Ben-Hurt

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

Directed by Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is wildly ambitious-an historical blockbuster with immense battles, meticulous panoramas, vivid supporting performances and none-too-coded commentary on current Mid-East bloodshed. It's also an inconsistent, frustrating film with a vaguely written and blandly played hero. And in its desire to connect the Crusades and modern times, it often superimposes the present upon the past in an anachronistic or grindingly rhetorical way. At its worst, Kingdom seems less interested in making history immediate than in scoring points off people who lived 1000 years ago and warning latter-day audiences, "Don't be like them!"

Heaven starts in France circa 1196 A.D. with a humble blacksmith named Balian (Saltine-bland Lord of the Rings costar Orlando Bloom, who lacks the necessary charisma to make this underwritten hero part watchable) grieving over his dead wife and child. Enter Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), who claims to be Balian's bastard father. Godfrey invites the lad to Jerusalem to do God's work and see his estate, a faintly utopian commune tended by Christians, Jews and Muslims. Alas, Godfrey dies en route to Jerusalem (as Neeson's saintly father figures tend to do)-but not before willing Balian his knighthood, his estate and his mission to bring peace to the Middle East.

You read that last part right. Screenwriter William Monahan has set Kingdom in a Jerusalem exhausted by 200 years of war-a place whose Muslim, Jewish and Christian citizens still distrust each other, but are willing to live in the same city, shop in the same markets and think twice before spilling each other's blood. This canny choice of time and place lets Scott superimpose a modern, secular, Western, liberal viewpoint onto the Crusades, and express it via numerous compositions in which crucifixes unnerve or terrify characters and/or dominate landscapes, starting with the film's opening shot, which places tiny, distant horsemen in the background, frame left, and an enormous cross in the foreground, frame right. The setting also puts sword-and-sandals fans in the odd but not unwelcome position of rooting against violence.

Kingdom's Jerusalem is the modern world in ancient microcosm, with three faiths resolving to share the same city without killing each other. The city's dicey equilibrium is encouraged by two wise leaders, the leprosy-ridden Catholic King Baldwin IV (a voice-over cameo by Edward Norton, sounding eerily like Marlon Brando's Julius Caesar) and the Salacen general Saladin (Syrian actor-director Ghassan Massoud). Baldwin and Saladin's foes are greedy, hateful renegades who prefer war to peace. Their ranks include Raynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson), a bigoted thug who thinks the Crusades have gone downhill since this whole peace thing, and Guy de Lusignan (Martin Csokas), a sneering, sadistic knight who's moved to stir up trouble partly out of frustration with his wife, Baldwin's sister Sibylla (Eva Green), a Christian who's so comfortable with Muslim culture that she wears a chador. Stir in political intrigue, intense combat, vivid supporting turns (notably by David Thewlis as the hero's advisor/confessor, and Jeremy Irons as Baldwin's war-weary right-hand man) and an obligatory, unconvincing love story between oppressed Sibylla and grieving Balian, and you've got one hell of a big, busy picture.

Conflicted, too. Scott's films often strive to balance the audience's thirst for violent spectacle (and Scott's showman's desire to satisfy that thirst) against the director's apparently sincere interest in exploring violence's causes and justifications. To balance these impulses, directors must mingle catharsis and horror-no easy task even for the great Sam Peckinpah. Scott is no Peckinpah, and between his careerist desire to maintain his A-list status and his instinctive ad man's eye (which makes every frame as glossy-beautiful as a Super Bowl ad), he often errs on the side of excitement, even exploitation. Thus the same career includes the depressed humanism of Blade Runner, the conflicted, melancholy feminism of Thelma and Louise and the leering sadism of Hannibal, which climaxed with Anthony Hopkins' smart-aleck serial killer nibbling Ray Liotta's brains. Scott's contradictory tendencies were showcased in his biggest hit Gladiator, which sincerely explored the conundrum of trying to be moral in an amoral world, and implicitly chided the audience for craving violence ("Are you not entertained?"), yet still showcased limb-loppings and decapitations in dazzling slow mo, endorsing the age-old canard that vengeance brings peace to wronged souls.

Kingdom tries to have it both ways throughout, alternating conventionally thrilling face-offs with images suggesting the futility of war (at the end of one battle, there are so many vultures pin-wheeling overhead that you can barely see the sky). This schizophrenia is embodied in the film's last act, which revolves around a Muslim siege against a Christian stronghold that would not have happened without political, economic and religious manipulation by warmongers. Balian leads the stronghold's spirited defense, but because he's depicted as an egalitarian humanist, you know he's not a religious fanatic trying to crush unbelievers; he's just trying to stave off the assault long enough to give his attackers reason to offer the Christians the opportunity to surrender without fear of slaughter. (Balian, Godfrey and numerous other religion-distrusting characters are merely latest examples of a pernicious but very old movie tradition: the anachronistically modern character whose views reflect contemporary social norms.) The final assault is one of the most visually and aurally imaginative battle sequences in recent cinema. Yet like the Gladiator battles, it feels vaguely dishonest. The film's stated point-of-view on religious violence dictates that we find the final battle scary and revolting and pray for it to stop. Yet John Mathieson's dynamically composed CinemaScope images are so blasted lovely, and Dody Dorn's cutting is so crisp and playful, that the sequence is thrilling instead.

It's tough to know whom to blame for the picture's faults. While Scott has never been the world's most exacting storyteller, the studio did make him chop an hour from the picture's running time after poor test screenings; the director's cut might be more nuanced and less morally, politically and theologically tangled. But whatever the explanation, this Kingdom is choppy and often unsatisfying, and its sustained, conscious comparison between modern times and the Crusades is less poetic and playful-and ultimately less thought-provoking-than similar explorations in Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique and Oliver Stone's wrongly maligned Alexander.

Where Godard and Stone used high-flown rhetoric and poetic images to show how ancient religious and political conflicts continue into the present, Monahan and Scott simply view the past through the prism of 21st-century Hollywood filmmakers-a more commonplace and reductive approach. (The script even puts post-Enlightenment democratic sentiments in the mouths of 12th-century Christian warriors. In Jerusalem, Godfrey says, "You are not what you were born, but what you have it in yourself to be"-a statement with which Thomas Jefferson and Rocky Balboa would surely agree.) The movie's gist is something like, "People use religion as an excuse to do stupid and often horrible things." An inarguable point, but one I'd rather hear from George Carlin.