Thanks , I Hate It: Kingdom of Heaven

Like his earlier film Gladiator, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a period piece firmly entrenched in the values of the present. The film's characters are sharply divided between more or less mustache-twirling medieval brutes and a few benighted secular humanists struggling to overcome the world's barbarity. Much of its three-hour-plus running time is taken up by scenes of these enlightened characters lamenting the violence and inhumanity of the Holy Land, espousing reforms and programs of tolerance and clemency their real-world counterparts would have laughed out of the room, and exchanging wryly worldly observations with one another about the fate of Jerusalem and its warring residents.

If Kingdom of Heaven confined itself to contrasting medieval and modern moral sensibilities it would be merely tedious, but its poor grasp on both subjects leads to further bungling related to setting, theology, and sociology. Scenes of Orlando Bloom's Balian of Ibelin, a bastard son of the French petty nobility, teaching Palestinian desert dwellers how to dig a well are especially egregious in their misconceptiosn the cultural and mechanical sophistication of medieval civilization. The patronizing racial component is loathsome enough on its own, an early sign that the conspicuous even-handedness of Scott's Crusader States morality play has -- in the most generous terms -- some backwards views about the Muslim world.

Kingdom of Heaven is broadly more pleasing on a technical level, its sets and costumes lush and memorable, its editing attentive. Scott 's thoughtfully-blocked crowd scenes are a delight, though some of the movie's CGI fell short even at the time of its 2005 release -- the interiors of holy structures rendered overly smooth and silvery, the horizon frequently reduced to a 300-esque blur. Even its dullest back-and-forth conversation scenes are pleasantly nuanced, characters lounging in artful poses or moving through light and shadow as they talk. And speaking of the ensemble, Brendan Gleeson and Eva Green are both so good that they transcend their plodding material. Jeremy Irons has little to do and Orlando Bloom is relentlessly one-note, while Edward Norton's uncredited performance as King Baldwin IV makes the best of a truly saccharine role.

It's that last decision -- the presentation of Baldwin as a peacemaker and liberal thinker -- that really gets at what I find repellent about Scott's movie, more so even than its relentless grandstanding about equality and respecting all religions.  Accuracy is not a requirement for a good piece of historical fiction. Ken Russell's The Devils plays about as fast and loose with its subject matter as one can and I don't think it's a stretch to call it one of the greatest films of all time. Even dumber, more meatheaded fare like Mel Gibson's Braveheart succeeds as melodramatic romance and action epic in a way Kingdom of Heaven never does. Inaccuracy isn't Kingdom's problem, though; instead it's revisionism. It's a story where a warmonger is a saint, a corrupt bureaucrat is a plucky upstart, and a near-crazily devoted marriage an abusive political sham broken up for the sake of letting the hero ride off into the sunset with the girl. What good is polemic if you have to change every fact you can get your hands on to make it fit?