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BIRTH OF A NATION: PART 2
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
As the film's opening sequence establishes, the Knights in question are neither English nor Roman but Sarmatian - a race who lived somewhere east of the Roman Empire in its heyday, near Mesopotamia. They were vanquished by the Romans, but their military prowess so impressed the conquerors that they and their descendents were spared, albeit in return for never-ending servitude to Rome. Lancelot is one such indentured warrior, as are the familiar Galahad (noticeably not Lancelot's son, as lore would have it), and Gawain, as well as several unfamiliar characters: Bors, Tristan, and Dragonet.
This multitude of nations and religions greatly reconfigures the axes of good and evil, complicating the simple moral dynamics of the Arthurian legend. The narrative simplicity of folkloric mythology only accommodates moral absolutism: unambiguous statements explaining which characters are good and which are evil. It's fitting that a film that rigorously shuns this epic tradition bears the marks of moral ambiguity, although such complexity betrays the legend's accepted codes. The myth of King Arthur serves a double purpose: it's a foundation or origin myth that both reifies the British feudal system and establishes the divine right of Christian kings. Arthur, as the progenitor of and model for the line of monarchs who derived their authority from God, should align himself, morally speaking, with Germanius, rather than the heathen Pagans. He is the ur-King, a figure of impeccable egalitarian morals and devout Christian piety. Yet, by that act of reneging on a contract, the Holy Romans are immediately cast as antagonists, a role into which they sink deeper and deeper as the action progresses, each new religiously-motivated transgression making their beliefs all the more unpalatable. As Artorious reaches the besieged outpost in the north, he perceives the opulence of the Roman colonials and the squalor endured by the native Britons. As the knights prepare to depart with Papal godson in tow, they observe the clerics bricking up an underground chamber; within they uncover atrocities committed upon Pagans (including Keira Knightley's Guinevere), prosecuted with a zeal that anticipates the Spanish Inquisition. Arthur's mounting revulsion at this decidedly un-Christian non-tolerance signals a break with Roman-Christian (i.e. Catholic) ideals. His mission becomes that of establishing an endemically British form of Christianity. It would be easy if it weren't for those damned Pagans.
Therein lies the problem: the bloodthirsty Woads perceive him as aligned with the prosecuting Christians, ignoring his dual identity as both Briton (on his mother's side) and Roman (his father's). He wears the armour and helm of a Roman centurion, but his accent runs thick with War English; he is a liminal king, posed between equally legitimate national allegiances. It's easy to miss amid the flash and fury of battle scenes and thundering hooves, but etched into Arthur's battle-scarred face is a slowly deepening furrow of indecision: whether to uphold Christian ideology or to respect his national birthright. As one atrocity piles upon the next, Arthur's sympathies tend toward the Woads - a wild nation who hold him in contempt. With narrative serendipity, the Christian king and his profane British subjects find common ground in a common foe: the Saxons. Thus the two enter an uneasy alliance cemented by the marriage of Arthur and Guinevere the Woad. Here we come to the heart of one kind of "truth" contained in Fuqua's Arthur: the birth of a nation, generally depicted through ethical divides established by myth, is here portrayed in terms of moral ambiguities, political alliances, and diplomatic exigencies.
What Fuqua loses, of course, are some of the legend's most tantalizing story lines. Lancelot, for example, perishes in the final combat, eliminating the possibility of adultery with Guinevere. Boorman's Excalibur, for all its hammy acting, cheap sentimentality and shoddy sense of storytelling, at least embraced every aspect of the Arthurian myth. But Fuqua wants to profess his authenticity and eat the fabulous too; in a bit of extra-textual cheating, he evokes familiar tropes from the tale's various mythic iterations while at the same time claiming to tell a "true" story devoid of fantasy. Lancelot's gazes at Guinevere are rendered longing and meaningful by our knowledge that elsewhere, in other myths, they have been lovers. The trailers also traffic in the mystical. Fuqua's Merlin is non-magical, but shots from the trailer frame his arms towards a raised tempestuous sky, as if conjuring nature's elements responded to his command. Likewise, Excalibur is only briefly referenced, but Fuqua's treatment of Arthur drawing the weapon from a burial mound is cribbed from every mystical depiction of sword-in-the-stone extraction imaginable; in trailers, the full-grown Arthur is bathed in a supernaturally green light and posed against a ghostly graveyard as he exhorts "Lord, guide my hand and Excalibur. I am ready." Fuqua's claims for Arthur's unvarnished reality are somewhat disingenuous because he uses mythical short-hand, subtly incorporating fairy tale associations while simultaneously professing a devotion to stark, non-metaphorical history.
Fuqua marshals other cultural codes and conventions to flesh out this tale. Arthur's trajectory of the king in Arthur plays very much like a Shakespearean history, especially Henry IV and V. Just as the young Plantagenet learned the rough speech of criminals and commoners from Falstaff in IV, and gleaned the thoughts of his populace by walking in peasant's garb amongst the soldiers before the battle of Agincourt in V, Arthur too must learn the ways of his people before he can assume the throne. Having lived his life behind the defensive barrier of Hadrian's Wall, he has lived out of touch with his countrymen. He undergoes a transformation-from general to king, from Latinate Artorious to Anglicized Arthur - once he comes to understand the nation's plight and is thus compelled to act. The cast of Knights surrounding him are strikingly evocative of the characters Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym from Henry V. These companions function as allegories for the nations and tribes - England, Scotland, and Wales - eventually to be unified under a single flag. That unification comes with a marriage of warring factions; just as King Henry marries Queen Isabel to reconcile England and France in Henry V, Arthur's union with Guinevere in the final sequence is a synecdoche for the harmony, prosperity, and union of the once troubled Britain. Tending away from fantasy, this Arthur seems suited to statecraft and judicious rule, recognizable in his libertŽ-egalitŽ-fraternitŽ sermons to his troops, and a tolerance for their Pagan beliefs. (A minor quibble: the idea of a religiously tolerant British king is wholly unbelievable-cf. Henry VIII.) It's also anachronistic: one can hardly imagine a true feudal lord speaking to his vassals of individual freedom, equality under God, and a brotherhood of men - his speech before the final Saxon showdown moves Arthur again into the realm of the secular and profane. "If this be our destiny, so be it," he says. "But let history remember, that as free men we chose to make it so."
It is an incredible antebellum call to war, one of the few in recent memory that can legitimately be compared with the one made by Shakespeare's Henry V on St. Crispin's day. However, it is the only truly showy scene to be found in the duration of King Arthur, for Fuqua, in keeping with his quest for authenticity, has banished most epic-worthy conceits. In the past few years, Hollywood has gotten back into the mythic-war-waging business. Troy, the redoubtable Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even the last Knightley-Bruckheimer collaboration, Pirates of the Caribbean, have all staged period battles marked stylistically by a predilection for sweeping panoramas, swooping helicopter shots, deep focus vistas, and wall-to-wall digital effects. King Arthur is their aesthetic antithesis. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak predominantly shot high-speed film, ideal for capturing fast action in low light, but with coarse and grainy results. The night photography, in particular, literally pulsates. This approach infuses the frame with a gritty, earthy tone that compliments the swarthiness of the warriors, who, in turn, are bloodied and muddied from head to toe.
Idziak and Fuqua take pains to avoid photographing Arthur, his Knights, and their dwellings in shining armour and loving soft focus - another departure from Excalibur and its kind - zeroing instead on the griminess; everything is dirt and decay, befitting the Dark Ages. Clive Owen's Arthur, already dark and brooding, is appropriately stubbled and battered. The cinematography continually thwarts the epic impulse toward vast panoramas and sweeping vistas, the background obscured by swirling snowflakes and smoke. The device serves double duty as a pathetic fallacy - the fitful torrent of Arthur's mind finds a correlative in whipping snow; burning smoke in the second half reflects his rage towards the invading Saxons-but also shortens the depth of field, emphasizing the foreground of the frame, which is often filled with uncomfortably tight close-ups of scarred, bloody faces. The exigencies of violent conflict do not permit the contemplation of majestic scenery; beautiful landscapes are a luxury that's impossible in the climate of war.
The battle sequences are constructed with novel intelligence and carefully considered geography. The first, the Woad attack on the Roman convoy, encapsulates Arthur's ambivalent relationship with the native Brits and the Romans. Fuqua introduces him observing the convoy from afar, placing him at a distance from Rome; when the Woads attack, he and his men rush to the bishop's defence, and Fuqua puts himself between two warring sides, a position he'll occupy for the next hour of the film. For the second battle, Fuqua opts for the novel setting of a frozen lake surface where the seven knights make a stand against a horde of Saxons, using arrow and bow to force the enemy ranks to concentrate together until the ice cracks under their weight. The third and ultimate conflict, between the Woad-Sarmatian alliance and the Saxons is a gritty, chaotic marvel. Fuqua casts aside the traditional approach (continuity, discernible lines of action, clear formations of battle ranks), most recently on display in Troy, in favor of frenetic disorder. Smoke and flying mud occlude the frame, firmly established geographical trajectories yield to broken mapping, and soldiers are bloodied beyond the point of recognition. We are unsure who is winning and who is losing. For chaotic choreography and utter disorientation, the sequence recalls the uncontrolled furor of the final battle in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. It's almost as if Fuqua wanted to refute the clean, orderly warfare waged in The Lord of the Rings and Braveheart. Clearly defined axes of direction are fine for the decorum of fantasy but don't serve earthy verisimilitude well.
For all the ingenious cultural pastiche in King Arthur, it's still hard to ignore the film's weaknesses. Lowest common denominator dialogue reduces momentum, and one wishes that screenwriter David Franzoni hadn't put the following words, for example, into the mouth of a newly-rescued Guinevere: "My father told me great tales of you, fairy tales. People so brave, so selfless that they cannot be real-Arthur and his Knights." In one sentence she gives away Fuqua's impetus for making the film-i.e., to create a more truthful, less sentimental anti-epic. Too bad he feels the necessity to spell it out rather than trust his audience. Perhaps it's just growing pains. In the context of his previous films, Training Day and Tears of the Sun, which both demonstrate the heft of moral ambiguity and genuine intelligence, Fuqua shows himself to be a filmmaker steadily growing in talent. - JAMES CRAWFORD
http://www.arthuriana.co.uk/historicity/arthur.htm
© 2004 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
