthur and his knights win the day, but with heavy casualties. Meanwhile, Guinevere tries to convince Arthur to abandon his allegiance to Rome and stay behind to help the Druid rebel leader Merlin (yes, he makes a dorky appearance…) fight off the Saxons. Although his reasoning is a bit vague, he decides to accept the challenge and make his stand on Badon Hill to fight off the overwhelming onslaught of Saxons. Now his knights must make the crucial decision whether to abandon their old leader to his fate or stick it out with him to the bitter end.

    King Arthur has some epic qualities, and is based on an inherently good premise. Some of the visuals are wonderfully Celtic in feel. Filmed on location in Ireland, the glorious scenery with soaring mountains, rolling hills, and massive lakes was mythic in proportion. The battle on the frozen river is very well orchestrated, and the camera shots under the ice of the Saxons tramping forward are pretty cool. The scenes of Arthur decked out in Roman armor on horseback, surveying the mist-covered Mount Badon before the final battle is particularly evocative. The soul of the warrior becoming a horse in an intriguing concept, as is the portrayal of swords sticking out of all burial cairns as a matter of course, thus explaining why Arthur had to pull out “the sword in the stone.”

     The music is gloriously lush and inspired, even when the film itself is insipid. Moya Brennan’s vocals add a haunting strain to the romantic sequences, and the nostalgic song that Bors the Younger’s mistress sings has some really nice potential, reminiscent of “The Edge of Night” sung by Pippin in The Return of the King. But what could have been turned into something really fell flat after hearing the same line repeated so many times: “We will go home, across the mountains…” Nice for effect, but it was just too much of a good thing.

   

    Clive Owen is a pretty decent actor, but I’m afraid the material he got stuck with in this film is mostly lack-luster. On a positive note, Arthur is portrayed as a devout Christian, which is one of the few things we can actually verify about the historical character. He is shown selflessly praying that God would take his life but spare his knights as they travel north on their final mission. He also counters the pagan (seemingly atheist) Lancelot’s mockery of his prayers by saying, “A man should not fear kneeling to The God he trusts.” But for all this, Arthur embraces the teaching of Pelagius, a heretical monk who claimed their was no such thing as Original Sin or Divine Grace, making it necessary for people to earn their own salvation through good works alone. In this film, he is erroneously portrayed as the champion of the free world under oppression from the Roman Empire and the Roman Church.

    I’ll admit I’m rather prejudiced against Keira Knightley from the first considering her past annoying roles as Gwen in Princess in Thieves and Elizabeth Swan in Pirates of the Caribbean. But honestly, her portrayal of Guinevere as a Celtic warrior princess just totally underwhelmed me. First of all, her character is so different from any past depiction of Guinevere in romances, that she might as well have a different name. Both she and Lancelot had no historical basis, but were introduced to the older Welsh mythology by French minstrels. The film-makers seemed to overlook this point, and didn’t even make use of the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot love triangle, which would have at least justified why Guinevere and Lancelot were introduced to the “historical” plot to begin with!

    Instead, they settled for a modernistic portrayal of “girl-power”, an ancient Turiel for all practical purposes! Watching her seduce Arthur in his tent and then run around half-naked on a battlefield, hacking with an axe and strangling with a garrote, was quite disturbing. I don’t know how is with the other viewers, but her grotesquely unfeminine display did not endear her to me. I know all about female Celtic warriors as a historical reality, but have they to do with Guinevere? Furthermore, were their actions really what our modern generation identifies as the height of womanly virtue and role models for our daughters? I can appreciate a feisty maiden armed with wits and weapons to hold off and befuddle the baddies…but she’s got to do it with class, charm, and fitting femininity, not trying to be what she can never be: namely, a man!

    And this leads nicely to the next burning question: Is Hollywood obsessed with woad paint for some strange reason? From Wallace to Guinevere, they’re constantly plastering it on the wrong people from the wrong time periods. During the time of the Saxon invasion of Britain, the native Britons had largely been Romanized and Christianized, and were most certainly not running around smeared with blue paint. But this just highlights the major historical foible made when meshing together two major events that were separated by at least a generation: the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain and the invasion of the Saxons. The Saxon baddies are laughably predictable in their behavioral comportments and faux villain voices that come off sounding like they are recovering from laryngitis. There are no insights into Saxon life, culture, or perspective, nor even authentic looking raids!

    The concept of a Celtic society that actually benefitted from being a part of The Roman Empire and The Catholic Church is lost on the storyboard. The portrayal of the Church is deplorable, best demonstrated by a corrupt bishop with a cheesy Italian accent and a spangling of sadistic monks who lock druids in dungeons and starve them to death while chanting requiems. Never mind the fact that The Catholic Church and her hard-working monks were instrumental in saving civilization during the Dark Ages; never mind that they successfully converted Europe and created Christendom; never mind all the glorious saints who were examples of charity and humility to all they met. No, no, no. That simply does not fit into the secular narrative. In championing Paganism and knocking the Church, the film-makers were really advancing a district neutral, lukewarm secularism.

    In getting rid of the Church as a positive influence, there is a necessity to change the traditional reason why Arthur is thought to have fought the Saxons. Instead of Arthur fighting for Christendom against the invading hoards of Paganism, he is portrayed as fighting for an airy-fairy notion of “freedom” with a distinctly modern flavor. One major question remains: Freedom to do what exactly? Like ambition, it’s only really as good as what’s done with it. But the secular perception of virtue has raised the state of being free as the end-all and be-all of life, instead of means to an end. But this nifty replacement of motivations for Arthur doesn’t carry over well, and in the end it comes out very simply as two warrior cultures sparring with one another over the land; “freedom”, religious or otherwise, is ultimately a non-issue.

    Morally, the plot plummets, driven by racy dialogue on the part of “The Knights” and Bors the Younger’s blatant shacking up with his long-time mistress and his multitudinous illegitimate children. Arthur’s own “casual sex” with Guinevere and later marriage to her in a pagan ceremony (in the midst of a papier-mâché Stonehenge no less!) really makes me lose respect for him as well. There is quite a lot of vulgar language hither and yon, explicit and highly unnecessary to get whatever point is trying to be made across to the audience. Battle sequences could be pretty bloody as well, with sword-slashing, ax-hacking, garrote-strangling, and drowning beneath ice. I fast-forwarded quite a lot of these gutsy sequences myself, both because they were graphic and far too long.

  

    I can’t believe they killed off Lancelot in such an anti-climactic fashion on Badon Hill! Really, overall, his position as trusty side-kick was minimally utilized, and while I still think Ioan Gruffudd is a terrific actor, the character development for Lancelot was practically non-existent, and he never really came into his own. His one major moment in the sun was when he leads “the knights” back to help Arthur fight the Saxons, even though they had been given leave to return to their homes in Dalmatia. Sadly, the film fails to make a strong emotional connection between the audience and the characters, much less their long-lost homeland or the autocratic Rome or the savage British Isles.

    Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, for all its historical butchery, did manage to relay the concepts of “home” and “freedom” in a way that could connect with modern audiences while not losing complete touch with the mythologized past. But when every historical epic afterwards tries to recapture the same old sparkle, ad nauseum, it quickly becomes a sappy mess. Although King Arthur did give the main character an interesting little hype-up speech about “home” being an emotional state when free men fight for the freedom of themselves and others, Arthur’s reasons for fighting with the Celtic Druids fail to stir the soul. They are far too vague, propped up by his mother’s ancestry (which is only briefly touched upon) and his disillusioned after Pelagius is excommunicated and executed.

    So in theory, King Arthur, historical style, was a unique idea that could have been a great success if it had been handles with greater care. But the sketchy storyline and historical interpretations reduced it to nothing more than a second-hand, second rate mythology. I suppose we shall just have to live in hope until someone gets up enough nerve to give the de-wizarded Arthurius another go. Until then, we can at least enjoy this version’s epic soundtrack as the saving grace of the production.

  

  

Guinevere (Keira Knightley) urges Arthur (Clive Owen) to battle the Saxons