Ridley Scott's dazzling epic of the Crusades has attracted flak from historians and Islamic scholars, but will its combination of spiritual devotion and gore draw audiences into the fold?
Peter Stanford
Sunday April 24, 2005
The Observer
Religion and mainstream cinema tend not to mix, unless it's one debunking the other. And that's usually one-way traffic - Life of Brian, Dogma, The Pope Must Die, Amen. But then two things happened to change the relationship.
First, 9/11 focused attention as never before on the hostility between some parts of Islam and the West. Religion overnight became a matter not for a dwindling bunch of sad souls who needed to get out more, but a terrifying force reshaping our planet.
Then Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ broke box office records around the globe, despite being cold-shouldered as an uneconomic vanity project by the Hollywood studios on the grounds of its heavy Catholic content. They had assumed religion only sold if you were laughing at it and were proved spectacularly wrong.
Both events form the backdrop to Ridley Scott's controversial release, Kingdom of Heaven. The £75 million epic from Oscar-nominated Scott takes as its subject the Crusades, the 200-year collision between Europe and the East, Christianity and Islam, over the fate of the Holy Land.
Set in 1185, it follows Balian (Orlando Bloom looking at his most Christ-like), a blacksmith in rural France, who is claimed as his illegitimate son by a Crusader knight, Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson) and taken to Jerusalem. Balian has lost his faith after the suicide of his wife, but slowly regains it at the court of saintly Baldwin IV (Edward Norton), the King of Jerusalem, who practises and preaches tolerance between Christians and Muslims. However, zealots on both sides destroy Baldwin's 'kingdom of heaven' and when his power-hungry son-in-law Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) succeeds him, the scene is set for a confrontation with the Saracen General Saladin (Ghassan Massound) which leads to Balian's heroic leadership of the siege of Jerusalem.
Kingdom of Heaven is, however, no run-of-the-mill variation on the popular theme of the historical thriller - all battle scenes, manly knees and banquets. Instead, Scott has directed a complex modern morality play, its dialogue dominated by high-minded talk of God, redemption, sin and punishment.
In a post-9/11 world, with British and American troops still in Iraq, the subject matter is inevitably sensitive. The film has already generated headlines. In the New York Times last autumn a series of Islamic scholars lined up to denounce Kingdom of Heaven as 'anti-Islamic', pandering to stereotypes and likely to offend Muslims.
Meanwhile, Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, a Cambridge academic and expert on the Crusades, has labelled it 'Osama bin Laden's version of history'. He questioned its historical accuracy, saying its basis lies in the romantic thrillers of Walter Scott, though screenwriter William Monahan has the support of academic experts in pointing to real-life figures and events as the basis for the major characters and events in the film.
What is true, however, is that the film gives religion - both Christian and Muslim, in their purest, most tolerant forms - the best and most respectful press it has got since The Song of Bernadette. And it manages, moreover, to tell its story without the usually de rigueur dollop of on-screen eroticism. The most you glimpse is the delicate shoulder of Baldwin's sister, Princess Sibylla (Eva Green) as she falls for Balian.
Such restraint is no accident. Scott is attempting to lure back to the big screen the hitherto non-cinema-going audiences from God-fearing middle America who turned out in such impressive numbers to watch Gibson's chaste epic. They need have no fears of being corrupted by sexual depravity in Kingdom of Heaven and may feel uplifted by the depth of its search for the hand of God at work. An essential part of the Gibson package was its gore with every physical indignity Jesus suffered on his Via Crucis recreated in extraordinary and lingering detail. Christian audiences, the zealous Australian actor-cum-director had realised, have no problem with blood and guts - it's just sex they're saving till they're married. Kingdom of Heaven is also not for the squeamish as heads are chopped off, guts torn out and the severed head of arch-Crusader, Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson) displayed on a pole - a historical inaccuracy, according to one expert.
Yet it is less Kingdom of Heaven's very specific sexual restraint than its occasionally laboured parallels between the 1180s and the post-9/11 world that will probably be most debated by audiences. Five years ago there would have been no question that the Saracens should be portrayed as baddies, all treachery and turbans. Yet Saladin is shown as dedicated to peace and understanding between the great religious faiths as Bloom's Balian and his protector and patron, Baldwin. Saladin is even gracious in his final victory and pauses to right a fallen crucifix as he enters Jerusalem. Dramatic licence, arguably, but it has led to accusations that Scott is too indulgent of the Muslim side. He may just, of course, have felt the need to redress the balance after centuries of remorseless anti-Saracen bias in most Western accounts.
The film chooses unambiguously to place the blame for the Crusader-Saracen conflict, which causes the eventual downfall of Baldwin's kingdom, squarely at the door of fundamentalists in both camps, but overall it is the Christian fundamentalists who come off worst of all. At a time when the Catholic church has just elected as its leader a cardinal who has previously described other faiths as 'gravely deficient', Kingdom of Heaven presents a deeply unappealing picture of all those who feel their religious belief is superior to any other. Lusignan, the new king of Jerusalem, is egged on to battle by the Knights Templar, brandishing their crosses and talking of 'killing a Muslim to get to heaven'.
Balian hammers home the point about the supremacy of religious tolerance when he hands over the Holy City to Saladin. God, he tells his followers, is in your head and your heart, not in any particular place.
It is in its loud and repeated plea for religious tolerance and understanding rather than its precise historical accuracy that Kingdom of Heaven risks most. Evangelical Christians went to see The Passion of the Christ because it buttressed their own faith position. They may not welcome being told that Jesus, Mohammed and Jehovah are all much of a muchness.
And, in a broader political context, the careful, even-handed, pacific approach of Baldwin and Balian to reconciling East and West stands in stark, and no doubt intentional, counterpoint to the efforts of George W. Bush on his own self-avowed 'crusade' in today's Middle East.
But Scott's central theme is one of faith lost and reborn in Balian. Though it is not a new one for him - Maximus in Gladiator went through the same process - in Kingdom of Heaven he invokes religion more pointedly. Even though he does so with great respect for the principle, if not the institutions, that may not be enough to save him from criticism, as other directors such as Pasolini (The Gospel According to St Matthew), Godard (Hail Mary) and Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) can readily testify. For if cinema traditionally looks on religion as a suitable target, then many believers have come, despite Gibson's efforts, to regard film as a secular, godless medium that is not for them.
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