"You could tell by the way that he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him." —A Confederacy of Dunces
Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts in Ready Player One
Last week I got to sit down with Danny Anderson and Nathan Magee for Danny's Sectarian Review Podcast. The topic of discussion: Ready Player One, both the awful book and the fun movie. Had a great time chatting about the story and what it says, in both versions, about the world we live in. Click through to the show's website or the widget below to have a listen!
An old favorite of mine from Chesterton, taken from an interview given to the Cleveland Press during his 1921 trip to the United States:
“The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, in Greece just after World War II
I'm not sure where I first heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor's book A Time of Gifts, but I'm grateful that I did. The first passage I ever read of it was a lavish and beautifully written description of his visit to Munich's Hofbräuhaus in January 1934, less than a year after Hitler came to power in Germany. Fermor so immediately evoked the time and place and atmosphere—from the appearance of the obese, beer-swilling masses to the sheer noise of eating and singing—that I had to read the rest. I finally started it over the weekend.
A Time of Gifts relates Fermor's adventures, at the age of 18, through Europe. Expelled from school, restless at the thought of a career in the army, and bored with formal education, Fermor decided to hike his way across Europe, alone. He borrowed a few pounds from friends, kitted himself out in London, and took a steamer to the Hook of Holland, where he landed in December 1933. His goal: Constantinople, at the other end of the continent.
I'm about halfway through. Fermor has traveled up the Rhine, cut diagonally across southern Germany via the Neckar and over the Danube, and has just arrived in Salzburg. It's a pure delight.
Fermor based this book on his memories, notes, letters, and diaries of 1933-34 but wrote and published it in the 1970s, and he brings that longer perspective to bear on a number of occasions. (Examples below.) After his trip, he did serve in the British military, fighting in special operations on Crete and living in caves between guerrilla strikes. His most famous exploit was kidnapping a German general. He went on to a life of further adventure and worldwide travel, but the war looms largest over A Time of Gifts. Many of the places and people he meets along the Rhine, Neckar, and Danube in the early 1930s would be irreversibly changed—if not destroyed—within a decade.
This hindsight lends A Time of Gifts a powerful sense of nostalgia and pathos. Fermor's youthful exuberance, naivete, and awkwardness are humorous and fun to read about, and his willingness to laugh at himself immediately wins one over. But over and over, turning his reminiscences bittersweet, are the offhand comments, asides, and footnotes about what survived the war and what didn't. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Below I've copied a few of my favorite passages of A Time of Gifts so far. Please do check out the whole book. I've enjoyed it immensely so far.
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One fun thing, for me, is that I've been to a number of the places Fermor describes. Here he narrates his approach, moving upriver along the Rhine, to Cologne, the first sign of which, even today, from fifty miles off on the Autobahn, is the twin spires of the Kölner Dom:
After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest's initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it.
Here Fermor, with wry wit, describes finding himself in church in Coblenz with a bunch of Nazis:
It was the shortest day of the year and signs of the seasons were becoming hourly more marked. Every other person in the streets was heading for home with a tall and newly felled fir-sapling across his shoulder, and it was under a mesh of Christmas decorations that I was sucked into the Liebfrauenkirche next day. The romanesque nave was packed and an anthem of great choral splendour rose from the gothic choir stalls, while the cauliflowering incense followed the plainsong across the slopes of the sunbeams. A Dominican in horn-rimmed spectacles delivered a vigorous sermon. A number of Brownshirts—I'd forgotten all about them for the moment—was scattered among the congregation, with eyes lowered and their caps in their hands. They looked rather odd. They should have been out in the forest, dancing round Odin and Thor, or Loki perhaps.
Fermor reaches another German town, one I know pretty well—Heidelberg—just before the new year. This is as perfect a description of the sensory joy of thawing out after a day in the snow as you can find:
This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day's doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, strangling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots.
Fermor is at Zum roten Ochsen, the Red Ox, a famous Heidelberg Inn that's still in operation. He stays for a few days at the behest of the generous owners, Herr and Frau Spengel, and tours the town, University, and Heidelberg Castle with their son, Fritz:
Frau Spengel insisted that it was absurd to set off on New Year's Day; so I spent another twenty-four hours wandering about the town and castle and reading and writing and talking with this kind and civilized family. (My sojourn at the Red Ox, afterwards, was one of several high points of recollection that failed to succumb to the obliterating moods of war. I often thought of it.)
And appended to this paragraph is this footnote:
After writing these words and wondering whether I had spelt the name Spengel right—also to discover what had happened to the family—on a sudden impulse I sent a letter to the Red Ox, addressed "to the proprietor." A very nice letter from Fritz's son—he was born in 1939—tells me that not only my host and hostess are dead, but that Fritz was killed in Norway (where the first battalion of my own regiment at the time was heavily engaged) and buried at Trondheim in 1940, six years after we met. The present Herr Spengel is the sixth generation of the same family to own and run this delightful inn.
I could post many, many more, but I'll conclude with the longish chunk from Munich that first brought my attention to Fermor and his work:
I had expected a different kind of town, more like Nuremberg, perhaps, or Rothenburg. The neo-classical architecture in this boreal and boisterous weather, the giant boulevards, the unleavened pomp—everything struck chill to the heart. The proportion of Storm Troopers and S.S. in the streets was unusually high and still mounting and the Nazi salute flickered about the pavement like a tic douloureux. Outside the Feldherrnhalle, with its memorial to the sixteen Nazis killed in a 1923 street fight nearby, two S.S. sentries with fixed bayonets and black helmets mounted guard like figures of cast-iron and the right arms of all passers-by shot up as though in reflex to an electric beam. It was perilous to withhold this homage. One heard tales of uninitiated strangers being physically set-upon by zealots. Then the thoroughfares began to shrink. I caught a glimpse down a lane of Gothic masonry and lancets and buttresses and further on copper domes hung in convolutions of baroque. A Virgin on a column presided over a slanting piazza, one side of which was formed by a tall, Victorian-Gothic building whose great arched undercroft led to a confusion of lesser streets. In the heart of them stood a massive building; my objective, the Hofbräuhaus. A heavy arched door was pouring a raucous and lurching party of Brownshirts onto the trampled snow.
I was back in beer-territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika'd arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love's labour lost. Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion. In one chamber a table of S.A. men were grinding out Lore, Lore, Lore, scanning the slow beat with the butts of their mugs, then running the syllables in double time, like the carriages of an express: "UND—KOMMT—DER—FRÜHLingindastal! GRÜSS—MIR—DIE—LORenocheinmal". But it was certain civilian figures seated at meat that drew the glance and held it.
One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost non-stop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—can wreak on the human frame. Intestine strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.
The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o'clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches' eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinee idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on check and brow. They might have been competing with stop watches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and bretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies always came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with Schweinebraten, potatoes, Sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves' pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre's banquet. But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand; beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh plate-loads of consumer goods; and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again in a happy renewal of clamour and intake.
I strayed by mistake into a room full of S.S. officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannführers, black from their lightning-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones caps. I still hadn't found the part of this Bastille I was seeking, but at last a noise like the rush of a river guided me downstairs again to my journey's end.
The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvellous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. This was the fuel that had turned the berserk feeders upstairs into Zeppelins and floated them so far from heart's desire. The gunmetal-coloured cylinders were stamped with a blue HB conjoined under the Bavarian crown, like the foundry-mark on cannon. The tables, in my mind's eye, were becoming batteries where each gunner served a silent and recoil-less piece of ordnance which, trained on himself, pounded away in steady siege. Mass-gunfire! Here and there on the tables, with their heads in puddles of beer, isolated bombardiers had been mown down in their emplacements. The vaults reverberated with the thunder of a creeping barrage. There must have been over a thousand pieces engaged!—Big Berthas, Krupp's pale brood, battery on battery crashing at random or in salvoes as hands adjusted the elevation and traverse and then tightened on the stone trigger-guard. Supported by comrades, the walking wounded reeled through the battle smoke and a fresh gunner leaped into each place as it fell empty.
Hugely enjoyable book. Pick it up if you're at all interested in travel, Europe, or just a good memoir.
“‘Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?’ She, supposing Him to be the gardener, said unto Him...”
This is a sonnet I wrote on Easter Sunday a few years ago. It's an elaboration on an image from my favorite passage of Chesterton's Everlasting Man. But the less explanation the better, probably.
I hope you enjoy, and that you all have a happy Easter!
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The Gardener
(After Chesterton)
In the beginning, first of all the stations,
the gardener, his delving his delight,
in cooling mists of waning daylight
walked his grounds and spoke with his creations.
But garden drove him out, itself so driven,
and histories of corruption followed after—
of rot, of glut, of lust and hollow laughter,
the briar-strangled garden left unliving.
Beginning new, that gardener once gone
returned and looked and set to work again—
his delving his delight, despite of thorns,
despite of toil, despite of blood—until again
he rose and walked the garden, now reborn,
in coolness not of evening but of dawn.
From a piece he wrote critiquing his own play, Magic:
“If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”
Magic is a wonderful little comedy that I read some years ago during a bout of depression. It deals with faith, reason, and skepticism on the scale of ordinary life. The most dramatic thing that happens in this play, in which characters furiously debate whether magic is, in fact, real, is a lamp turning on.
With characteristically Chestertonian wit and humor, Magic insists on faith and reason, rather than faith or reason, and dramatizes the impoverishment of humanity when the two are opposed. But it's not a straight allegory or morality play; Chesterton leaves things ambiguous, including the very subject of the play.
If it's so ambiguous, then what's the point? you might want to ask. I don't know, but Magic was exactly what I needed when I read it, the same way many people claimed to have been saved from madness by Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday. To quote his introduction to the book of Job, in reference to God's refusal to answer Job's questions:
The other great fact which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
Magic has been revived a few times in out of the way places by fellow devotees of Chesterton. (Here's a review of a production from about the time I read the play.) It's never been staged anywhere close enough for me to see it performed, but I hope that will change someday.
In the mean time, do check Magic out. It's a short three act play; you can easily read it through in one sitting. It's available free at Project Gutenberg and in volume 11 of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, which is still a work in progress (at 37 volumes!) from Ignatius Press.
This week's Historical Movie Monday looks at another old medieval favorite that has serious historical problems. Like Braveheart, it throws accuracy to the winds. Unlike Braveheart, it is too cold, cerebral, and present-minded to make the sacrifice worthwhile. The film is Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.
“Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright, that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong; that is your oath.”
Following the fall of Jerusalem to the knights of the First Crusade in 1099, the kingdoms and counties founded to safeguard Christian holy sites in the Near East faced ongoing problems. The disorganized, underfed, disease-ridden knights' miraculous success, it became clear, had been aided by division within the Islamic world. The first crusaders had launched their pilgrimage (their word: the word Crusade was not applied until much later) at a time when the Seljuq Empire was subdivided among numerous rival lords, and the Seljuqs themselves warred off and on with the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt. Over the course of the next century, the Islamic empires of the Near East attained first equilibrium and finally cohesion thanks to a number of powerful, charismatic warlords. Among these were Zengi, Nur ad-Din, and, finally, Saladin.
With Saladin, the situation in the east was reversed. The fractious European guardians of Jerusalem now faced a determined and unified opponent and the Crusader kingdoms began to fall. Appeals for reinforcements from the West provoked little response. The king of Jerusalem and his lords had to rely heavily on diplomacy to maintain their control, and when it came to blows a new phenomenon, the military orders, took on a large share of the burden. These orders, the two most powerful of which were the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, combined the traditional vows of monks with the emerging chivalric ideals of knights.
Orlando Bloom and David Thewlis in Kingdom of Heaven.
In 1185, Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, died aged 24. He left the throne to his eight-year old nephew Baldwin V. But the boy king died a year later, and the throne passed, with some controversy, to the boy's mother, Sibylla. Among those debating the succession was Balian of Ibelin, whose stepdaughter Isabella had a better claim to the throne, and Reynald of Châtillon, Prince of Antioch, who supported Sibylla. At Sibylla's coronation, she brought forward her husband Guy of Lusignan to be crowned and share power with her.
Sibylla and Guy were a disaster. In less than a year, in July 1187, Guy had led his armies against the threatening army of Saladin and into a trap. Cut off from their route of escape and with no water supply in the torturous summer heat, Guy's army was forced into combat with Saladin at Hattin and annihilated. Guy, and much of the Crusader kingdoms' nobility with him, was captured. Saladin's forces ritually massacred their Templar and Hospitaller prisoners. Reynald, a longtime troublemaker for Saladin, was killed by Saladin himself. Jerusalem lay open to attack.
Now bereft of its king, Jerusalem turned to the leadership of Balian, who had passed through Muslim-controlled territory to the city to rescue his wife and family. At the request of Queen Sibylla, Balian took command and refused to capitulate to Saladin.
During a siege lasting just under two weeks, Saladin's engineers pounded the city walls with trebuchets and other siege engines, undermined another portion of the walls, and repeatedly attacked, though without success. Finally, on October 2, Balian agreed to negotiate terms with Saladin and surrendered the city. The city's inhabitants and the numerous refugees who had fled Saladin were allowed to leave—if they paid a ransom. Not all could.
The fall of Jerusalem in 1187 galvanized the Latin Church and Western Europe responded with another upsurge of Crusade, this time led by three of the most powerful men in Europe—Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor; Philip Augustus, King of France; and Richard the Lionheart, King of England. This crusade, too, gradually fell apart, and while Richard was able to negotiate safe passage to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims, he could not retake the city.
The coronation of King Baldwin V of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven. Tiberias (Jeremy Irons), Sibylla (Eva Green), and Guy of Lusignan (Marton Csokas) look on.
Based on a script by William Monahan (screenwriter for The Departed), Kingdom of Heaven follows the course of actual history in broad outline while having some serious, fundamental problems with that history, about which more below.
The film's director, Ridley Scott, is one of the few "visionary directors" so frequently advertised in trailers nowadays who may actually deserve the title. His films are always visually stunning, and Kingdom of Heaven is no exception. Shot on film by frequent collaborator John Mathieson, who had first worked with Scott on Gladiator, this film looks great from beginning to end. Production designer Arthur Max, who had also worked on Gladiator, enhanced numerous preexisting Spanish locations with set dressing and props to give the film a palpable real-world sensibility. Scott himself strove to make the film feel authentic, inventing minor details for background action like a method for cleaning and polishing mail and making the combat as intense, violent, and frightening as possible. Kingdom of Heaven has stunning location photography, beautiful lighting, gorgeous costumes, and thrilling battle scenes. One reason I enjoy it is because it's not only beautiful to look at, but the sheer amount of detail makes the film feel like it takes place in a big, real world rather than a series of sets.
Eva Green as Sibylla
I emphasize the visual splendor of Kingdom of Heaven for a reason. Like Braveheart, which is a useful point of comparison, Kingdom of Heaven revels in big-budget, widescreen glory meant to evoke the epics of the 1950s and 60s. This plays to Scott's strengths as a visual filmmaker and storyteller. Unfortunately, the casting and acting and the performances—all of which helped sell Braveheart despite its historical flimflam—don't measure up, and the result is that this beautiful film is often dramatically inert.
Acquitting themselves well are Liam Neeson as Godfrey, Balian's father; Jeremy Irons as a composite character, a stalwart veteran named Tiberias; and Eva Green, who plays Sibylla as an emotionally damaged seductress and a Westerner slowly going native in the Levant. David Thewlis has an excellent turn as an unnamed Hospitaller, who may or may not be a guardian angel for Balian. Thewlis is, with Neeson, the most sympathetic character in the film. Edward Norton deserves special mention for his performance as the leper king Baldwin IV; he never once removes an eerily expressionless mask and nevertheless gives a magnetic performance.
Lesser performances come from Marton Csokas and Brendan Gleeson as Guy and Reynald, who are obviously meant to be the film's villains. I say "obviously" because their performances are histrionic mustache-twirling of silent film caliber—Csoka's Guy skulks and sneers and insinuates as if he had the words Bad Guy emblazoned on his forehead, and it seems like the usually wonderful Gleeson is just seeing what he can get away with, playing Reynald as an ultraviolent loon.
The film's biggest problem, performance-wise, is Orlando Bloom as Balian. Bloom had previously worked with Scott in Black Hawk Down—his character spent the majority of the film in a coma—but he is woefully miscast here, and out of his depth. His Balian is supposed to be a thoughtful, intelligent, but practical man who is new to the ways of the world and struggles with doubt and regret. Bloom works his hardest but most often looks confused. He is overpowered by the other performers in virtually every scene, especially Neeson, Norton, and his intended love interest, Green.
But Bloom was not Kingdom of Heaven's only problem. The film was cut down by over an hour for its theatrical release, turning some scenes into detached nonsense and excising the coronation and early death of Baldwin V completely. The pacing, despite Scott's best efforts to meet the studio's demand for a shorter film, was awkward, at best. I remember watching Kingdom of Heaven in theaters and feeling that the film lurched along, with dramatic shifts in tone and character motivation, especially Sibylla, who seemed to have a mental breakdown for no reason. As a result, reviews ranged from "meh" to negative and the film, while not a bomb, was not a financial success.
Fortunately, Scott was able to get his "preferred version" out on DVD, and the director's cut is an immensely improved film.
Marton Csokas as Guy of Lusignan, inaccurately depicted as a Knight Templar in Kingdom of Heaven
As soon as the film begins, before we have even seen the first shot, we're in trouble. The film opens with this series of titles:
It is almost 100 years since Christian armies from Europe seized Jerusalem.
Jerusalem fell to storm in 1099. The film opens in a fictional scenario in the mid-1180s. Close enough.
Europe suffers in the grip of repression and poverty. Peasant and lord alike flee to the Holy Land in search of fortune or salvation.
The "dark ages" stereotype right out of the gate. One might ask Repression by whose standard? or Poverty by whose standard? Europe was actually doing fairly well in the 12th century: harvests were consistently good, the population was rising, literature and the arts flourished, and the seed of the university—which often encouraged more debate and academic freedom than their modern counterparts—had taken root.
Furthermore, this title shows the film's fundamental misunderstanding of the Crusades as essentially colonial projects. For the vast majority of Latin Christians, the Holy Land was a pilgrimage destination. The Crusader kingdoms had endemic and ongoing problems manning their own defenses, since crusading knights would fulfill their vow to go to Jerusalem and immediately return home to sort out the problems that had inevitably arisen in their absence (best example: Richard the Lionheart). The Crusades-as-colonialism narrative has been so thoroughly debunked by the work of historians like Jonathan Riley-Smith and many, many others that is is laughable to see it dramatized this way. But there are reasons it is so.
Finally:
One knight returns home in search of his son.
This sets up the film's entirely artificial backstory for Balian, and off we go.
Kingdom of Heaven was not a hit with Crusade historians. Riley-Smith lamented that "at a time of inter-faith tension, nonsense like this will only reinforce existing myths." I happen to agree. Thomas F. Madden wrote that
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, [the filmmakers] 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.
It is difficult to enumerate the historical failings of Kingdom of Heaven because there are so many on every level of historical representation, from misinterpretation of motives and character, the ordering of events, and the roles played by particular people, to quibbles about anachronistic costuming. But some of the film's historical problems are more serious than others, and those fundamental problems are the cause of most of the others.
While most of the film's characters are real people, the film plays fast and loose with their respective characters. Balian's origins are well known and unremarkable. He was not the illegitimate son of a nobleman and was not a proto-Zen modern secularist. Far from it—at one point of the siege of Jerusalem he threatened to kill Muslim hostages. He was also present at the Battle of Hattin rather than mooning around in Jerusalem. King Baldwin was a leper and did attempt to maintain the peace, but this had more to do with the ever tenuous and fragile state of his undermanned kingdom than abstract Enlightenment principle. While most of the Christian characters are exaggerated for effect, Saladin's character is substantially softened to make him more palatable to moderns. Those who could not pay the heavy ransom he imposed on Jerusalem were sold into slavery, and he personally participated in the massacres of prisoners after Hattin and the siege of Acre.
Brendan Gleeson hamming it up as Reynald
The film goes out of its way to villainize its bad guys. Scott really lays it on thick. Guy of Lusignan and Reynald of Châtillon are inaccurately depicted as Templars, presumably because some members of the audience will have heard of the Templars and have a vaguely negative impression of them. This is an especially egregious error since Guy is depicted (accurately) as married, something the warrior monks of the Knights Templar were forbidden to do. The real Reynald was also married; the filmmakers seem to have conflated him with the Templars' Grand Master, Gerard of Ridefort, for no apparent reason, and to have added insult to injury by portraying him as insane.
One could look past some of these problems were it not for Kingdom of Heaven's greatest failing—it is not interested in the past for its own sake.
In a series of blog posts from two years ago (Part 1 and Part 2), around the time of Free State of Jones's release, historian Chris Gehrz outlined four useful questions to ask of films that purport to tell us stories from history:
Is it entertaining?
Is it truthful?
Is it actually interested in the past?
Does it prompt the audience to engage in historical thinking?
The only one of these questions to which I would answer Yes, in regard to Kingdom of Heaven, is the first—and even then, with Orlando Bloom a black hole of charisma at the center of the film, that Yes would be equivocal.
As to whether Kingdom of Heaven is truthful, the answer must be No. Gehrz quotes the novelist E.L. Doctorow: "The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like." This, I think, is the crucial difference between Kingdom of Heaven and the otherwise historically atrocious Braveheart. For all its flaws, Braveheart conveyed some sense of the spirit of that time; Kingdom of Heaven is, by Ridley Scott's own admission, so relativized and altered to make sense to modern people in modern terms, that it fails in its attempt to transport viewers to the 12th century.
“Kingdom of Heaven . . . is relentlessly present-minded.”
This brings me to Gehrz's third and fourth questions. I think Ridley Scott may be interested in the past—he has certainly made a lot of historical movies, beginning with his feature debut—but his films aren't. Put another way, he is so consumed with finding a usable past for his personal messages that he does violence to history in order to fit it to the Procrustean bed of modern film.
Kingdom of Heaven—arriving at the height of Post-9/11 political upheaval, media agony over the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and alternating accusations of Islamophobia and capitulation to Islamism—is relentlessly present-minded. (Some reviewers saw this as a strength.) Its characters are stand-ins for, on one side, right-wing hawks, depicted here as bloody-minded religious fanatics (a recognizable stereotype for anyone who lived through that time); their opponents are noble foreigners with legitimate grievances rooted in colonialism and Western oppression, creatures of the Orientalism texts of late-20th century grad schools; and caught in the middle are the open-minded, sensible, spiritual but not religious types who have somehow discovered Enlightenment-era ideals of religious toleration in the 1180s. Scott also packs in some meditations on class, equality, nobility, honor, and chivalry, but always with an eye to tickling modern sensibilities.
Witness this scene: Balian, Scott's agnostic modern hero, threatens to destroy Jerusalem while negotiating with Saladin:
Saladin: Will you yield the city?
Balian: Before I lose it, I will burn it to the ground. Your holy places—ours. Every last thing in Jerusalem that drives men mad.
In Scott's vision, religion, especially religious fanaticism (that is, anyone taking religion more seriously than I do) is the problem. By choosing the 12th century to purvey this message, he has plenty of straw men to joust with.
While Kingdom of Heaven looks great, has mostly wonderful sets and costumes, and loads of brilliantly staged action, its characters and setting are not authentically 12th-century, but puppets in a miniature theater acting out a feebly articulated morality play about religion, terrorism, Western guilt, and foreign policy. Which is a shame, because the real story is so interesting on its own.
The historical literature on the Crusades is huge, and somewhat unusual in that you're best served by looking at the more recent work rather than the older stuff. Past Crusade history was often inflected with anti-Catholicism, the Romanticism of Sir Walter Scott, or Marxist theory, the latter deeply enough to have persisted in the popular imagination (and influenced Kingdom of Heaven). Fortunately, the last two generations of Crusade historians have amended, nuanced, or outright debunked a lot of old conceptions of the Crusades.
The best one-stop book if you're looking to an accessible introduction is The Concise History of the Crusades, by Thomas F. Madden, now in a third edition. Madden offers a short, well-researched, and well-written narrative of the Crusade movement with good analysis of what the Crusades were (always a vexed question, especially since the Crusaders themselves didn't use the word), why the Crusading movement emerged where and when it did, and how it changed over time. He also, like many historians since 9/11, includes helpful discussion of Crusading's legacy. Oxford UP's Very Short Introductions series also has a slim little volume on the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman.
Other good surveys of the time and movement include The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land, by Thomas Asbridge; Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades, by Jonathan Phillips; and God's War: A New History of the Crusades, by Christopher Tyerman. Dan Jones's recent book The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors, also covers many of the events of this film.
The work of Jonathan Riley-Smith must not be overlooked. Riley-Smith helped demolish many theories of what caused the Crusades through intensive research of Crusader wills, which demonstrated that 1) Crusaders planned to return from rather than stay in the Holy Land, 2) they were predominantly the heads of households or the heirs of great fortunes, men with the most to lose from a failed pilgrimage, and 3) going on Crusade was ruinously expensive, and Crusaders, if they took the cross out of a profit motive, would have been better off staying home. Riley-Smith's book The Crusades: A History is a good one-volume history of the period and an introduction to his work.
Two good references for medieval warfare in this period are Medieval Warfare: A History, an indispensable anthology edited by Maurice Keen, the great historian of medieval chivalry; and Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000-1300, by John France. Norman Housley's Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land, also offers a lot of good insight into the lived experience of the Crusaders.
One of the best resources for serious engagement with the history, historiography, and myths of the Crusades is Seven Myths of the Crusades, Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt, Eds., the first of a new series from Hackett Publishing. This short, well-researched collection of essays tackles some of the most well-known and persistent myths of the Crusades, including the myth of pure Western Christian aggression, the Children's Crusade, the Marxist myth of Crusaders as colonialists, Templar and Mason conspiracy theories, and the notion that present day Islamic terror stems from "a nine hundred-year-long grievance" with the West. It's excellent.
In an unusual occurrence, Easter falls on April Fool's Day this year. The same was true in 1945, when April 1 served as D-day for the Allied landings on Okinawa. To commemorate the battle, we'll look at a recent film about an unusual participant, conscientious objector Desmond Doss. The film: Hacksaw Ridge.
Thanks for reading!
In his essay "Dante" from The Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot responds to people who object to Dante's vivid descriptions of the vile and disgusting, especially throughout Inferno:
“The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.”
Goodness never looks so good as it does when contrasted with evil. I think this is, at least in part, why we respond so strongly to self-sacrifice, heroism, and love in terrible circumstances.
I recently rediscovered this bit I wrote for a contest almost a decade ago. The contest's theme was "Reject a Hit," fictional editorial rejection letters for great literature. I remember thinking myself terribly clever to bury a few Dante-related jokes—some obvious, some not so obvious—inside this. I would tweak a few things if I rewrote this now, but I was amused enough while rereading it to want to share. Enjoy!
* * * * *
Dear Signor Alighieri,
We are delighted to have received your manuscript entitled The Divine Comedy. Though your manuscript possesses some literary merit, we regret we are unable accept it for publication at this time. However, I felt your work was strong enough, often enough, to warrant more than the standard form letter.
There is a thriving market for supernatural narrative, and though you fail to incorporate current trends in werewolves and vampires, a story about the afterlife could certainly sell well. However, we find your constant topical allusions trivialize the subject. How are our readers in Venice, Paris, or London to know the reputation of Florence’s local glutton? Furthermore, your constant political references as well as inexplicable asides about Siena—which represents a large readership—also risk offending readers. In short, such allusions weaken your work’s staying power, which is to say nothing of your gratuitous toilet humor.
There is also—and I broach this subject cautiously—the issue of libel. This is, in fact, the deciding issue in our rejection. We began counting midway through the first section—which you tastelessly call Hell—and soon lost count of actual figures you have derided in your work. Such persons may in fact be dead (though you included a living pope at one point, then explained away his presence in hell by claiming that his body is possessed by a devil—a solution which in no way improves your legal stance), but they have friends and relatives still living, and belonged to organizations which could—and almost certainly will—object to your work. Issues of good taste aside, we cannot leave ourselves open to potential lawsuits which number in the hundreds.
I hope you understand our reservations, and accept our wishes for the best of luck in your other projects. We understand you have authored a few sonnets and a political tract—perhaps it is in those fields that you should pursue fame.
Thank you again for considering us.
Sincerely,
Giovanni Rusticucci, Editor
Today I ran across these passages from two columns by G.K. Chesterton again. They appeared in successive editions of the Illustrated London News in July 1913. The world before the First World War is as near an alien world as we can approach, but not, as I think these columns demonstrate, totally dissimilar.
Here, Chesterton is explaining what it's like to talk to a crank (in the sense of a zealot for some idiosyncratic cause or theory) and attempting to settle on some definition, some classification that will help identify cranks.
From, "The Habits of the Crank," July 19, 1913:
I have spent much of my life in studying the habits of the crank. . . . By this time I believe I have an eye for a crank. And, before going any further, let me hasten to explain that a sincere and simple enthusiast is not a crank, however wild he may be, or however wrong he may be. Don Quixote was not a crank. Plimsoll was not a crank. Mr. George Lansbury is not a crank. If you said these men were simply mistaken, I should still retort that at least they were mistaken simply. But the crank is never simple. He could no more make a plain mistake than he could see a plain fact. I have never satisfied myself with any definition of him: but you all know him. Sometimes I have thought he might be defined thus: that he always talks on his one topic; and yet it is not his topic that tires us, but himself. . . .
There is another possible definition of the crank. He is that man who always manages (by an eternal crisis of self-consciousness) to combine all the disadvantages of everything. Another way in which I tried to define the crank was that he always begins at the wrong end. He never knows the right way to take hold of anything, as one takes hold of a cat by the scruff of the neck. He always tries to catch his cat by the tail; especially if it is a Manx cat. The thing he begins with is always the thing that is last—and least. Thus, if he is talking about the ancient and awful bond between man and women, he will talk about votes before he talks about vows. Thus, if he is interested in talking about children, he will be genuinely interested in the children’s schools; it will never so much as cross his mind that children, as a class, generally belong to families. If he is interested in Shakespeare, he will not be interested in Shakespeare’s poetry; he will be interested in the extraordinary question of who wrote it. If he is interested in one of the Gospels or in one of the Epistles, he will not be interested in what is written there; he will be interested in some bottomless bosh about when it was written. It was when I had got thus far in my speculations that I began to suspect that I had found the definition of the crank after all.
The true and horrid secret of the crank is this: that he is not interested in his subject. He is only interested in his object. He wants to do something, to alter something, to feel he has made a difference, to rediscover his own miserable existence. He does not care for women, but for Votes for Women; he does not care for children, but for education; he does not care for animals, but for Anti-vivisection; he does not care for Nature, but for “open spaces.” . . . [H]e has not enough energy to live the life of contemplation. He can never enjoy a discussion because he can never enjoy a doubt. He is unfit for all the arts and sciences and philosophies, which require a powerful patience or a noble indifference. He is unfit to be an agnostic. . . .
Again, the crank is never really interested in his subject, because he takes too stiff and biased a view of it. He knows nothing of the romantic hesitations, the rich reactions that there are in a really interesting subject. He cannot love and hate a thing at the same time; which is the root of half the poetry of the world. . . . They know very little of their tragic side, and nothing at all of their comic side. They want to alter something and to feel bright and bustling. That is what they mean when they say that their eyes are fixed on the future. They never by any chance look at what they are doing.
And from "The Cranks of Secular Education," July 26, 1913:
The crank, to whom I made some references last week, has another characteristic which leads us to another subject—for, indeed, he only has it when he is the nicest sort of crank, and the nicest sort of crank is rare. And the difficulty about him is not that he differs from everybody else, but that he cannot believe that anybody else differs from him. He thinks things are self-evident which are really in the last degree questionable; and he thinks opinions are universal which the mass of mankind has never heard of. He labours under the fixed idea that you and I do not know what our own opinions are, and he kindly explains them to us. He says, “As a Christian, you must admit that all armaments are in theory immoral”; and if I answer that neither Christianity nor my modest self admits anything of the kind, he says it is a paradox. He says, “As a Socialist, of course you would be in favour of divorce reform”; and if I tell him in all simplicity that I am not a Socialist, and if I were I need not be in the least in favour of divorce reform, he entertains some extraordinary notion that I am pulling his leg. Whereas I have no desire of the kind—except, perhaps, a faint desire to pull his nose for being so abominably stupid.
I'm struck by how much these descriptions resemble present day political discourse; certainly among activists and the ideologically possessed, but across a pretty broad segment of the population.
Finally, cranks are very often tangled up in conspiracy theories, which is a topic I've studied and read a lot about. Not all conspiracy theorists and cranks (a good majority probably are and the rest tend that way), but all cranks adhere to at least one conspiracy theory. Here's Umberto Eco bridging the gap between Chesterton's crank and the paranoid conspiracist:
A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
Medieval March continues with a film that poses a unique challenge to me as a movie lover and an historian: it's a rousing, beautifully shot and acted drama full of exciting battle scenes, overwhelming pathos, and sincere emotion rooted in love of family and homeland. It's also historical garbage. The film is Braveheart.
“Aye. Fight, and you may die. Run, and you’ll live. At least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance—just one chance—to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!”
In 1286, Alexander III, King of Scotland, died in a freak accident when, having lost his way in the dark, his horse stumbled over an embankment and he broke his neck. Alexander died having outlived all three of his children; his nearest heir was his granddaughter Margaret, the daughter of the King of Norway. Margaret was three years old at the time of Alexander's death, and the lords and bishops of Scotland assembled to select Guardians to protect the kingdom until she was of age. Meanwhile, Edward I, king of England, negotiated with the Guardians to marry his young son Edward to Margaret and unite their kingdoms, and sought a papal dispensation to allow the marriage.
In 1290, the now seven year old Margaret set sail from Norway to Scotland. She never arrived, dying in the Orkneys on the voyage.
Patrick McGoohan as King Edward I of England in Braveheart
Margaret's death left Scotland with no apparent heir to the throne. Over a dozen claimants—including Margaret's father and several grandchildren of illegitimate children of a previous king—came forward. Only four of them had serious grounds to claim the throne, but the waters were sufficiently muddied that the Guardians asked King Edward to monitor the dispute. Ever the opportunist, Edward—who had already spent fifteen years subduing Wales—agreed on the condition that the Scots lords swear loyalty to him as Scotland's feudal overlord. The council chose John Balliol as king, and Edward proceeded to treat him as an servile underling.
Four years later, Balliol, bridling at Edward's overlordship, renounced his oath. Edward invaded across the then-porous frontier, rapidly defeated the Scots, capturing many of their lords, and forced Balliol to abdicate. Edward returned to England with Balliol as a prisoner and the Stone of Scone, the traditional seat used during Scottish coronations, as a trophy. (It remained in the base of the coronation throne of the kings and queens of England up through the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952.) Edward required homage of all the leading Scottish nobility and installed English lords throughout Scotland.
In May of the next year, 1297, William Wallace first appears in the historical record. He probably (more on sources below) killed an English sheriff in an incident at Lanark, probably in revenge for a previous attack on him by the sheriff while at court. All the circumstances leading up to this attack are unclear, but Wallace rapidly emerged as a leading brigand, fighting from the forests as part of a general uprising against English rule with many similar rebel leaders. By September, Wallace had enough clout to join forces with Andrew Moray, a leading Scottish nobleman, and defeat an English army at Stirling Bridge. The badly outnumbered Scots used the local geography to their advantage, holding a narrow bridgehead in a bend of the river. Wallace cut the English army in half as it attempted to cross and defeated it in detail. For this victory, Wallace and Moray were named the two Guardians of Scotland, and when Moray died of wounds sustained in the battle a few months later, Wallace was left sole Guardian.
Edward mustered his strength and personally led a second invasion force into Scotland the following spring. In April, Edward and Wallace faced off at Falkirk, where Wallace's static infantry, arranged in a series of schiltrons, circular formations meant to ward off cavalry attack, were weakened, broken apart, and finally destroyed by English combined arms—infantry, cavalry, crossbow, and, especially, the longbow. Wallace's cavalry, receiving the brunt of the English cavalry's attack since it could not risk attacking the spearmen, fled. Wallace fled too, and gave up his title as Guardian that fall, just a year after his victory at Stirling Bridge.
After this year of frenetic activity, Wallace's movements become unclear. He is known to have continued fighting, but his reputation had suffered a crippling blow at Falkirk. Edward invaded again in 1300 and 1303, and either put his enemies to flight or convinced them to recognize his right to rule. Among those swearing to recognize his authority was Robert Bruce, grandson of one of the claimants to the throne after the death of Margaret. Edward behaved with clemency toward many Scottish nobles, recognizing that, after years of failed intervention, if he hoped to rule Scotland he would need their support.
The one Scot leader to whom Edward would under no terms grant mercy was William Wallace, who was captured near Glasgow and turned over to Edward in 1305. Taken to London in chains, Wallace stood trial on charges of treason and what modern people would call war crimes. The charge of treason, writes historian Marc Morris "was somewhat ironic, for Wallace was probably the only Scottish leader who had not sworn allegiance to the English king" at some point in the last twenty chaotic years. Wallace himself pointed out that he had never sworn fealty to Edward, but his judges were unconvinced.
On August 23, 1305, William Wallace was ceremonially dragged through the streets of London to Smithfield, the place of execution outside the city walls. There he was hanged until almost dead and, after being cut down while still alive, disemboweled. While the executioners beheaded and quartered his body, his guts were publicly burned. His head was mounted on London Bridge.
Braveheart began with a trip by screenwriter Randall Wallace (no relation) to Scotland, where he noticed a monument to William Wallace at Edinburgh Castle. Having never head of this famous Wallace, he got the gist of the story from his tour guide, read a little about Wallace in the poetic retelling of a fifteenth century balladeer, and wrote his screenplay. Mel Gibson originally wanted to direct, but could only get financing for the film from a major studio if he also agreed to star. It's fortunate that he agreed; Gibson is what made—and still makes—Braveheart work.
Gibson had learned well from filmmakers he had worked with as a rising star. One can especially sense the influences of George Miller, his director in the Mad Max films, in the violence of the combat, the brilliant use of slow motion and jump cuts, and the apocalyptic dream imagery, and Peter Weir, director of Gallipoli, in the film's attention to atmosphere, landscapes, and the combination of magnificent natural beauty with violence. Crucially, Gibson was able to cut down Wallace's bloated original screenplay and refine clunky or unclear scenes, both to save money on the film's large but finite budget and to sell the story visually.
Spartacus and Braveheart, father and son epics
The most noteworthy example concerns the introduction of everyone's favorite character: Stephen the Irishman. As originally written, Stephen proved his worth as William Wallace's ally and devoted bodyguard in a long, intense nighttime battle in a castle. Lacking the budget to shoot such a technically involved scene (night shoots are notoriously long and difficult), Gibson had to get creative. What he came up with in a few minutes was a small masterpiece of visual storytelling—a scene with Wallace, Stephen, and another eager new rebel recruit hunting in the forest. (Take three minutes to watch it here.) Gibson's new scene makes the point intended by Randall Wallace's screenplay in ninety seconds and only two lines of dialogue.
The film shot extensively in Scotland but most of the footage used for the final product was shot in Ireland. The Irish Army even provided extras for the battle scenes; some of the same soldiers would go on to work as extras in the Omaha Beach scene of Saving Private Ryan. John Toll, one of the greatest living cinematographers and a master of the art, shot the film in anamorphic widescreen to capture its old-fashioned epic scope and brought out every rough texture of the sets and costumes, every lush and sweeping landscape, in a film that is both romantic in its scale and brutally real in its violence. James Horner's score is among his best; the words sweeping, romantic, and old-fashioned come to mind again. Who can't thrill to his steadily building drums at Stirling, the tender theme for William and Murron's romance, or the soaring notes of "Freedom" during Wallace's death?
Gibson intentionally made a film in the vein of old Hollywood epics—a film of dashing rebels, beautiful princesses, breathtakingly evil villains, near misses, and hair-raising escapes—but with the violence permitted of films in the 1990s and all the modern filmmaking techniques developed since the end of the sword-and-sandal epic's heyday. A key inspiration, one which Gibson cites several times in his commentary track on the film, is Spartacus. Watch the films back to back and you'll see the continuity, especially visually.
But where Kubrick's film is cerebral and not a little cold in its approach to violence in the name of freedom, Gibson's is all heart. Braveheart continues to appeal because of the way it dramatizes human emotion, especially its finely nuanced depictions of love. Wallace and Gibson's film, thanks not only to Gibson's direction but also an excellent cast (I could write another post just in praise of Brendan Gleeson, James Cosmo, Patrick McGoohan, Angus MacFadyen, Catherine McCormack, and Sophie Marceau) begins with love of family and country. It encompasses love of fathers and sons, love for wife and children—both hopes, in Wallace's case cut tragically short—love among comrades for each other and their leaders, and, of course, love of freedom. The film is awash in emotion, with repeated setups and callbacks that tie the story together emotionally as well as narratively: a thistle, an embroidered handkerchief, a thrown rock, a strip of tartan cloth.
Sophie Marceau as Isabella of France in Braveheart
This is where things get shaky. While Braveheart is a masterpiece of epic filmmaking and visual storytelling, I think it is best classified as historical fiction or even historical fantasy. It has almost no bearing on historical reality. It is, by now, a cliche to pick on Braveheart's historical problems, so I'm going to be brief. Here are a few:
There are two basic reasons for these (and many, many, many other) egregious inaccuracies.
First, Randall Wallace based his screenplay on The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace, a narrative poem by the fifteenth-century bard Blind Harry. This work is one of the only detailed sources we have regarding the life of William Wallace, but it is rife with historiographical problems: it is a poem, artistic in form and intent and obviously exaggerated for effect; it contradicts verifiable fact in other earlier and more reliable sources; and it was composed at least 175 years after the events it purports to retell. While Braveheart broadly follows the bullet-point version of Wallace's life, much of the film's detail comes from Blind Harry: Wallace's personal character, his wife, her death as the catalyst for his rebellion, Stephen, etc.
Wallace escorted to a parley with Isabella outside York, not one word of which ever happened
Second, Gibson's main interest as a filmmaker on Braveheart was to make a film, to tell a story and to tell it as vividly and as cinematically as possible. With no great attachment to the facts of the case thanks to the loosey-goosey screenplay, Gibson was free to shape Braveheart into a beautiful, moving, emotionally powerful meditation on love and freedom that could showcase his strengths both as an actor and a director. In this regard, Braveheart is a brilliant success.
But is Braveheart worth anything as a historical film? Despite everything, I think so. Its portrait of Edward I, while grossly exaggerated bordering on character assassination, shows the power of a capable and driven medieval monarch. The film's violence is an antidote to the castles-and-princesses view of the Middle Ages that some people have, while Gibson's obvious love of the film's characters and respect for their culture—especially Scotland's pre-Reformation Catholicism—keep the film from descending into a chronologically snobby muckworld. The film also dips its toe in the complicated structures of medieval authority, which could be useful. And I think, despite failing in pretty much every other category of authenticity, Braveheart captures a little something of the spirit of the time. But only a little something.
Braveheart is one of my favorite movies, and has remained so since high school. It's over twenty years old now, and still holds up thanks to its vision, moral ernestness, and sincere and deeply felt emotion. It's not good history—not at all—but I wouldn't mind a few more films like it nowadays.
As mentioned above, one of the most important and problematic sources for Wallace's life and deeds is The Wallace, a lay by Blind Harry the Minstrel. You can read the complete text for free at Project Gutenberg and some nicely annotated selections at the University of Rochester's Middle English Texts Series. The poem is available in a modern English translation by William Hamilton, but appears to be out of print. Start hunting through your nearest used book store.
Magnus Magnusson's massive Scotland: The Story of a Nation, has a lengthy chapter on Wallace and his context in the struggles against English overlordship. Magnusson relates the story well and is appropriately cautious about the folklore that has accumulated around Wallace.
For the English side, historian Marc Morris has a recent biography of Edward I, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, that thoroughly deals with the entirety of this important king's long and busy reign. Concise, well-written, illuminating looks at the reigns of both Edward I and his worthless son Edward II are available from the excellent Penguin Monarchs series.
Medieval March will conclude with another exciting, well-crafted epic that has a troubled relationship with the truth: Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. Thanks for reading!
“For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break.”
From Chesterton's great book Orthodoxy, on the addition, through Jesus, of courage to the traits of the creator God, but a pretty broadly applicable definition.
Brian Cox as Sir Winston Churchill in Churchill
My wife, who has shepherded eighth graders through more than her share of national parks and historical sites, jokes that someone, somewhere sells "historical-site-in-a-box" kits. Lower end state parks, with only enough funding for the cheap package, get split-rail fences, a cannon or two, and maybe a trail. The pricier kits come with cornhusk doll making and musket demonstrations, and perhaps a reconstructed building or two. The gold package includes a whole fort, and the platinum package comes with year-round reenactors and specialty items like period ships (she's been to Jamestown in the summer one too many times).
I joke about a simliar concept I call "Abe Lincoln's beard." I noticed some years ago that commercials, when they need an Abraham Lincoln, can grab virtually any tall, skinny, and/or old guy—regardless of appearance as long as he fits these criteria—put a beard and a stovepipe hat on him, and they have a Lincoln. (I call as witnesses Honda, Diet Mountain Dew, Apples to Apples, and whatever this insomnia drug was.) I think one of the reasons Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Lincoln was so astonishing was because he turned this cardboard cutout into a fully realized human being.
Which brings me to Churchill.
Churchill is 2017's other Winston Churchill movie. It stars the great Brian Cox as Churchill, with Miranda Richardson as Clemmie and John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) as Dwight Eisenhower. It's a disaster. It certainly suffers in comparison to the superbly acted and cinematic Darkest Hour, but even if the latter had never come out, Churchill would stand as a bad historical film.
Brian Cox as Churchill and Danny Webb as Field Marshal Alan Brooke in Churchill
I want to say, first off, that Brian Cox is not the problem. I actually felt bad for him; he's a magnificent actor and he's acting his heart out, putting his all into this performance, but he's been given nothing by the script, which is repetitive, cliched, and riddled with serious historical problems. (Andrew Roberts, so persnickety in his Dunkirk review, is on target about Churchill.) Cox elevates what would have been an otherwise unwatchable movie, and for that he deserves credit.
The movie is miscast (John Slattery is too elegant and charismatic a figure to play Eisenhower, an unprepossessing, nose to the grindstone administrator), supremely careless (a 50-star US flag gets a long closeup), and obviously cheap (when General Bernard Montgomery gives as speech to his "army," about twenty men shuffle over and try to look like a larger crowd). There's nothing wrong with low budget films—there have been plenty of great ones—but this film is not artful enough to conceal that or make up for its constraints with an interesting and energetic story.
The biggest problem is the script. This is a film trying desperately, but in vain, to humanize a heroic figure by showing him in a moment of darkness and failure. Unfortunately, as Roberts notes in the detailed takedown linked above, it sets out to do this through distortion and invention, and the writer's inventions are cliches of the worst variety. Churchill and Clemmie have the following exchange:
Clemmie [sulking over Churchill's neglect of her]: General Eisenhower writes his wife long letters every weekend.
Churchill: Well then why don't you marry General Eisenhower?
Churchill had many faults, but slinging middle school comebacks wasn't among them.
So what are we left with, if the Churchill of Churchill is not the real thing? The film tries repeatedly to sell us on the authenticity of its portrait of the man through soft-focus, backlit closeups of whisky glasses, watch chains, cigars, and so forth, but all we're really getting is a collection of things meant to signal Look! This is Winston Churchill. It's an Abe Lincoln's beard of Churchill. A Churchill-in-a-box kit.
I went in with an open mind, wanting, if anything, to see a fine performance by Cox. I'm glad to say he did his best with what was given him—he's a professional—but it wasn't enough to save the movie. Otherwise I had to entertain myself, through this film's interminable 90 minutes, by filling out the contents of the Churchill-in-a-box kit for any aspiring filmmakers who want the trappings but not the spirit of the man.
Each Churchill-in-a-box kit contains:
Black three-piece suit with bowtie
Hat
Cane
Endless cigars
Gold watch chain
Introduction in bed or in bathtub (with bathrobe, or perhaps "a state of nature")
Scotch, champagne, etc.
Poor posture in the backseat of a limousine
Gruff speech
V-for-victory
Churchill losing his temper
Churchill being wrong about something (India, Ireland, Gallipoli, etc.)
Churchill being right about something else (Hitler)
Churchill quoting the classics
Churchill saying something surprisingly off-color
Churchill being rude to a secretary
Clemmie telling the secretary what a beast he can be and making him apologize
You get the idea. Churchill is an unfortunate object lesson: characters are more than traits, especially real, important historical figures with easily recognizable ("iconic") traits. Darkest Hour understood this; Churchill did not. And that's too bad.
The official site of historian and novelist Jordan M. Poss.
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