The Eternal Quest for Justice

According to some postings on the internet, which may or may not be true, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood began with a script or script outline that had the Sheriff of Nottingham as the possible hero. (James Goldman’s screenplay for Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976) came close to anticipating this idea with Robert Shaw playing a sympathetic Sherriff to Sean Connery’s grizzled but still heroic Robin.) However, once Russell Crowe became involved, this new take on the legend was dropped. But we are still going to have to wait for the sequel to see Crowe as the full-blown Robin Hood of legend. As we are told in an opening title, this is how the legend began.

In fact the film is a reworking of themes from the opening of Ridley Scott’s earlier epic The Kingdom of Heaven. Here screenwriter William Monahan created a back story for Balian of Ibelin, the real-life defender of Jerusalem that has him rise from blacksmith to Baron of Ibelin when his natural father returns from the Crusades and adopts him as his legitimate heir. In Robin Hood our hero is an archer (at first called Robert) in King Richard’s army who stumbles on a plot against the king in which a famous knight is murdered. Through a series of plot twists familiar to anyone who has read historical fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Sir Walter Scott, Rafael Sabatini, Philip Lindsay—the archer is persuaded to impersonate the dead knight, who was of course Robin of Locksley.

It is all very diverting, with Crowe a quietly authoritative Robert/Robin, and Mark Strong having the time of his life as the villainous traitor, Sir Godfrey (a character based loosely on Basil Rathbone’s Sir Guy of Gisbourne from the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn). The great Max von Sydow is splendid as the blinded but still formidable father of the murdered knight who persuades Robert to impersonate his son, while Cate Blanchett is very effective as an independent, tough-minded Marian who in this version is Sir Robin’s widow. This is one of the film’s better inventions. The wives of lords in that period frequently took on the running of the castle in their husbands’ absences, even directing military operations. In addition, this new Robin Hood portrays the regional nature of feudal life better than I have seen it done before; at least in a Robin Hood movie. It may also be the first one to show the peasants actually farming before the rapine and pillage begin.

The violence is handled with Ridley Scott’s usual panache—multi-camera set-ups capture every detail of the shock of battle with plenty of close shots to involve the viewer in the action. The director’s familiar mist, low light levels and shadows that we have come to expect from his collaborations with cinematographer Tom Mathieson create a credibly bleak setting for this portrayal of twelfth-century plotting, violence and betrayal.

For all this, as the British critics have been quick to point out, the narrative, as distinct from the atmosphere, is wildly unhistorical. Certainly the death of Richard the Lionheart occurs in the film much as it did in reality, and Robert’s return to England with the news is something that at least could have happened. But the agitation about the Great Charter—Magna Carta—took place sixteen years later, not immediately after John succeeded to the throne. Moreover the Charter was an agreement between some over-mighty barons and the King, not an affirmation of the rights of Englishmen as in the film. Indeed this interpretation of Magna Carta came from seventeenth-century opponents of James I and Charles I. “Divine right”, asserted by the film’s King John when he double-crosses the barons who have supported him in the war against France, was a seventeenth-century, not a twelfth-century concept. Furthermore there was no invasion of England by the French during John’s reign, and if there had been I doubt if they would have employed barges that resembled the Higgins boats devised for Second World War beach landings in the Pacific and Europe.

Of course, Scott and his principal writer Brian Helgeland’s distortions of history are no worse than the fantasies film-makers have been concocting for a century, not to mention the inventions by the anonymous writers of the fifteenth-century ballads and novelists like Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe. Still, the dialogue has too many modern idioms for my taste, even though the screenplay is superbly structured and dramatically effective. Above all, like its illustrious predecessors, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood embodies a powerful affirmation of human dignity and freedom at a time when these values remain threatened throughout the world.

While Robin Hood has had no difficulty reaching an international audience, there seems to have been almost a conspiracy to prevent viewers outside Europe from seeing the Swedish epics Arn: The Knight Templar (2007) and its sequel Arn: The Kingdom at Road’s End (2008) in anything like the form their makers intended. Abridged versions are available on DVD in Australia and Britain but they are a travesty—so much so that someone bought the Swedish DVDs of both films (which surprisingly had English subtitles) and posted them on YouTube. This is where I was able to see them—not the ideal way to view a big-screen movie, but I saw enough to convince me these were major works that come close to equalling the great epic films of the last century.

The two films are based on the best-selling trilogy of novels by Jan Guillou, The Road to Jerusalem, The Knight Templar, and The Kingdom at the End of the Road. Although Guillou is a communist investigative journalist whose exploits exposing Swedish intelligence scandals seem to have inspired the plot of Stieg Larsson’s last Salander novel, the trilogy is written from within the medieval world of twelfth-century Sweden and Palestine. Indeed the main plot could be that of a medieval poem or saga. Arn and his betrothed Cecilia are for political reasons excommunicated for anticipating their wedding night. She is confined to a convent to do penance for twenty years; he is dispatched as a Templar Knight to the Holy Land where he becomes a famous warrior. This love story is interwoven with sequences showing Arn’s exploits in Palestine and the fighting and manoeuvring between the clans of northern Europe.

According to Swedish commentators, Guillou has created his own history for the novels and now the films. But Guillou and the film-makers have succeeded in thinking themselves into the world of the twelfth century to recreate the codes of obligation, duty and religious belief that governed medieval life. Arn and Cecilia believe they are under the special protection of the Virgin Mary. It is an idea that comes straight from the twelfth century, a combination of the courtly love in the poetry emerging from the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine where the beloved is worshipped with religious fervor, and the semi-erotic devotion to the Virgin who in some medieval lyrics is both Christ’s lover and his mother.

It is a marvellous literary device but fiendishly difficult to make believable in a modern film. Somehow director Peter Flinth, screenwriter Hans Gunnarsson and two extraordinary actors, Joakim Natterqvist as Arn and Sofia Helin as Cecilia, bring it off superbly. The love scenes are played with an unaffected sincerity that almost compels the viewer to believe in the characters’ devotion throughout twenty years of exile and imprisonment. Flinth and his designers Anna Asp, Frederic Evard and Linda Janson incorporate images of the Virgin throughout both films, culminating in a staging of a pieta in the final moments of The Kingdom at Road’s End.

Equally effective is the treatment of Arn’s adventures in the Holy Land. The history may have been drastically simplified but it is not distorted. Guillou and Gunnarsson omit some of the worst of the Crusaders’ excesses by having Arn’s adventures take place before Richard the Lionheart and the third Crusade. Arn does get to save the life of Saladin (who later returns the favour) and the Saracen leader is portrayed as even more chivalrous, not to mention handsome, than he is in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Flinth sees the Crusades as a tragedy for both sides and avoids any hint of present-minded moralising. Even Saladin’s modern-sounding hope that Jerusalem will eventually become a place for all faiths is completely in character, if even more pertinent now than it was then. As one reviewer wrote of the novels, “utterly of its time and utterly modern”.

The Arn films may be the first to portray the different languages spoken in twelfth-century Sweden. While the principal language is Swedish, the monks who educate Arn speak English, French and Latin, while in the Holy Land we hear English and Arabic. This is not exactly what would have been spoken at the time but it is enough to evoke the period and make the characters credible.

Flinth’s treatment of this material is unabashedly romantic. As photographed by cinematographer Eric Kress, Arn and Cecilia look stunning as they gallop across the countryside, and look even better in the discreet love scenes with Arn quoting the Song of Solomon. Interiors in the monastery where Arn is educated have the textures of Rembrandt paintings, while the exteriors (actually filmed in Scotland) have an almost pastoral quality for Arn and Cecilia’s love-making in the first film, and a bleak grandeur for the climactic battle in the snow in The Kingdom at Road’s End. These battle scenes are grimly realistic although never excessive. Flinth, while cutting away from the extreme violence, allows individual combats to play out so the viewer can appreciate the swordplay. Featured in most of Arn’s confrontations is the character’s ability to fight ambidextrously, for which Natterqvist learnt how to throw his broadsword from hand to hand while controlling his horse.

Not the least of the director’s achievements has been to integrate the talents of an extraordinarily diverse cast. Michael Nyqvist and Stellan Skarsgard are suitably rugged as Arn’s father and uncle and entirely believable as formidable clan leaders. Simon Callow playing in English is elegantly incisive as Father Henry, Arn’s mentor, while this characterisation of an entirely admirable cleric is nicely balanced by Sven-Bertil Taube’s chilling portrait of the venal bishop who exiles the lovers, and Bibi Andersson’s splendidly vicious abbess, mistress of a convent “from which God has been shut out”.

Peering at a computer screen to view films that ought to be projected on a Panavision screen in a cinema may be difficult, but I can’t begin to describe the pleasure of experiencing a film narrative that simply flows without any pressure to hit pre-determined turning points or cram a complex drama into some arbitrary three-act structure. Certainly there are sub-plots, but the transition from love story to political and military epic in the second film is virtually seamless.

So why is a work as distinguished as this released outside Sweden in version that is virtually incomprehensible? One should never underrate plain old human stupidity but I can’t help feeling that the achievements of the Arn films are an implied reproach to the excesses of Hollywood movie-making. With a budget of US$30 million dollars they are the most expensive ever made in Sweden. Yet Russell Crowe’s fee alone for Robin Hood was US$20 million. Anyway, despite the difference in expenditure, the production values of Robin Hood and Arn are identical. And if we are discussing star power, Crowe is certainly a charismatic performer, but so is Natterqvist, and he is by far the more accomplished action star.

Are there forces in the industry that are determined to prevent the Arn films from succeeding internationally? If so, from an Australian perspective this is very dangerous. Like Sweden we are a small country that has stories to tell that could indeed become epics. This will never happen if film budgets are needlessly inflated, as regrettably seems to have been the case with Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Our film-makers can only learn from films like Arn. So the sooner these Swedish epics are exhibited here on the big screen and available in full-length special-edition DVDs the better.

Neil McDonald writes: The Girl Who Played with Fire, the third film in the Stieg Larsson trilogy, of which we reviewed the first two parts in the May issue, is due for cinema release in Australia in September