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BIRTH OF A NATION
Antoine Fuqua's rendition of the King Arthur legend purports to present the reality instead of the myth - but James Crawford can't handle the truth.
a Film Comment online exclusive
Critics have assailed Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur with the slings and arrows of outraged verbiage-and prima facie, they are somewhat justified. The film's outward trappings bear the marks of a prototypical mindless blockbuster: extended passages of clunky testosterone-saturated dialogue; medieval knights hacking the bejesus out of each other on bloodstained battlefields; and, of course, a Jerry Bruckheimer production credit. And yet, despite its problems, King Arthur is rendered with sophistication, cultural awareness, and considerable intelligence.
That said, the publicity campaign arouses reasonable skepticism. Trailers herald that this, contrary to all other Arthurian recreations, is the true story of the Once and Future King, a claim that is of course preposterous. Current scholarly speculation has narrowed the man down to a group of four or five kings from the Sixth or Seventh century A.D.; the rest remains conjecture. The film's claim that Arthur "was a real man" seems to stem from the Historia Brittonum, one of the few extant documents that alludes to Arthur's historical identity. That work's veracity, however, is severely compromised because its image of the king was actually based on fictional epic poetry. While any claim purporting to tell the single, irrefutable truth about Arthur is patently absurd, King Arthur finds itself in good, if controversial company: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, also touted as a definitively truthful account, is itself derived primarily from only one account (the Gospel according to Mark) while the other three Gospels-especially John's-are marginalized. At least Gibson depicts a man whose existence we are sure of (it is the exact life-and-death details that are obscured); Fuqua is fleshing out a man whose very reality is based on fiction. Why must filmmakers insist on speaking the absolute, irrefutable "truth" about figures who only can be murkily known through the fog of a thousand years? Because fidelity does not mesh with the traditions of summer blockbusters; fidelity is not big box office.
Putting aside the rhetorical flourish of the film's marketing, when Fuqua speaks of "truth," he's using shorthand indicating that this version of King Arthur eschews the mythic and magical in favor of the earthy, the political, and the quotidian. Since the late 12th century, the Arthurian myth has burrowed its way into literature. With Chretien de Troyes epic poem, it began to take on its final form, and with Thomas Malory's 15th-century Le morte d'Arthur Lancelot and Guinevere's adultery, the sword in the stone, and Merlin's wizardry were most lucidly crystallized. Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King gave the myth a Victorian spin, while T.H. White produced that scourge of 11th-grade literature classes, The Once and Future King, just prior to WWII. It is from White's version that Disney cribbed their animated The Sword in the Stone (63). Each of these has a strong sense of moral clarity (Arthur and Christianity are equally exalted for their righteousness) and a heavy reliance on fantastic events.
John Boorman's Excalibur (81) trades exclusively on fantasy, incorporating the familiar tropes of the Arthurian myth, while Disney's Sword utilizes White's animal transformations to depict the young king's education. The singing-dancing spectacle Camelot (67) relies on Merlin for its very structure; the wizard exhorts Arthur to think back on his past, in essence conjuring the flashback that frames the film. Thematically King Arthur owes more to Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac (74), which resolved to render the tale of questing knights as ingloriously as possible. Fuqua deliberately rebuts fanciful Arthurian epics by making character and setting unremarkable. The director's motor, from his epigraph concerning the identity of Arthur the man, is history.
Arthur is not, as in the myth, the offspring of Uther and Igraine's near-rape union, but the child of a Roman and native Briton; he does not pull Excalibur out of a stone as in Le morte, but out of his father's burial mound. Guinevere is not rescued from a tower besieged by the witch Mordred, as in Tennyson's eponymous poem, but from a dungeon where she has been the victim of religious persecution. Merlin is neither an omnipotent wizard moving backwards through time nor Arthur's mentor in the Once and Future King, but a leader of a belligerent blue-faced tribe whose only mystical ability is to emerge from and retreat into the wilderness at will.
Thus we are plunged into geopolitical turmoil. Merlin's azure army of Woads, the Pagan natives living in England north of Hadrian's wall, devote their lives to ousting the Romans. The latter are led by Clive Owen's Artorious, who serves as a regional general for the occupying forces. In the adroitly captured first battle sequence, the Woads unleash an unholy torrent of Pagan arrows upon a Roman convoy. After Arthur and his knights repel the attack, the convoy's true purpose is revealed. It carries Bishop Germanius, sent by the Holy Roman Empire to release Arthur and his knights from their bonds of servitude. The Empire is withdrawing from its outer reaches, and soon England will be left to its own devices. However, before they are given their freedom, the Knights must rescue the Pope's favourite godson and pupil, who, living north of Hadrian's wall, is in danger from invading Saxon hordes.
