A Marvelous Excursion in the Lion's Kingdom

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

The New York Sun, December 8, 2005

If there's one thing that Brits of the old school didn't appreciate, it was a fuss, and if there's one thing we know about the repressed, eccentric, and misogynistic C.S. Lewis, it's that he was a Brit of the old school. Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine that Lewis, a man who relished vigorous debate, would have enjoyed the fuss that has newly enveloped his Narnia in controversy, rancor, and - from the faithful - fresh adulation. As scolds scold, his vision is sexist, Anglocentric, and - fashionably - maybe even Islamophobic. The Narnia stories are, allegedly, cunning and deceitful propaganda for that nasty Jesus, an insidious trap for generations of unwary secularist tots. Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik even cast doubts on Lewis' grasp of Christian theology. Aslan should, he wrote, have been something less glorious, a donkey, perhaps, rather than a lion. Aslan an ass? As if.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the culture wars, great hopes have been pinned on the Disney version of the lion's tale. The film was co-produced by a billionaire Christian entrepreneur (Philip Anschutz and his Walden Media) and even endorsed by the odd but oddly influential Focus on the Family. Sensing that this movie may be a second coming of "The Passion of the Christ," other evangelical groups have discreetly dropped the boycott long imposed on Disney for gay days, the Weinstein brothers, and other offenses. Disney has returned the compliment, enlisting evangelicals and Christian marketing groups to help promote the movie.

But all this is to miss the point. The tales of Narnia were always intended as something subtler than allegory. It's easy for a child to read them and miss the Christian resonance altogether (age 8 or 9, I did). As Lewis recalled, the first inspiration for the stories was visual - not spiritual - a picture that came to him "of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood," and much of the force, and the wonder, of these books comes from the striking images they contain. These images, especially when reinforced by Pauline Baynes's marvelous illustrations, do so much to bring this fictional world to vivid, memorable, and compelling life.

In this, and not only this, this movie version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," directed by Andrew Adamson of "Shrek" fame, is a terrific interpretation of Lewis's vision. An earlier attempt, the BBC's 1988 version (available on DVD in this country, but don't bother), was shipwrecked by puppet level performances, primitive effects, and a budget that cannot have exceeded £5, 2 pence, and a prayer. Stagy and contrived, it had the conviction of a pantomime horse, or, more accurately, lion, and belongs with Ralph Bakshi's atrocious "Lord of the Rings" in that special hell reserved for those movies that turn Inklings' dreams into dross. By contrast, the CGI that underpins Mr. Adamson's film will transport its audiences into a Narnia of witches, fauns, minotaurs, monsters (younger members of the audience will get a fright or two, which will probably do them good), giants, and talking animals as effectively as the train in the movie's early sequences carries the Pevensie children from the London Blitz into the depths of the lush, green English countryside (New Zealand, actually, once again passing itself off as the Shire), the heart of an Albion where landscape, legend, and history merge into myth.

These effects pass their toughest test in the film's climax, which is, if we're honest about it, a battle between two menageries. Handled incorrectly, this could easily descend into absurdity, but instead we're shown a stirring struggle that matches anything witnessed at Helm's Deep, and which does more than justice to that sense of the epic that plays so large a part in the enchantment that is Narnia.

As even the hapless nerds who plowed their weary way through the three most recent "Star Wars" films could tell you, though, special effects by themselves are not enough. The strength of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is that it not only features animals that can talk, it also boasts actors who can act. Almost without exception, the fine cast (even, such as in the case of Rupert Everett's delightful fox, when we only hear their voices) adds to the pleasure of the film, but it is Tilda Swinton's extraordinary Jadis who succeeds in stealing the movie despite failing to hang on to Narnia. With her almost translucent skin and austere, angular Scots features, Ms. Swinton is a natural to portray Lewis's witch:

"Her face was white - not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern."

And she is, as Ms. Swinton's commanding performance leaves no doubt, every inch a queen and in every thought and deed a force for bleak, relentless evil.

The young actors and actresses playing the four children who stand between the White Witch and her winter without end are more than up to the challenge, however. In particular, little Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is a beguiling, wide-eyed imp whose anarchic enthusiasm lights up the screen whenever she appears. Meanwhile her oldest brother, grave, responsible Peter (William Moseley), will delight the girls with his classic, slightly old-fashioned good looks and faint aura of the doomed subaltern of the trenches that C.S. Lewis so nearly was. And it would be invidious not to mention James McAvoy's charming, delicately touching Mr. Tumnus, the faun who is white rabbit to Lucy's Alice, and her introduction, and ours, to Narnia and the weird, heroic adventure that Lewis set out to describe.

It's a story to which Mr. Adamson and his writers have remained, quite rightly, almost completely faithful. They have, fortunately, avoided reproducing the feel of those passages in the original novel where Lewis comes across as a rather condescending vicar, but any changes or embellishments to the plot itself are minimal and, if it's not heresy to say so, an improvement. What's more, from the snowy wastes of the witch's domain to the glistening, gathering signs of thaw that signal that Aslan is indeed on the move, this unusually beautiful film also looks right: This is the Narnia that I saw when I read this book as a small boy nearly four decades ago, and there will be, I suspect, many others who will succumb to the same delighted nostalgia.

As for the book's message, such as it is, that's in the movie, as it should be, but why that should offend or upset anyone is beyond me. The film is never explicitly preachy, and the story itself stands on its own merits. Lewis, an inveterate (and, complained Tolkien, somewhat indiscriminate) miner of myth, knew that well-told sagas of quest, comradeship, war, self-sacrifice, and even resurrection have long gripped the human imagination. Under the circumstances, it's no great shock that "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was not to be the only excursion to Narnia, and it's not much more of a surprise that the combined "Chronicles" have now sold around 90 million copies.

Back to work, Mr. Adamson, your audience is waiting.

An Imperfect Enjoyment

The Libertine

The New York Sun, November 23, 2005

"The Libertine" is a fierce, intelligent, and compelling account of John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-80). It is also infuriating, not so much for what it is, as for what it could have been.

Perhaps this is inevitable. In the course of his brief, brilliant, dark shambles of a life, Rochester was a poet, a satirist, a wit, a lampoonist, a classicist, a thug, a drunk, a bully, a brawler, a hero, a coward, a lecher, a prankster, a kidnapper, a pimp, a penitent, a politician, an atheist, a jailbird, a courtier, an exile, and, curiously, an occasional importer of dildos. To describe - and explain - all that in two hours was never going to be easy, but, sadly, "The Libertine" (based on the 1994 play of the same name by Stephen Jeffreys) only covers the five years leading up to Rochester's death and never really tries to do so.

Adding to the sense of an opportunity missed, the movie makes little or no effort to show how the wicked earl was the perfect symbol of his torn, troubled age. Yes, with its startling juxtapositions of splendor and squalor, "The Libertine" skillfully portrays the uneven, unsettling, and treacherous surface of Restoration England, but it does too little to show the turmoil that lay beneath, turmoil that played no small part in making Rochester the man he became.

England in the 1670s was febrile, discontented, and restless, scarred by the recent civil war and unsure about what would come next. The monarchy may have returned after the collapse of a short-lived republic, but the old certainties had not. When the English revolutionaries decapitated the first King Charles, they also finally destroyed the idea that a king derived his authority solely from God. And if God's representative was no longer God's, what could hold society together? To the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (like Rochester, an atheist), the only feasible solution was an all-powerful state. To Rochester, the only possible response was "Who cares?"

His indifference extended far beyond political theory. With God a dead myth and the afterlife a shattered illusion, all that remained was to eke what enjoyment he could from an existence that was temporary, random, and pointless. Life was a joke, the punch line was savage, and the laughter hollow. Mr. Jeffreys's play hinted at all this, but the movie adaptation (on which he also collaborated) opts for disconcerting spectacle over troubling speculation, and the real inspiration of Rochester's wild ride is left in shadow.

Where the film does succeed, magnificently, is in its depiction of a man trapped in the obsessive pursuit of pleasures that only reinforced his self-loathing, rage, and despair and left him dead of syphilis at the age of 33. In the movie's deeply disturbing, hypnotic prologue, Johnny Depp's saturnine Rochester (another remarkable performance by this most remarkable of actors) warns the audience that we "will not like" him. It is just as clear that he does not like us. Nor, indeed, does he think very much of himself. His is a baleful vision, and it oozes the weary disgust that saturates the uncomfortable imagery of this bleak, demanding film. Rochester's circle of wits is made up of the corpulent, the malicious, and the grotesque, and his London is a primitive, merciless city, shot in drab, bleached, wan colors, where even the fittest are sick, and few survive for long.

These ideas descend into nightmare during the course of a scene inspired by Rochester's "A Ramble in St. James's Park," a poem of impressive obscenity that begins with the funniest two lines ever written on the subject of gossip - this is a family newspaper, so you will have to look them up yourself - and culminates in sour, desperate fury. A revolted Rochester is filmed stumbling through the mists, miasmas, and degradation of what was then London's naughtiest rendezvous (hopeful tourists should note that the park, these days, is not what it was). The frantic, rococo writhing, coupling, and who knows what is to Rochester yet another brutal reminder that you don't need God to make a hell.

But it's not all gloom, disease, and debauchery. "The Libertine" also offers a romanticized version of the liaison between Rochester and his teenage mistress, the actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton, in a rather earnest performance), that is part "Pygmalion," part feminist fable, and which conveniently manages to overlook its more, uh, mercenary aspects. To their credit, however, the movie's creators resist the temptation to apply today's dreary orthodoxies to the poet's relationship with the other Elizabeth, his wife, the Countess of Rochester (played to heartbreaking and aristocratic perfection by Rosamund Pike, a lovely actress so poised that she even brought a touch of class to last month's catastrophic "Doom"). While Rochester's girlfriends, boyfriends (oh yes, that too), mistresses, whores, and bastards put their strains on the marriage, the movie correctly leaves little doubt that the earl and his countess shared a real - and loving - affection.

This makes the cruelty of a critical scene in which Rochester humiliates his wife by refusing to stand alongside her for a formal portrait, posing instead with a monkey, all the more puzzling. So far as we know, Elizabeth never attended those sittings, and, typically for Rochester, the painting (it now hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery and shows him crowning a rather dissolute-looking monkey with a poet's wreath) was, primarily, a joke at his own expense. In Mr. Jeffreys's play, if not the movie, the artist understands: "Of all those bewigged men that I painted, bothering posterity with their long faces, he [was] the only one aware of his own absurdity."

On the whole, however, in terms of historical accuracy, "The Libertine's" sins are, unlike those of the earl, minor, mainly of omission, and usually excusable. Even if the idea that Rochester's farce "Sodom" was actually performed in front of an appalled King Charles II (a fine, louche, and cynical cameo by John Malkovich) is a fiction, it's a useful device to help illustrate the way in which the always complicated (and who does complicated better than Mr. Depp?) Rochester relished taunting the man who was his friend, patron, surrogate father, and, much more dangerously, monarch. It also gives "The Libertine's" director, Laurence Dunmore, an entertaining opportunity to demonstrate that there's more to British cinema's barnyard baroque than Ken Russell.

More seriously, the movie is too quick to pass over the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional drama of the poet's once-famous deathbed repentance. Right to his life's wretched, agonizing conclusion, Rochester remained trapped between the past and the future, teetering uneasily between the fear that there was a God and the terror that there was none, before finally toppling back into the faith of his fathers and the arms of his wife. Smug divines all over England were to celebrate the reprobate's return for decades to come.

And somewhere a monkey began to laugh.

Siren Song of the South

The Dukes of Hazzard

The New  York Sun, August 5, 2005

If, in 2005, a movie about two rednecks, one hottie, and a Dodge Charger emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag turns out to be a hit, it will say a lot for the appeal of nostalgia, the power of marketing, and the prospect of seeing Jessica Simpson in Daisy Dukes. It may even say something about the way this nation has finally come to terms with its bottom right-hand corner. And if it has, just a little of the credit must go to Bo, Luke, and Daisy and a show once described (in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) as the "worst thing to happen to the South since Appomattox."

Ah, yes, Appomattox. For a long, long, long time, America didn't quite know what to do about the South. Abraham Lincoln tried tough love. William Tecumseh Sherman burned it down. The land of the free may have owed its creation, at least in part, to Virginia aristocrats, but the way America evolved - more Horatio Alger than Ashley Wilkes - left the South in the role of an awkward, ornery, and embarrassing old relative, complete with nasty habits, eccentric behavior, and mossy, decaying real estate.

But if this country's politicians didn't know what to do with Dixie, its entertainment industry had no such problems. Confronted by a difficult, disconcerting Other that had no easy part to play in America's optimistic notion of itself, Hollywood preferred to either look the other way or, better still, make something up. In "Birth of a Nation" the dolts of the Klan were portrayed as latter-day Lancelots, rescuing white civilization in general, and Lillian Gish in particular, from barbarism. A quarter of a century later, the more decorous "Gone With the Wind" offered up moonlight, magnolias, and a Confederacy fought for by men in gray so noble it seemed rude to mention what, exactly, they were defending.

Times changed. During the years of civil rights protests and, eventually, legislation, Hollywood's South became the site of achingly earnest, eat-your greens dramas about race relations (none better - or more achingly earnest - than "To Kill a Mockingbird") as well as the preferred location for vicious prisons ("Cool Hand Luke"), dubious preachers ("Night of the Hunter"), all-around creepiness ("Hush ... Hush Sweet Charlotte"), or somewhat unsatisfactory vacations ("Deliverance").

Bracing material, but too bracing for the programmers of prime-time television, who took a very different tack. Beginning with "The Real McCoys" (1957-63), the adventures of a family of hicks from West Virginia transplanted to California, Southerness was played for laughs - and by hillbillies. Tara had been replaced by a beat-up shack, a banjo, and cornpone.

People have always laughed at yokels, bumpkins, and hayseeds, but there was something else about the McCoys, the Clampetts, and the heehawing, straw-chewin' rabble that followed them. Treating the South as a source of low, rustic comedy was a way of defusing and avoiding the troubling images coming up from Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery. At the same time, it was a way for the rest of the country to congratulate itself on being better, and smarter, than those relics, racists, and reactionaries living below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Then something unexpected happened. The rube tube was a smash, but audiences were laughing as much with as at the country folk. Stranger still, no one enjoyed these series more than the hicks who were their supposed target. And, no, it wasn't because they were funny - the leaden, ponderous, and preachy "Andy Griffith Show" (1960-68) has all the humor, pacing, and excitement of a funeral in Fargo. Their real appeal came from the subtext that, however hokey they may have been, the Mayberrys, Hootervilles, and Petticoat Junctions were the last repositories of the values of decent, traditional America.

This subtext became explicit with the arrival of the strait-laced and saccharine "Waltons" (1972-81), a simpering but weirdly compelling drama in which the only laughs were by accident. Compared with the staid, relentlessly moralizing Waltons, the ragtag roustabout Dukes - who burst onto the small screen in 1979, at about the time Olivia Walton mercifully left for the sanatorium - were the Manson Family. Dig a little deeper, however, and the two shows had a surprising amount in common, from a grandfatherly authority figure (Grandpa Walton, Uncle Jesse Duke) to the way that Southern culture was portrayed as blue collar, and, in its essence, Appalachian. The plantation was dead. Hazzard County may have been nominally in Georgia, but its soul was somewhere in Kentucky. The music was bluegrass, the moonlight was moonshine, and the magnolias were, well, Daisies.

Above all, as their names suggest, both shows were about family. In an interview recorded on a "Dukes of Hazzard" DVD (yes, dear reader, I own some), former Rep. Ben Jones ("Cooter") explained how in Hazzard County there was "law" (of a sort), but more importantly there was "order." It was the latter that Uncle Jesse represented, with his insistence on fair play, tradition, and kin. That the law, even when not administered by Sheriff  Rosco P. Coltrane, could be deeply flawed was an idea that ran through Hazzard County but could never be found anywhere on the squeaky-clean Waltons' mountain.

In this, the Dukes were tapping into the disdain for "gummint" that was, understandably enough, an increasingly prominent feature of Carter-era America, and for which CB-toting good ol' boys were a handy, lovable, proxy. The libertarian trucker epic "Convoy" and the more specifically Southern "Smokey and the Bandit" (a clear source of inspiration for "The Dukes of Hazzard") were just two movies that showed the way politics were going.

None of this would have counted for much if the Dukes, in their amiable, ramshackle way, weren't good television. True, the writers didn't bother to vary the story too much from episode to episode - plot by Boss Hogg to frame the Duke boys; car chase; pileup; rural metaphor-strewn conversation; gratuitous Bo and Luke skinny-dipping scene; hopelessly confused Coltrane; explosion; plenty, plenty, plenty of Daisy; failure of Hogg plot - and, yes, we should pass over the unfortunate business of Coy and Vance Duke, the anti-popes of Hazzard. But who's complaining? This was a show, after all, for which more than half the fan letters were addressed to the General Lee, a car.

Hazzard County was a fantasy, an inviting, sunny, bucolic farce, nicely filmed, skillfully played, beautifully embellished by a redneck Farrah and given some vague, very vague, structure by the dry, deadpan narration of Waylon Jennings. And did I mention that the music was great? No wonder so many tuned in each Friday to "visit." In the South, where the Dukes found their most enthusiastic audiences, some still do. The show's on CMT, Dukes Fests featuring a platoon of General Lees and an army of hollering fans (an estimated 40,000 of them this year) are a regular event, and the truly dedicated can travel to Cooter's Place in Gatlinburg, Tenn., for souvenirs and a glimpse of the legendary grease monkey's tow truck.

Back in the real world, sadly, Waylon is gone, Uncle Jesse has passed on, and the Boar's Nest has been turned into a church. But Hazzard County will never change.

Should You See It?

Former Rep. Ben Jones, the original Cooter, has denounced the new "Dukes of Hazzard" for its "profanity laced script" and "blatant sexual situations." But he hasn't seen it. I have. And having sat through this dreary and joyless mess, I can tell old Cooter that in a production this dull, a few more blatant sexual situations would have been very welcome indeed. As for the profanity in the script, it was nothing compared with the expletives really needed to describe a film so dreadful that, by the end, I was hoping the General Lee would be crushed by a Sherman tank - shipped in, perhaps, from a nearby war movie.

The problem is not that this film is dumb (although it is), but that it is mean-spirited, graceless, and lacking in any charm whatsoever. The television series was not exactly egghead fare, but its witless, cheerful joie de vivre and the easy rapport between its characters made it, at its best, a lot of fun.

The movie, by contrast, is oddly harsh (both Rosco and Hogg are far nastier than in the original), and painfully contrived. There's no chemistry at all between Bo and Luke, though they can barely get into a car without hollerin'; poor Daisy is reduced to a rent-a-siren, and even the inevitable brawl at the Boar's Nest comes across as an over-choreographed effort to go one broken bottle further than every other movie bar fight.

On the bright side, there are a few good jokes, some decent car chases, and a delightful performance by Kevin Heffernan as bait salesman, conspiracy theorist, and weirdo. The rest of the cast (including Burt Reynolds, who should have known better) appear to do as little as they can get away with, possibly to avoid embarrassing Jessica Simpson, who is a feast for the eyes but a famine for the brain. Poor dear, she cannot act at all. Nevertheless, she's probably the only reason to see this film.

Sorry, Congressman.

A Package of Spare Parts

The Island

the  New York Sun, July 22, 2005

As we all know from the movies, if you're going to clone something, clone something worthwhile: So, for example, don't clone dangerous dinosaurs, and don't clone Adolf Hitler. That's good advice. Unfortunately, Michael Bay, the director of "The Island," hasn't taken it. His new film may not exactly be a clone, but it certainly appears to have borrowed (there's some controversy about this) its central conceit from "Parts: The Clonus Horror," a low-budget, high concept fiasco from 1979 best known these days as a victim of the sarcastic nerds at "Mystery Science Theater 3000." That's a shame. An intelligent film about clones and cloning is long overdue. "The Island" is not it.

What we get instead are parts, so to speak, of "Clonus" minus the Herb Tarlek jackets and pleasantly gratuitous nudity, together with a fairly standard futuristic fleeing couple drama with more than a touch of "Logan's Run" about it, all wrapped up in the flash, dash and pizzazz of a film by Michael Bay, the creator of "Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor," and "The Rock." But while "Clonus" had a desperate, ramshackle charm, "The Island" is too commercial and too slickly packaged for that, something that is only reinforced by shameless product placement, intrusive even by the debased standards of contemporary Hollywood.

It's difficult to say too much about "The Island's" plot without giving the game away, but, for all the film's many faults, there's no doubt that Mr. Bay knows how to put together an entertaining summer movie (full disclosure: I enjoyed "Armageddon"). From the hallucinatory opening sequences, to the virtuoso fast cutting, to the rococo chases and baroque gunplay, to the feeble, and usually unsuccessful, lapses into humor, this is classic Bay, as evanescent, entertaining, and dumb as a day at the beach.

Oh yes, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson do their best to portray the runaway clones, and Steve Buscemi is convincing as a louse with a heart of gold, but it's not the actors that count in a movie like this.

Hollywood's Hideous Progeny

The New York Sun, July 22, 2005

In this time of Dolly, stem cells, and decoded genomes, it should be no surprise that Hollywood has sent in the clones. "The Island," the new genes-and-screams blockbuster that opens this week, may be trite, slight, and none too bright, but the appearance of a big-budget movie premised, however feebly, on the medical promise and moral contradictions of human cloning, is yet another reminder that Xeroxed people are now icons of social, scientific, and cultural unease.

In just the last few months, Kazuo Ishiguro has published the clammy and claustrophobic "Never Let Me Go," a novel that covers very similar ground to "The Island," and Joyce Carol Oates has done pretty much the same in the latest Atlantic Monthly, with "BD 11 1 86," a short story so unsubtle that Dick and Jane, by comparison, look profound: "But you, Danny, your body will survive for decades. As a body donor, you're one of the elite." Poor Danny. Poor readers.

The only real surprise has been how little Hollywood has done with cloning so far. To be sure, clones have played parts in movies, but films that concern their, um, issues are few and far between. That's strange. It's been more than 70 years since Universal Pictures' "Frankenstein" tapped so effectively, and lucratively, into humanity's fear of its own ingenuity, a fear that has since fueled countless films of science gone bad, mad, or both, and made more than a few moviemakers very, very rich. Horror stories about cloning ought to fit nicely into this genre, and what's more, given the fascination of the subject matter, raise its collective IQ.

That hasn't happened. To be fair, "Blade Runner" was an intelligent examination of what cloning could mean, but that's a movie more than two decades old. Mostly we've been given low-budget disasters, such as 1979's "Parts: The Clonus Horror" or big-budget disasters like Schwarzenegger's forgettable "The Sixth Day," and now "The Island." With politicians busy stoking up anxiety over this topic, it's only a matter of time before "The Island" becomes an archipelago. To discover what future movies about cloning will be like, just take a look at what has gone before.

To start with, to boost their scientific credibility, there will almost certainly be a microscope moment when human cells are shown dividing, or forming, or whatever it is they do after the cloning process has begun (see the recent "Godsend," for one) and, to the same end, expect to hear so much meaningless medico-technical babble that the only reasonable assumption is that the late "Bones" McCoy (or, presumably, his clone) is somewhere in the vicinity.

It goes without saying that at least one character will be accused of playing God (as one does in "The Island") and, just to ram home the message that we're talking serious stuff here, there's a good chance that the plot will include someone called Adam (as it does in both "Godsend" and "The Sixth Day") and that Adam will turn out to be a clone (ditto). Likewise, the movie's title may well refer to either the deity ("Godsend") or to His big book ("The Sixth Day"). Those able to sit through "Embryo" (an honorary cloning movie which merits inclusion in this survey - or, indeed any survey - on a number of grounds, not least a naked Barbara Carrera and a surreally entertaining dogfight) can see the religious imagery crowned by shots of Michelangelo's depiction of the Creation.

God matters, because the central conceit of such movies has been, and will be, that, in artificially creating life, man is trespassing on God's domain. At the moment that Victor Frankenstein brings life to his creation, he shouts (this is in the movie; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would never have been so gauche) that he knows "how it feels to be God." And the moment he says that, we know that he's finished. Frankenstein's saga derives much of its tragic force from the way it follows the rules of an ancient taboo, a taboo that Shelley's book, her "hideous progeny," did much to reinforce: There are some things that are not for man to discover. Ignore that fact and disaster will follow. Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, Icarus fell from the sky, and Frankenstein caused the destruction of those he loved.

So it is that, in the movies, human cloning is generally portrayed as a bad thing, and its consequences usually malign, even if the clones themselves may not be (hate the cloning, love the clone). But what is it about cloning that is so sinful? In an age when many no longer have any religious beliefs, simply asserting that the creation of life is the monopoly of a god is not enough. Shelley, an atheist, faced this problem by making her Victor realize that his experiment was so unnatural that he came to reject its results. Even so, Frankenstein's repudiation of his creature at the moment of its creation ("the beauty of the dream vanished ... and disgust filled my heart") seems as much aesthetic as moral, and is not entirely convincing. The problems for the modern filmmaker are even trickier: In an age of IVF, who is to say what is, or what is not, natural?

Hollywood has dealt with this intellectual challenge the old-fashioned way: by avoiding it. Usually ("The Sixth Day," "The Island") the people responsible for the cloning are portrayed as so vile, and their methods so vicious, or otherwise flawed ("Godsend"), that deeper questions can be dropped in favor of facile controversy, easy indignation, and junk science jabbering, and don't even get me started on the "Boys From Brazil." Can we all agree now that cloning Adolf Hitler is a really, really, bad idea?

But look carefully behind the ridiculous premises and flimsy plots of some of these movies, and it is possible to get a sense of why human cloning causes quite so much alarm. Narcissistic creatures that we are, it's all about us. Despite the fact that we share our planet with 6 billion others, the notion that homo sapiens generally, and ourselves individually, could be mass-produced appears to be an affront to our sense of self and species. Predictably enough, therefore, a number of movies (even the light-hearted "Multiplicity") include scenes in which clones confront their "parents," or vice versa, and either party (or both) ends up wondering who he or she "really" is - which, if anyone actually stopped to think about it, is something completely unaffected by the existence of a genetic duplicate.

More realistic, perhaps, is another fear that can be discerned beneath the surface of these movies, the fear that the clones aren't monsters, but that we, however, may be. "Blade Runner" is preoccupied by the question of whether clones are truly human (it concludes that they are), but most other movies seem to regard this as beyond dispute. Clones are like you and me (and you and me, and you and me). And they should be treated accordingly. Our dread is that we cannot be trusted to do so. In film after film, clones are abused, exploited, and treated as disposable objects by mankind. The real issue then becomes not their humanity, but ours.

And that's an entirely different question.

The Return of Novelty Boy

The New York Sun, July 8, 2005

Once, on a gray hangover Sunday morning quite a few years ago now, I saw Johnny Depp. He was stumbling along Sixth Avenue on the way to that flea market in the 20s, and so was I. He was a wan, disheveled wreck, and so was I. But he had Kate Moss in tow, and I, well ... I did not. Even back then Johnny Depp was a star, a Cary Grant for our ragamuffin times, a tatterdemalion Tom Cruise, James Dean without the car crash, a charmer, an enigma, a talent to watch - even if, judging by the box office of most of his movies, not many people did.

That began to change with "Sleepy Hollow" and "Pirates of the Caribbean," and could change even more with "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," which opens next week. But there's an excellent opportunity to assess his work right now at "In Deppth" (sigh), a retrospective opening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music today. Over the course of three weeks, BAM will show a selection of movies that convey a real sense of Mr. Depp's range, quality, and charm. Above all, filmgoers will be left with an impression of the extraordinary presence that he brings to even the most mediocre movies ("The Ninth Gate," I'm talking about you), a presence that owes something to Mr. Depp's good looks, but much more to his talent.

The idea that Mr. Depp has achieved what he has while defying Hollywood convention, however, is not quite correct. While he's too smart for red string and Kabbalah gibberish, Mr. Depp has in many other respects stuck to the standard script for a rising star: idiot preachiness ("America is dumb; it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive ... my daughter is four and my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out."), tabloid scandals, the usual substances, jail time, tragedy (poor River Phoenix twitched his last outside Mr. Depp's Viper Room), an awe-inspiring sequence of girlfriends, and displays of petulance that reached an early peak at the moment when (eat your heart out, Russell Crowe) he set his underpants ablaze on the set of "21 Jump Street": Apparently his motor home hadn't been cleaned for a while. Oh well.

It was on "Jump Street," though, that Mr. Depp's career began to veer in an unexpected direction. The hairstyle, acne, and just-say-no police drama had made his name and bank balance, but the actor felt "lost, shoved down the gullets of America as a young Republican. TV Boy, heartthrob, teen idol, teen hunk ... bound for ... lunch box antiquity. Novelty boy, franchise boy." Fair enough, but it took a truly perverse imagination to believe that Mr. Depp could lose his unwanted teen-idol tag by escaping to the big screen and playing, yes, a teen idol.

Yet in John Waters's delirious, delightful, and ridiculous "Cry-Baby" (screening July 10), he did. As the absurd, delinquent, but strangely appealing Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker, Mr. Depp is a beautiful, low-rent Elvis, shaking, sneering, and seducing his way through a performance that parodies both the heroes of our rockabilly past and the sort of stardom that Mr. Depp himself had been meant to aspire to. After "Cry-Baby," Mr. Depp's face may still have graced People, but his mind, it was clear, was elsewhere.

That movie pointed the way that Mr. Depp's career would go. It showed his endearing willingness to forgo other more commercial projects in exchange for the opportunity to work in films that he found intriguing, even if their directors - like Mr. Waters himself, or Jim Jarmusch ("Dead Man") or, in a sense, Tim Burton ("Edward Scissorhands," "Sleepy Hollow," and "Charlie") were outside the Hollywood mainstream. Also, it's notable (even if it's somewhat obscured by the carnival cast of grotesques, misfits, and oddities with whom, typically, John Waters peoples "Cry-Baby") that Wade Walker was the first of the oddball roles with which Johnny Depp, the boy who didn't want to be "novelty boy," was to make his name.

Until then, Mr. Depp's roles had been routine fare for a star on the make. He appeared without his trousers - or anything else - in a lowbrow sex comedy ("Private Resort"), he was shot at by the Viet Cong in "Platoon," and butchered by Freddie Krueger in "A Nightmare on Elm Street." In Wade's wake, however, he replaced the generic with the exotic, becoming something of a showcase for the peculiar, most notably with his two special Eds, Scissorhands and Wood, and, in "Pirates of the Caribbean," with Jack Sparrow, the weirdest scoundrel ever to sail the Spanish Main.

To Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Mr. Depp in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," a film in which the actor shone in a more normal role, Mr. Depp's preference for offbeat characters was a way of hiding in plain sight, concealed behind the eccentricities of those he portrayed. Perhaps, but it's more likely that Mr. Depp, a man who once bought the house which was (reputedly) the site of Munchkin orgies during the filming of "The Wizard of Oz," gravitated naturally toward roles that appealed to his well-developed sense of the bizarre, something that he often exploits but never abuses. The strangeness of the characters he plays is not an excuse to descend into pastiche, caricature or ham. Mr. Depp takes them seriously, and so, therefore, should we.

Inevitably, there are omissions at BAM, mainly recent offerings such as "Pirates," "Blow," and, mercifully, the overrated "Finding Neverland" (Ian Holm was a far more convincing Barrie in a BBC version of the same story). Fans of film fiasco will be disappointed that there's no opportunity to judge "The Brave," the only movie that Mr. Depp has ever directed, a project probably doomed from the moment that he decided to bless the beginning of filming with a Native American ritual.

No time to see all that BAM has to offer? Well, for a sense of Mr. Depp's range, try his subtle, sensitive portrayal of the conflicted undercover cop in "Donnie Brasco" (July 15), a character far removed from his usual madcap menagerie. Then there's the hypnotic "Dead Man" (July 30), an extraordinary, slow, slow, slow Western, teetering uneasily between a dream and a joke, with Mr. Depp compelling as he drifts helplessly toward his fate. But if there's only one film you can catch, it has to be "Edward Scissorhands" (July 9), Mr. Burton's masterpiece, and Mr. Depp's, too. A gorgeous fairy tale, this kinder, gentler "Frankenstein" has an almost mute Mr. Depp strapped into a leather bodysuit, those legendary looks lost under stark white makeup and a tangled black wig. Despite these handicaps, Mr. Depp somehow uses minimal dialogue, marvelously expressive eyes, and the tricks of an accomplished mime to convey the very essence of the being he portrays.

It's a performance that he hasn't topped, and there are some signs from his latest work that he may never do so. His Jack Sparrow was a wild, wonderful and inspired comic creation. Sparrow transformed "Pirates of the Caribbean" from dross into gold, but plans for a sequel and the imminent release of "Charlie" may be a harbinger of something altogether less welcome: the return of novelty boy, this time as a licensed, lovable eccentric, good box office certainly but entirely lacking the edge that has made Mr. Depp so great for so long.

Let's hope not.

There's Nothing About Drew

Fever Pitch

The New york Sun, April 8, 2005

The best thing that can be said about the new American "adaptation" of "Fever Pitch" that opens this week is that its directors - the usually reliable Farrelly brothers - knew that doing justice to Nick Hornby's morosely funny memoir was beyond them. Instead, they borrowed, then watered down, his sports-obsessed persona, added elements of the romance thrown into the English film of the book, and moved the whole thing to Beantown. Dour, dull, relentless Arsenal and its terrifying fans of 20 years ago, a horde out of Peckinpah, are transformed into Capra cornpone: the feisty, loveable Red Sox, and the feisty, loveable salts of the earth that worship them. To describe the script as lame would be to dis the disabled; let's just say that stock footage of Boston's not particularly inspiring skyline (included, doubtless, to make viewers forget the fact that much of the film was shot in Toronto) provides some of "Fever Pitch's more entertaining moments.

As the Hornby character, Ben, Jimmy Fallon of "Saturday Night Live" does what he can to liven up a movie that is, whatever your view of cryonics, more dead than Ted Williams. He's not helped by Drew Barrymore, still clinging to the sweetheart image she so laboriously built up after falling from disgrace. She portrays Lindsey, Ben's supposedly sophisticated investment banker girlfriend, as Laurie Partridge with a spreadsheet.

In truth, however, Lindsey and Ben only play supporting roles to the real stars of this film, the Boston Red Sox and their regrettable (look, this is The New York Sun you're reading) come-from-behind victory at the end of last season. If you want to savor those moments again, but this time in the context of an utterly unconvincing love story, see this movie.

Nick Hornby: Fever Pitch

Yes, the ball is round, but all the rest is wrong

In the decade or so since it first appeared, as unexpected as an English World Cup victory, Nick Hornby's peculiar, touching, and obsessive "Fever Pitch" has established itself as part of Britain's pop-cultural canon, a bestselling book that wowed both snooty critics and a legion of fans rarely seen studying a page without pictures. Just as remarkably, it was a memoir centered on football that won over those who knew little, and cared less, about a game of 90 minutes devoted to the kicking of a small round ball.

Round ball? Ah yes, Mr. Hornby was writing about what we Brits call "football" - something never, ever, to be confused with the ponderous spectacle known internationally, and with some disdain, as "American football." Nor, for that matter, should it be muddled up with the effete "soccer" played in the United States. That's a genteel game favored by high school girls and Title IX vigilantes, a pastime of great importance to the moms who are this country's most annoying political demographic, but which has had little to offer the rest of us since the sad moment Brandi Chastain pulled her shirt back on.

A few years ago, Mr. Hornby adapted his book for a British movie version of "Fever Pitch" (1997) transforming his oddball chronicle into a routinely soapy romance with the home team playing the role of the Other Woman (a theme which he dealt with more effectively in "High Fidelity," with old records, his other obsession, standing in for the Gunners). Now it has been again adapted, this time by the Farrelly brothers, into a disappointing film about, of all things, baseball.

Don't waste your time with either of these movies: Read the book.

The sport Mr. Hornby describes so well is not the glossy, celebrity-drenched "beautiful game" of English myth and Latin reality, but something altogether more dreary - something very specific, mercifully, to its awful era and depressing place, the disheartening, despondent England of 20 or 30 years ago. The games were dull, uninspired, and bloody, 11-a-side recreations of the battle of the Somme, marked, only (to borrow Mr. Hornby's phrase) by "dingy competence." If "you want entertainment," snarled one well-known coach, "go and watch clowns."

This was a time long, long before David Beckham, gentrification, and all-seater stadiums. It is a time remembered best with the help of driving rain, damp discomfort, and the smell of cigarettes and stale beer, a time when the game was dominated by characters like Arsenal's burly and menacing Charlie George, a creature whose very existence was proof that Neanderthal Man had survived into modern times. Mr. George was legendary, Mr. Hornby explains, for his inarticulacy, lack of savvy in dealing with the press, and, above all, the way in which the player's "long, lank hair remained unfeathered and unlayered right up until the time he unwisely decided upon a bubble perm from hell some time in the mid-seventies." No Posh for you, mate.

Back then, attending the Saturday afternoon footie, a blue-collar staple stretching back for a century, was an old rite rapidly turning rancid, marked by squalid, dangerously cramped stadiums, declining attendance and the constant threat of punch-ups, and worse, between warring fans. In the 1970s the violence was bad enough, but in the decade that followed "it was," Mr. Hornby wrote, "less predictable and much nastier. Police confiscated knives and machetes and other weapons ... things with spikes coming out of them; and there was that famous photograph of a fan with a dart sticking out of his nose."

Under the circumstances, it's a relief to report that, while its distinctly local flavor means that "Fever Pitch" is a book that will always be a minority taste in the United States, there's much more to it than reminiscences of a North London team whose exploits, however beautifully retold, are unlikely to compete with the fall of Troy as a saga with staying power. "Fever Pitch" is as much the self-mocking story of one man's obsession as it is a chronicle of games long gone: "With twenty minutes to go, Exeter went into the lead, and my girlfriend ... promptly did what I had always presumed women were apt to do at moments of crisis: she fainted. Her girlfriend took her off to see the ... ambulance men; I, meanwhile, did nothing, apart from pray for an equalizer."

If you are contemplating those words and thinking Mr. Hornby demonstrated an admirable sense of the right priorities, "Fever Pitch" is the book for you, and even more so for those understanding enough to be your friends. The stats-crazed, emotional roller-coaster, monomaniacal mind of the madder type of sports fan has rarely, if ever, been better described or, for that matter, more seductively. Following its publication, a startled nation suddenly found itself engulfed by copycat football nerds - boring, but essentially benign, and rarely associated with things with spikes.

But it is as autobiography that "Fever Pitch" really excels. Mr. Hornby was introduced to the game by his father, desperate to find something, anything, he could share with a young son hurt and angered by dad's departure from the family home. And it worked: "Saturday afternoons in North London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about ... and the days had a structure, a routine," Mr. Hornby wrote. "The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn; the Gunners' Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home." Supporting Arsenal ("the Gunners") became the means by which the boy finds himself and, finally, gradually, rather belatedly, comes of age, a story Hornby tells in a manner that is distinctively his own.

Mr. Hornby's own film adaptation was an agreeable enough effort, but it never won the audience of the original. To understand why, just compare the movie's conventionally happy conclusion with the book's final paragraph:

"Against Aston Villa, one week after Wrexham, my whole life flashed before my eyes. A nil-nil draw, against a nothing team, in a meaningless game, in front of a restive, occasionally angry but for the most part wearily tolerant crowd, in the freezing January cold. ... All that was missing was Ian Ure falling over his feet, and my dad, grumbling away in the seat next to me."

You don't get better than that.

What's So Fascinating About Office Politics?

In Good Company

The New York Sun, December, 29, 2004

In Soviet movies in Stalin's day, peasants sang and factories hummed. In America, by contrast, a country where the economic system has actually delivered the goods, Hollywood's hymns to the glories of office or factory are, with occasional exceptions, either off-key or nonexistent. Just as "Tucker - The Man and His Dream," possibly the finest movie ever made on the American auto industry, was about failure, so films about the American workplace tend to be dyspeptic, depressing, and filled with resentment: Chaplin's "Modern Times" is a parable of alienation, Billy Wilder's "Apartment" becomes a sty for management swine, and no salesman can watch David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" without drink in hand or razor blade on wrist. As for "The Man in a Gray Flannel Suit" - well, you get the picture.

In fact, with the dubious exception of those creepily contented employees in the current Wal-Mart commercials, the happiest laborers ever seen on American screens are those seven little fellows who used to whistle while they worked. Cartoon characters. Foreigners, Germans, as I recall.

None of this should be a surprise. Artistic types have never been too fond of capitalism, and they like turning up for a regular job even less. That said, the most striking aspect of movies about the workplace is not their content, but their rarity. Millions toil five days a week, but you wouldn't know it from the fare at the local multiplex. Exotic locations (Outer space! Ancient Rome! High school!) are used again and again, but films about the office are more difficult to find than laughs in a Chevy Chase comedy. The office isn't box office.

Some movies even may take place in the office, but they are not about the office. Law office and newsroom are movie perennials - "In Good Company" is a variation on the latter - but the 1980s, like the 1950s, generated movies set in the world of big business. "Working Girl," while hardly a careful exposition of the investment banking profession, was (like the equally fluffy "The Secret of My Success" ) a cheery reflection of the pro-business, can-do spirit of America under Reagan - a president whose greatest movie role, it should be remembered, was in the remarkable "King's Row," where he played a man who lost his legs but found happiness in real estate.

"Wall Street," meanwhile, was not about, well, Wall Street so much as it was a tale of the temptation, fall, and redemption of one man, a variant on a fable that has been around ever since that unhappy day in Eden; indeed, it is repeated in the Clinton-era "Boiler Room," a tale of the temptation, fall, and redemption of, yes, yet another young stockbroker.

But it was always going to be difficult for cinema to capture the essence of employment, which is its repetitiveness, the daily grind repeated year after year after year. Except, perhaps, in the more arid areas of the avant-garde, feature films need a story, a hero, and a clear narrative arc. Office life is not like that.

The most successful workplace film in recent years, "Office Space" - "Dilbert" on 35 mm - played corporate angst for laughs. Without the filter of humor, its tale of despair, cynicism, incompetence, and ennui would have been impossible to watch - at least by anyone with a cubicle to report to. "In Good Company," starring Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, and Scarlett Johansson and opening today, has more than a little in common with "Office Space."

Both are portrayals of the way in which modern corporations cloak age-old greed in new age sentiment and meaningless business school procedures - with the implicit message that this is typical of much of American capitalism. The difference, reflecting another half-decade of restructuring, globalization, and general white-collar mayhem, is that "Office Space" describes a company that was already dysfunctional, while "In Good Company" relates the history of a decent corporate culture overwhelmed by the demands of Globecom, its appalling - and unsubtly named - new owner.

The film is mostly enjoyable, though its tacked-on happy ending leaves something to be desired. But the need for such unrealistic interpolations, it seems to me, is one of the reasons office life has always been most effectively portrayed in television series - and, again, often as comedy. By allowing the viewer to return to the same location and the same characters week after week, a series generates a sense of routine (very) roughly analogous to showing up to work.

Unconfined by the constraints of the Hollywood hundred minutes, television's format allows for greater detail, slower plot development, and a depiction of more complex relationships than the Sturm und Drang of the silver-screen workplace. A researcher trying to get a sense of how young investment bankers spent their time in the 1980s would do far better to watch "Capital City," a British financial soap from that era, than return to the study, yet again, of Gordon Gekko's fortune cookie aphorisms.

Under the circumstances, it is no surprise that it is a television series, the BBC's "The Office" (you can catch it on BBC America, or on DVD) that is perhaps the finest depiction of the hopelessness of corporate life. Once again it's comedy, a brilliant, brutally observed, brutally funny "Spinal Tap"-style mockumentary about a dreary office, a drearier workforce and a boss so lost in ego and management babble that you wouldn't wish him on Donald Trump.

Appropriately enough, the series ended on a note so bleak that, by comparison, a suicide note would read like a script for "Friends." The show's creators later relented, producing a "special" episode that provided something approaching a happy ending. Wimps.

Why To See It

The destructive takeover of a nice local business by a rapacious outsider has been a staple of American cinema for years, long, long before the onslaught of Globecom, Larry the Liquidator ("Other People's Money"), and long, doubtless, before that dismaying crisis at George Bailey's shambles of a building and loan (you know what movie I'm talking about). What makes this film worth watching are three performances.

There's Dennis Quaid in the cliched, but still effective role of Dan Foreman, the veteran manager forced to compromise his principles to stay in a job that has become a penance, the reliably sinister Malcolm McDowell as "Teddy K," the charismatic boss of Globecom, cheered and feared by the employees he will inevitably "let go," and Topher Grace as the jargon-spouting young manager, in charge, but out of depth, brought in to boss Foreman around.

Like Peter Gibbons, the hero of "Office Space," Mr. Grace's character, Carter Duryea, comes to understand that he is an apparatchik trapped in a system in which he no longer believes. I don't want to tell how the movie resolves his dilemma, but like Gibbons, and like Melville's proto-slacker Bartleby before him, it becomes clear Duryea may simply decide that he prefers not to continue working for Teddy K or, for that matter, in any other office. He's left with a choice: wicked big business or free-spirited "authenticity."

I think you can guess what he decides to do.

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.

Brian's Back

National Review Online, July 1 2004

Life of Brian

Do you remember Brian, Brian Cohen? Yes, that Brian. You know, Monty Python's Brian, Life of. Well, 25 years on, he's back—back for his Second Coming. It has been a sly, mocking resurrection, a manifestation confined to a limited number of movie theaters, all timed to take advantage of (a little) this vintage comedy's quarter century and (a lot) Mel Gibson's startlingly savaged Savior. The Pythons themselves have been characteristically reticent about the timing of the film's re-release. Coyly, its director, Terry Jones, merely told the press that it was "just a piece of shameless commercial opportunism on our part. We were just hoping to make a quick buck on the back of Mel's Passion." Well, whatever it took, in a time marked both by the rise of superstitious belief and, worse still, an explosion of religious conflict unthinkable only a few decades ago, the return of sane, gentle Brian Cohen is good news indeed, worthy of a hymn, a hallelujah, or a hosanna or two except for the fact that—as that most modest of men used to say—he was not the Messiah: Perhaps a round of quiet applause will suffice.

It seems strange now, but when Brian's biopic was first released in the U.K., there was furious controversy, angry debate, and (wild language for amiably agnostic Albion) even talk of "blasphemy." Vicars vented, priests prattled, bishops called for a boycott, a few politicians remounted their high horses, and, chicken-hearted EMI pulled its backing (George Harrison stepped in with replacement funding).

In the land of the Pilgrim Fathers, the reaction was, predictably, even harsher. Writing recently in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman recalled how Life of Brian "scored a perfect trifecta—denounced as blasphemy by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the Lutheran Council ('a disgraceful assault'), and the Rabbinical Alliance of America ('foul, disgusting')." The movie was picketed, banned in certain places, and, the ultimate seal of approval, condemned by Senator Strom Thurmond (a whitewashed sepulcher if ever I saw one).

The protests took their toll. On both sides of the Atlantic, cinemas hesitated over whether or not to take the film, but a decent number did the decent thing. The movie found an audience and, so far as is known, neither viewers nor projectionists nor popcorn sellers were bothered by boils, struck by lightning, or plagued by locusts, flies, frogs, or any of the other unpleasantness so often associated with annoying the Man Upstairs. Rumors that one ticket vendor was turned into a pillar of salt somewhere in the north of England can safely be discounted.

As usual, God got it right. Despite being born on the appropriate day in the appropriate town (something that briefly confused the three wise men and led to some unpleasantness over the gold, frankincense, and myrrh), Brian was, the movie makes clear, not the Messiah. He was not Him, his mother was Mandy, not Mary, and his Life was not blasphemy. Reinforcing this point, Brian is shown listening—at a distance, and with some interest—to the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is portrayed with respect. It is only His message that gets garbled ("Blessed are the cheese makers"?) by a crowd too preoccupied by its own bickering to concentrate on what Christ had to say. Come to think of it, that scene would make a fine sermon in its own right.

This is not to claim that Life of Brian is some sort of religious tract. Far from it. If there's any type of belief that runs through the movie, it's disbelief, unbelief, a world-weary skepticism that reaches its height or its depth (take your pick) on a jam-packed Calvary with the massed ranks of the crucified singing a rousing song that, in its blend of nonchalance, nihilism, and slightly deranged Epicureanism, has few peers:

...If life seems jolly rotten

There's something you've forgotten

And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.

When you're feeling in the dumps

Don't be silly chumps

Just purse your lips and whistle—that's the thing.

And...always look on the bright side of life...

Always look on the light side of life...

For life is quite absurd

And death's the final word

You must always face the curtain with a bow.

Forget about your sin—give the audience a grin

Enjoy it—it's your last chance anyhow...

It has a pretty good tune too.

To be sure, Life of Brian is unlikely to make it very soon into the Vatican's video collection but, unless the Pythons' secularism is of itself "offensive," there really ought to be little in their film to annoy most people of faith—so long as they have a sense of humor, that is. The real target of the movie's satire is not religion as such, but the unholy baggage that too frequently comes with it—the credulity, the fanaticism, and that very human urge to persecute, well, someone.

Watch, for example, poor Brian as he flees Jerusalem pursued by his "disciples." His frantic attempts to deny that he is the Messiah are ignored by a crowd desperate for someone, anyone, anything, to worship, but also intent on proving their own righteousness in that most pleasurable of ways—at the expense of others. Acolytes of Brian's gourd feud with devotees of his shoe, and all indulge in the nasty joys of schism. If Ingmar Bergman had directed Life of Brian, the rest of the movie would have been a grim depiction of an even grimmer religious war, concluding, doubtless, with a bleak finale in some northern European wasteland. But as Bergman didn't, and Terry Jones did, we get a naked hermit, the "miracle" of the juniper bushes, a Pontius Pilate who can't pronounce his "r"s, and, to end it all, that surprisingly cheerful crucifixion.

But as amusing as this movie is (and it is—despite 25 years in the vaults, it stinketh not), Life of Brian is difficult to watch without a sense of sadness. At the time it was made, the Pythons' "Passion" seemed to be taking aim at a soft target. In the West, at least, centuries of superstition, intolerance, and fanaticism seemed gradually to be receding into the past, mourned by a dwindling few. The established religions appeared reconciled to a comfortable, if decreasingly prominent, niche within the secular states of the post-Enlightenment, and where the West led, the rest of the world would surely follow.

Times change. To take just a few wretched examples from the cornucopia of cant on offer on these fruited plains, the nation created by the revolution that was the Age of Reason's finest hour now finds itself lost in nonsense. It is wrapped up in the Rapture, preyed on by Gantrys, prayed at by Falwells, prayed for by Jacksons, dumbed down by creation scientists, and hectored by ranting First Amendment fundamentalists who react to a cross as if they were vampires. Oh yes, fanaticism can be secular too. Just ask the People's Front of Judea (or was it the Judean People's Front?), zealots content to leave Brian to die on the cross, a handy martyr for their cause.

And when organized religion fades, the disorganized variety rushes in. As we stumble back towards the darkness of that beckoning cave, we let ourselves be spellbound by, to take a selection, pagans, Wiccans, shamans, seers, crystal-gazers, aliens, pieces of red string, table-tappers, Gaia, suburban necromancers, sidewalk psychics, and that blend of bunkum, baloney, science fiction, and Hollywood that calls itself the "religion" of Scientology.

But above all—and compared to which those tatty idiocies are nothing but trivia—the return of militant Islam and its encroachment once more on the people and the territories of the West force us to face, yet again, the horrors of religious war, this time an onslaught from Arabia's seventh-century darkness, in which the promise of heaven will be used as a justification for true believers to create a hell on earth for all those who oppose them. In a time when young men fly planes into office buildings in the hope of earning themselves an eternity with 72 virgins, it's difficult to look at those parts of Life of Brian in which the movie played on the baroque cruelty of (what then seemed) ancient history without as much unease as amusement. The long and originally very funny sequence that culminates in John Cleese being stoned for blasphemy now conjures up images of the Taliban's bestial Kabul. Later on, we see the Judean People's Front planning to kidnap and then behead the wife of Pontius Pilate, and the bloodiness of the scheme only serves to underline the utter incompetence of the conspiracy. We laughed then, back in 1979. Beheading? Ridiculous. We don't laugh so easily in 2004. Not after Daniel Pearl. Not after Nick Berg. Not after Paul Marshall Johnson.

So, to break the mood, turn for some words of wisdom from sensible, doomed, hapless Brian. There's a lovely moment when, appalled by the spectacle of the faithful gathering beneath his window, he tells them that, "you don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody. You've got to think for yourselves, you're all individuals." Simple stuff, but, these days, pretty good advice.

Even if it's not The Greatest Story Ever Told.