"Kingdom of Heaven"

I finally got around to watching Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven.” It succeeds at certain levels, and had the potential to be a modern masterpiece. But because he used it as a vehicle to score political points, it fell short of greatness.

It succeeds at a visual level, which is obviously important in a film, where visuals are a dominant element of the medium. Scott has a wonderful eye.

Mind you, there are times when it’s a little too much of a good thing. Too good to be believable. A computer enhanced stage set. I seriously doubt that Medieval Jerusalem was that pristine.

But, in general, this is a great looking film, and that’s something we look for in films, especially sword-and-sandal epics.

I also think it’s well cast from start to finish. Some critics think that Orlando Bloom is underpowered for the part. But I think that misses the point.

He plays the character of a reluctant hero, not an epic hero. And his military prowess is technological rather than muscular.

If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s not with the actor, but with the way the character was written. In a traditional sword-and-sandal epic, the part would be played by an actor like Kirk Douglas or Charlton Heston—who didn’t so much act as declaim hortatory speeches and project all-American manliness.

Bloom isn’t that kind of actor because he’s not that kind of guy. But it’s also not that kind of character.

There is one point at which I think Ridley Scott makes Balian act out of character. Balian is given a chance to marry Sibylla. But he refuses because her husband would be have to be assassinated. Yet, considering the fact that he’s having an affair with Sibylla, his scruples are rather sudden and selective. I think he’d welcome the opportunity to formalize their affair, even if he found the methods a bit distasteful.

I also don’t believe for a moment that Sibylla would abdicate the thrones of Acre, Ashkelon, and Tripoli to follow a man with no worldly prospects.

The theatrical release was butchered by the producers. The Director’s Cut fills in the blanks and restores narrative coherence.

One effect of the Director’s Cut is to make the character of Sibylla considerably less sympathetic. For example, there’s a scene in which, referring to adultery, she says the Decalogue doesn’t apply to aristocrats, only commoners.

There’s another scene in which she euthanizes her young son after discovering that he’s in the early stages of leprosy. One can understand, at an emotional level, why a mother couldn’t stand to see her son steadily deteriorate. But that’s a selfish motive. Sparing her own feelings.

Not doubt she’d justify this as a way of preventing her son from suffering the ravages of leprosy. But if that’s the motive, then that’s his call to make, not hers. It’s his life. That would be an argument for suicide, not homicide or “mercy-killing.”

And, of course, the entire outlook is profoundly unchristian. We are here to learn from our adversities. It’s a source of sanctification. Holiness is far more important than good health.

This goes to another problem with the film. There is not a single character who is truly admirable from a Christian standpoint.

But the greatest failing of the film is the way in which Ridley Scott turned it into a piece of antiwar propaganda at the expense of historical accuracy.

The problem is not that he plays fast and loose with historical details. We all understand and appreciate the principle of artistic license. The problem is that Scott rewrites history for ideological rather than artistic reasons.

He isn’t taking liberties with history to make the film more dramatically effective. That would be acceptable. No, he’s taking historical liberties to promote his naive pacifism.

And this also illustrates the hypocrisy of liberal multiculturalism. What’s the point of making a movie set in a different time and place if you take no interest in other people? If you don’t try to get inside their world? If you simply use the historical trappings as a thinly-veiled cipher for your own cultural prejudice?

Suppose you made a movie about the Iroquois in which every Indian acted like a Valley Girl or Valley Guy? Why bother?

Liberals pretend to interested in other cultures. They pretend to be tolerant. But, in fact, they don’t listen and learn. They presume to speak on behalf of others, rather than allowing others to speak for themselves. They simply superimpose their own cultural values on everyone else in the name of “multiculturalism.”

Imagine if Scott had made a movie about the Crusades that was true the period? That showed you how medieval Muslims and Jews, Latin Christians and Eastern Christians really thought and acted. There’s a lot of dramatic potential for a film like that.

And artistic license doesn’t mean that you systematically falsify history. You can change or invent specific historical incidents while remaining true to the way in which someone at that place and time would have thought, spoken, or acted. It can be historically authentic at a generic level even if specific characters or incidents are fictitious.

But Scott’s problem is that he wants to make a political statement, and the history of the Crusades undercuts rather than underwrites his preconceived agenda. Even worse for him, although many contemporary Christians no longer share the outlook of the Crusaders, many contemporary Muslims continue to share the outlook of the jihadist warriors who overran the Holy Land in the first place.

Some final thoughts on “Kingdom of Heaven”:

It made me aware of how subliminally Protestant I am. How much I’ve internalized Jn 4:21,23. Looking at the “holy” shrines where pilgrims pray at a legendary site which sacred tradition assigns to something Jesus said or did, I wish someone would hang out a shingle saying: “Jesus doesn’t live here anymore!”

You’re not going to find Jesus in Bethlehem or Jerusalem. If you’re searching for Jesus, you don’t have to pack your bags and travel thousands of miles. Jesus isn’t hard to find. He isn’t far away.

Open the Bible to the Gospels. That’s where you’ll encounter him. In this life, that’s as close as you’re going to get. And that’s as close as you need to get. Draw near to God in his Word, and he will draw near to you in your life. God comes to you when you come to him in his Word. That’s where we meet in him here on earth.

Having said that, I do believe in the right of Christians to live and worship in the Mideast, where they’ve done so since the inception of the Christian faith. Although I don’t believe in waging war for bit of “holy” real estate, I do believe that Christians have every right to live and worship wherever they please. The steady encroachment of the Mohammedan needs to be met and beaten back wherever possible.

The movie also reminded me that, historically, Christendom looked to the Holy Land rather than Holy See. Even for Latin believers, Jerusalem, and not the Vatican, was the spiritual center of gravity.

I wonder if Marian apparitions don’t function as a portable Jerusalem. Ever since Muslims conquered the Mideast, Christian access to the Holy Land has been touch-and-go.

But Mary can pop up anywhere, from Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima, through Medjugorje, to bank windows, a grilled-cheese sandwich, or a freeway underpass. Our Lady is quite the globetrotter.

The Holy Land has a fixed latitude and longitude, and Jesus ascended to heaven, but who needs the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as long as Mary will touch down from time to time to sanctify a cubic foot of topsoil near you?

I’ll finish with a few comments by a medieval historian who saw the movie:

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Neither Saladin nor Baldwin were tolerant rulers seeking peace between Muslims and Christians. The real Baldwin flew into a rage when he learned that Guy failed to attack Saladin in 1183. The real Saladin was, according to his biographer, filled with joy as he watched the decapitation of hundreds of Christians in 1187. Saladin preached jihad throughout his reign, making no secret of his desire to capture Jerusalem and massacre its Christian inhabitants. Both Baldwin and Saladin were, not surprisingly, men of their times, not ours.

Rather than catalogue all of the historical inaccuracies in this movie (and they are legion) I will confine myself to two general threads of anachronism that are woven throughout. First, the Kingdom of Jerusalem is frequently referred to in this film as a “new world.” It was nothing of the sort. Indeed, it was the oldest of the Old World. To watch this movie one would think that the Holy Land was a recently-discovered virgin wilderness just waiting for colonization by strapping young blacksmiths. Balian even sets up his own plantation, thus introducing irrigation to the Fertile Crescent. The Holy Land that Scott and Monahan describe clearly owes much more to post-medieval British history, where overseas lands of opportunity like North America, Australia, and India offered a fresh start for those seeking a new life.

The second major anachronism is the movie’s approach to religion. Most people know that the Crusades were wars of faith. Crusaders underwent extreme hardship, risking their lives and expending enormous amounts of money because of their devotion to Christ, his Church, and his people. Crusader piety also manifested itself in extraordinary devotion to the Virgin Mary and the saints, particularly those saints who had lived in the Holy Land. The Kingdom of Heaven, however, performs the delicate operation of stripping religious piety completely out of the Crusades. Balian and his father appear to be agnostics. Other Crusaders, like the Hospitaller, are openly critical of religion. Indeed, all of the good guys in this movie seem to have no devotion to God at all, only a devotion to tolerance. The bad guys, on the other hand, are all religiously devout, which causes them to be either evil (like Guy and Reynald) or mad (like the glassy-eyed preacher who chants, “To kill a Muslim is not murder, it is the path to heaven”). In other words, the medieval world is portrayed in much the same way that Hollywood views America: Smart people either have no religion or do not take it very seriously. The rest are right-wing Christian fanatics.

There are no churches in this movie, not even in the holiest of cities. There are no monks, no nuns, and very few pilgrims, all of whom would have filled the streets of medieval Jerusalem. Only two priests appear in the film, one a twisted corpse mutilator and the other a villain whose strategy for defending Jerusalem is to convert to Islam and leave the people to die. Scott scatters a few crosses here and there, but there are no crucifixes, which were much more common in the Middle Ages. Beautiful set decoration of Crusader palaces includes no icons of Mary or the saints, indeed no religious art of any kind. Christians, Muslims, and Jews all live in harmony in this cinematic Jerusalem. Yet, in truth non-Christians were forbidden to live in the Holy City during the reign of Baldwin IV. But it is not just Christianity that Scott sterilizes. Muslims are shown praying a few times in the film, yet the only devout Muslim is a black-robed cleric demanding that Saladin attack the Christians and capture Jerusalem. The message here is clear: Religion leads to fanaticism, and fanaticism leads to war.

As a matter of plot logic, one might reasonably wonder why all of these Crusaders wearing crosses on their breasts and marching off to hopeless battles care so little for Christianity? When preparing for the defense of Jerusalem, Balian proclaims that it is not the stones that matter, but the people living in the city. In order to save the people’s lives he threatens to destroy all of the Christian and Muslim holy sites, “everything,” he says, “that drives men mad.” Yet if he is only concerned with defending people, why has Balian come all the way to Jerusalem to do it? Aren’t there plenty of people in France who need defending? The truth is that Scott’s Balian has it exactly wrong. It is the stones, the buildings, the city that mattered above all else. Medieval Christians saw Jerusalem as a precious relic sanctified by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The people were there to glorify God and defend His Holy City. The real Balian, faced with the inevitable conquest of Jerusalem, threatened to destroy the Dome of the Rock if Saladin did not abandon his plan to massacre the Christian inhabitants. That plan is airbrushed out of the movie. Indeed, the good and noble Saladin of this movie lets all of the citizens depart with a hearty, good-natured smile on his face. The real Saladin required them to pay a ransom. Those that could not — and there were thousands — were sold into slavery.

Ridley Scott has repeatedly said that this movie is “not a documentary” but a “story based on history.” The problem is that the story is poor and the history is worse. Based on media interviews, Scott, Monahan, and the leading actors clearly believe that their story can help bring peace to the world today. Lasting peace, though, would be better served by candidly facing the truths of our shared past, however politically incorrect those might be.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/madden200505270751.asp