There’s a funny moment in Ridley Scott’s new version of Robin
Hood — almost the only one among these no-longer very merry
men — when Robin (Russell Crowe) and Maid Marion (Cate
Blanchett) are getting to know one another, and Marion has just
told him of her brief marriage to Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas
Hodge), the son of Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) of Pepper
Harrow, Nottingham. After only a week of married life, her
husband had gone off to the Holy Land with King Richard for a
decade of crusading, where he, like the King, had met his death.
Now, at Sir Walter’s instance, Robin has agreed to impersonate
his now-dead son, Marion’s husband, so that the estate of Pepper
Harrow will not be confiscated by the crown on his death. Robin,
a lowly yeoman and archer, had known Sir Robert in the King’s
army and says of him to his widow, “A good knight.”
“It was short but sweet,” replies Marion.
“No, I meant: he was a good knight,” explains
Robin. “A knight at arms.”
“Oh, yes, to be sure. Knight at arms.”
It’s all part of a classic Hollywood “meet-cute” setup
which starts from the moment that, seeing her from behind, Robin
addresses her as “girl” and receives a blushing rebuke for
failing to see that she is, as she insists, far past her
girlhood. The moment of her coyness and embarrassment is so
movieish, as is the moment when Robin, come to deliver the news
of her husband’s death, is invited to dinner by her father in
law, and requires her to help him off with his chain mail first.
As his magnificent physique stands revealed before her, we are
invited to speculate on what this long unhusbanded woman must be
thinking. Or, when they must share a bed-chamber to persuade the
servants that this is really Sir Robert come home to his wife and
Marion warns: “I sleep with a dagger. If you ever move as to
touch me, I will sever your manhood.” Ha ha. We know from the
movies that all this classic movie-courtship means that they will
soon be together.
As is usually the case these days, this breaking of the
frame and fracturing of the illusion that this is about 12th
century England rather than present-day Hollywood, is deliberate.
The real 12th century or anything approximating to it, so Mr.
Scott and his screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, presumably imagine,
would have been deadly boring to the pimply teenagers who are
their hopeful audience. For the same reason, Mr. Scott tarted up
the Middle Ages in Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Mr.
Helgeland did the same in A Knight’s Tale (2001).
Children these days expect the past to be made “relevant” to
their lives, not their lives to be put in touch with the past as
it really was.
It is in some ways amusing to read the film as an allegory
of the tea-party movement and recent American politics. King
Richard (Danny Huston) thus becomes George W. Bush, a warrior
king but one who foolishly squandered his resources on an
ill-advised Middle Eastern war that turned out to be the ruin of
him, bankrupting the country and leaving it to the tender mercies
of a young and inexperienced successor, his brother John (Oscar
Isaac), who, like President Obama, is determined not to allow the
profligacy of his predecessor hinder his own plans for taxing the
people until the pips squeak and spending the money on his own
pet projects — meanwhile leaving the country defenseless against
a foreign enemy drawn to make surreptitious war by the perception
of his weakness and domestic distractions. The foreign enemy in
this case is France, which mounts an invasion across the channel
unrecorded by history in Normandy-style landing craft. Obvious
allusions to Saving Private Ryan — with arrows taking
the place of bullets — are both an homage to Steven
Spielberg and a further reminder of the deliberate movie-fakery.
So is poor Miss Blanchett in a full suit of armor laying about
her with a broadsword on the beach.
There isn’t one interesting character in this movie. All
are recognizable stock figures from a thousand similar and
similarly pseudo-heroic sagas. But I don’t think this is by
inadvertence or incompetence either. To make anyone interesting,
or even recognizably human rather than a movie type, you would
break the spell and remind the audience of what is missing, which
is the link to reality that even the most jaded postmoderns among
us still sort-of expect from movies. We imagine, at least if
we’re not thinking about it too closely, that the movie will
resemble real life in certain important respects, and Mr. Scott
is here to tell us that that ain’t happening with his movie —
and to scold us for continuing to expect it to happen. Like the
remarkable closing credits, the whole film is absurdly
over-produced. But there is a reason for this, I think. It is
that Ridley Scott needs constantly to remind us that this is not
only fantasy but a particular kind of fantasy, a movie fantasy
set in a movie utopia and peopled by movie archetypes — not to
say stereotypes.
For the tea-party stuff is just a tease. By the time you
get to the end of the movie’s 140 minutes, you realize it is just
another progressive fable. Robin turns out to be the son of the
guy, a stonemason, who wrote the Magna Carta — here represented
as a 19th century rationalist’s design for a perfect political
system — a generation before the barons, with the indispensable
help of Robin, sought to impose it on King John. Robin adopts as
his own Sir Walter’s meaningless but curiously utopian-sounding
motto: “Rise and rise again until lambs become lions” and the
defeat of the French is followed by a retreat to the Greenwood
where, on Marion’s account of it, there is “no rich no poor, but
fair shares for all at nature’s table.” There is also an allusion
to Peter Pan and the lost boys with Marion in the role of Wendy
and Robin that of Peter. We’re home once again, folks, back in
Movieland. I’m not quite sure how that’s happened, but somehow,
that’s the only place today’s audiences ever want to be.
