Robin Hood
There was a point, about midway through this movie, watching Russel Crowe and Cate Blanchett acting together when I thought “This would be an excellent movie if it had nothing to do with Robin Hood.”
The worst part of this movie, and it’s riddled with it like marbled fat through red meat, are the plot elements necessary to twist the film until its a Robin Hood picture. The human drama: a scoundrel, a man-at-arms, who takes advantage of circumstance returning from the Crusades to assume the identity of a knight, is story enough. The man who discovers his assumed identity is important to many people, some powerful? That’s a good story, and that part of this movie is handled well, and is where the film’s heart and my interest lay.
But the film is hell-bent on being a Robin Hood movie, so on top of that we have to have the Merry Men, and King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Richard the Lion-hearted and Taxation, and the Saxon Barons and their Norman Masters and all that. Do we need all these elements for a film to be a Robin Hood movie? No. It’s possible to jettison some of them, pick and choose. We certainly have plenty of other permutations lying around people are free to watch and enjoy. No reason to trot out every story element. In fact, reason not to. Because using all these story elements means we have to explain them all, and we don’t go to movies because we want to watch people explaining things to each other.
On top of that, we have an invasion of England by France. At this point, I was no longer certain what was going on. Because of schemes and dual allegiances, there was a point where I was pretty certain some English guys were fighting some French guys, but it wasn’t THE English guys and it wasn’t THE French guys, they were still off somewhere else, or something.
Then, compounding matters, we get the Magna Carta. Now, let’s be fair. Any modern storyteller looking into the Robin Hood legend would quickly discover that King John, the King John of the popular modern Robin Hood story, is the same King John who signed the Magna Carta and IF you’re going to have a story about a Saxon nobleman who fights opressive taxation against the Norman King, there’s nothing wrong with having that story dovetail into the Magna Carta. You can’t reasonably object that Robin Hood had nothing to do with the Magna Carta, since he also had nothing to do with Prince John.
So I grant the Magna Carta, and the conflict that lead to it, as fertile ground for exploring in a Robin Hood story. But the two hour plot of land we have before us is in no way fertile enough to support all these stories. You have to pick your battles.
One thing you expect from a Robin Hood movie is a sense of camaraderie. The Merry Men. And, indeed, we have Alan a-Dale, Little John, and Wil Scarlett with Robin through the whole movie. But why? What do they do? They hardly have a handful of lines between then. The three of them have about one character’s worth of personality between them and of that, 80% of it is with John, big, dumb, good-natured and horny. It is this offense I take most personally. My favorite movies are all about camaraderie and for this movie to take the Merry Men to the prom only to leave them there and dance with someone else is a waste of my time and everyone else’s.
The film thinks it is the Origin Story of Robin Hood and in that context it works pretty well. But you don’t know that’s the context until the penultimate scene and the movie doesn’t seem to realize that’s the context. Hard to argue that this is an origin story when it begins with Maid Marian and Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and Prince John and Richard Lionheart, all in from the first act.
It felt like four movies crammed into one, and as much as I respect Ridley Scott, he’s not that good. The man who assumes another’s identity and finds out that doing so means he’s involved in a battle between two factions of noblemen? That movie with Crowe as the man posing as a knight and Cate Blanchett as the man’s wife who must put up an act, and Max von Sydow (!) as the knowing father trying to preserve his land? That’s enough right there. We didn’t need Robin Hood, we didn’t need Richard and John and Normans and Saxons and French invasions and all that.
Russel Crowe is still a lot of fun to watch act. Watching him in a big summer action-epic like this makes me yearn for a sequel to the extremely satisfying Master & Commander. And Cate Blanchett is fun, and beautiful and just…really, really amazing to watch. She’s perfect for Maid Marian. She looks like she just walked off the Bayeux Tapestry.
The interplay of their characters is very fine, there are broad strokes and subtlties enough. Why, then, must she bust out a sword and armor at the end of the movie and ride into battle? This is a character who’s managed a 5,000 acre farm for the last 10 years. She is as Medieval English Maid as it’s possible for a character to be. She is not a warrior-woman, there’s no hint of that in her character or her background, it’s not she who just came back from the crusades.
I have no problem with Maid Marian, Warrior-Woman, if you do the work for it. But for this Maid Marian to just show up at the last battle in armor and start hewing about her with a broadsword…it might as well be a lightsaber.
The Sheriff of Nottingham is in this. But only because the Sheriff of Nothingham is in Robin Hood movies. He doesn’t do anything. Indeed, apart from John, the bad-guy is The Bald English Bad Guy we’ve seen everywhere. We know he’s the bad guy because they cast The Bald English Bad Guy. When he throws his hood back in the beginning, we know he’s the bad guy. Perhaps it’s because the movie has to play well in Japan and Germany and they need to make sure you can tell the players even if you don’t speak the language but please, do we have to be this obvious?
As with many movies, I enjoyed myself more than you might think reading this. Just being at the movies makes me happy, regardless of what’s happening onscreen. And it takes something really offensive for me to engage my critical mind while I’m watching rather than here at the keyboard. It was around the point Some English Guys were fighting Some French Guys while the English Army and the French Army assembled somewhere else that I started to check out. Marian Warrior Princess was the clincher though.
But I was delighted at the ending, because it reveals that all this is set-up. Robin Hood’s story has only just begun! That’s all well and good if you’re going to then bust out a second movie, but that would surprise me. Ridley Scott tends not to do sequels, and if the better-on-all-accounts Master and Commander didn’t warrant a sequel, I doubt this movie will get one.
Wasn’t Master & Commander great? Let’s go watch that again.
Popularity: 13% [?]
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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May 20th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Just saw it this afternoon. My one-sentence summary: "Ridley Scott wanted to do a remake of Ivanhoe, but the studios made him do Robin Hood instead."
May 21st, 2010 at 9:14 pm
I have seen this too, now, which I wouldn’t have bothered to do if you hadn’t written about it. You change lives! I enjoyed it pretty well, and possibly having read about it beforehand made things like the warrior-woman moment and the general overstuffedness of the movie not so grating. What was grating, and I knew that it would be because it always is, was the stilted period-movie dialogue. Screenwriters seem to be getting better at striking a balance between freshness and old-timey-ness in this sort of thing, but there are still some jarring word choices, like "empower", and some outright bizarre ones — "tumescent"? Seriously?