A Very Contemporary King

King Arthur

ational Review nline, July 23, 2004

You would need to have a heart of stone to leave out the stone, but that's just what the team behind King Arthur has done. In a year of a Troy without Zeus, Antoine Fuqua has directed a King Arthur without the Lady of the Lake, Uther Pendragon, Morgana la Fey, Mordred, the Holy Grail, Camelot, Avalon, or, yes, even a stone. Not even a pebble. The rationale? Well, this new Arthur, the Roman-British Lucius Artorius Castus, complete with a glum band of Sarmatian knights (a bunch of foreigners—this Brit notes) is, supposedly, the real deal. His is the story that Thomas Malory, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lord Tennyson, T. H. White, and all those other hacks somehow managed to overlook.

The authenticity is, of course, bogus, but then Hollywood's view of historical reality ("Oh, fight, fight, fight! That's all you ever think of, Dickie Plantagenet!" King Richard and the Crusaders (1954)) usually is. In the age of Oliver Stone, we should be grateful that the only certain Lucius Artorius Castus died no more than a couple of centuries before the events described in the film. Somewhat cautiously, John Matthews, the movie's consultant historian has, been at pains to point out that he is "not saying that the Arthur represented in the movie is 100 per cent true." Matthews is saying, however, "that he represents the Arthurian truth."

Now that that's, um, cleared up, it's still a mystery exactly why commercial filmmakers chose to rewrite a story that has, let's face it, found a pretty good audience for over 1,000 years. Was it all the chivalry that frightened Fuqua off? Check out his Sir Bors, and you might think so. In Sir Thomas Malory's 15th century telling of the tale, Bors was, well, a bit of a bore. "For all women Sir Bors was a virgin save for one, that was the daughter of King Brangoris...Save for her Sir Bors was a clean maiden." Anyone who called King Arthur's Bors a "clean maiden" would not have got out of Britannia alive. Played by the talented Ray Winstone, a former boxer, he's a genial cockney Sarmatian thug, a Dark Ages soccer hooligan, an East End Lothario with a love of birds, the bottle, and a brawl—lock, stock, and two smoking scabbards.

But there was more to Camelot than chivalry. If it was smut that Fuqua fancied, different versions of the saga have plenty to pick from, including incest, illegitimacy, adultery, date-rape Merlin-style, and, unforgettably, naughty Guinevere and her James Hewitt in shining armor. According to Malory, who had already written with some relish about Guinevere "writhing" in frustration on her bed (Lancelot had been neglecting what were meant to be, ahem, Arthur's duties), the moment that the quest for the Holy Grail had come to an end, the queen and her knight "loved together more hotter than they did [before]", so often, it seems, "that many in the court spake of it, and in especial Sir Agravain... for he was ever open-mouthed." And so, after reading that, was I.

King Arthur, by contrast, is disappointingly chaste. Lancelot and Guinevere (played by Keira Knightley as a mix of Xena, and mute, lovely Nova from Planet of the Apes) exchange a smoldering glance or two and a tender battlefield death scene, but that's it. Her relationship with Castus isn't much "hotter," catching light only at the moment that the future king pulls, not a sword out of a stone, but Guinevere's fingers out of their sockets. Even the naughty opportunity presented by the movie's setting—according to some sources, ancient Picts and Celts fought, rather perilously, one would think, in the nude—is neglected. That would, the gorgeous Knightley told the London Daily Telegraph, "have been much too distracting." Well, yes, Keira dear, it would. And that would have been a good thing. King Arthur is a movie that could use some distraction.

A more likely explanation for the decision to abandon the old, familiar narrative was the need to avoid embarrassing comparisons with John Boorman's magical Excalibur, a movie that is likely to remain the definitive Arthur for many years to come. Far easier to capitalize on the post-Gladiator boom (the screenplays for King Arthur and Gladiator were both written by David Franzoni: He's doing Hannibal next) in sword, spear, and shield epics, with a supposedly authentic reworking that conveniently brings a medieval romance back to the days of newly trendy antiquity.

As to that authenticity, I wouldn't worry too much about it. If it's ancient nits you want to pick, there are more in King Arthur than in a dirty Gaul's hair, but who cares? When it comes to the lost lord of Camelot, all claims of authenticity are spurious. We will never know who he was—or if he was. There may, once, have been a great leader whose memory survived, first as recollection, then, later as his last warriors died off, and their children, and their children's children, as a campfire saga, a winter's tale, heroic certainly, exaggerated probably, but strong enough a story that its fragments survived to inspire historians hundreds of years later, starting with Nennius, the eight-century Welsh monk who was the first to tell of Arthur, the dux bellorum, and his twelve victories over the invading Saxons.

Or possibly the great king was just a composite, a blend of the real and the imagined, Artorius and Aurelianus, Artgur, perhaps, and Arcturus too. Maybe he always was what he was to become, nothing more than a dream, a fiction, a symbol, an inspiration, a fantasy. For the truth is that the "authentic" Arthur has long been the Arthur of the myth, his tale an epic first written down in an era when the frontiers between history and legend were shifting, elusive and lacked any border guards. They told the tale of Britain's great king, and they embellished it, and they embellished it again, Welshmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Normans and, yes, even the English, all across that Christendom of castles, cathedrals and chivalry. His was a story defined by monks, explained by knights, sung by poets. He was a man of no precise era, and no exact place.

John Boorman understood this. His extraordinary, beautiful Excalibur floats between epochs. It's a requiem for the Celtic dark ages, and a medieval epic, a pagan tale and a Christian quest. There are knights, to be sure, in armor, but an armor so wonderfully strange that those who wear it transcend any fixed past and become warriors outside of time, playing out their drama against a backdrop of Wagner and Orff, as they thunder towards, to quote Tennyson, that "last dim, weird battle in the west," and a king, the king, passing beneath the setting sun.

Compared with this, Fuqua's muddy, emasculated epic comes across, well, as a little prosaic. It's nicely shot, the battle scenes work, and, even if Clive Owen's gloomy, brooding, darkly handsome Castus sometimes seems more prince of Denmark than King of Britain, he's a compelling screen presence. Pierce Brosnan, be afraid, very afraid. For an audience in the right mood (hard liquor would help), there are worse ways to spend an hour or two.

After all, King Arthur was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and, like all the cream of the Bruckheimer crop (Top Gun! The Rock! Con Air! Armageddon!), it has moments of loopy magnificence. The problem is that this dank, damp tale of Romans, woad-daubed tribesmen, and proto-genocidal Saxons warring away in the Scottish lowlands is most effective when it refers back to the ancient, grander legend, with the knights' (oddly un-Sarmatian) names, Gawain, Galahad, Lancelot, Bors, with the roundtable at which the Sarmatians sit, or, best of all, with the moment when the young Castus pulls out the sword, Excalibur, that marks the grave of his fallen father.

The most interesting aspect of this latest version of an old, old story is the way in which, like many of the earlier retellings, it is used to reflect the values of its own time. So, for example, Arthur's wayward queen, Tennyson's "stately" monarch, is played by a somewhat feral Knightley as a girl-power Guinevere, all woad, weaponry and attitude. No wonder poor Castus spends so much of the movie looking so anxious. To add to his worries, the poor man also has to contend with the disillusioning discovery that his spiritual inspiration, Pelagius, a holy man (an authentic historical figure, really, of the right time, more or less, and the right place: he was either of British or Irish descent) has been deemed a heretic, and executed by the wicked folk in Rome.

As it happens, Pelagius's heresy seems extremely attractive (I'm no theologian, but so far as I can make out, he rejected the notion of original sin and was a fan of free will), but there's no evidence to justify his place in King Arthur or, for that matter, the report of his execution. He's probably just there for use as a fresh stick with which to beat the Catholic Church (without exception, the priests and the monks who appear in this movie are portrayed unsympathetically) as well as, post-Da Vinci Code, to throw in a fashionably alternative view of Christianity. Under these circumstances, it's no surprise that (spoiler coming, if you care) the film ends with Castus' marriage to the pagan Guinevere in a seaside Stonehenge with more than a touch of Spinal Tap about it.

Contrast that with how, in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, an earlier updating of the legend permeated with high-Victorian romanticism and unafraid of magic and mythology, the poet describes the arrival of the barge that will take the dying Arthur away to Avalon:

Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge,

Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,

Beneath them; and descending they were ware

That all the decks were dense with stately forms,

Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream-by these

Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose

A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,

And, as it were one voice, an agony

Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills

All night in a waste land, where no one comes,

Or hath come, since the making of the world.

I know which version I prefer.