A Ramble About Robin Hood

In the commentary to the Director’s Cut of Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott said that he would jump at a chance to return to make other movies in that particular era. He did so with Robin Hood, and he should have looked before he leaped.

It’s frustrating not because it’s a bad film. It isn’t. It’s just hamstrung by being called Robin Hood. It isn’t Robin Hood. But then again, this is another secret history movie, like Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur. By creating a narrative that supposedly is about the man behind the myth, the film cannot decide what it is about. Sure, Russell Crowe’s character is well drawn and executed, bit he doesn’t need to be Robin Hood. As a matter of fact, the film would have been better if all the references to Robin Hood and the like were absent until the very end. I say this because it is obvious that the Robin Hood bits are a subplot, or perhaps an after thought. Because I think that Scott really wanted to make a movie about William Marshal and King John.

I really hope that, like Kingdom of Heaven, there is a superior cut of this film waiting to be released on DVD. But instead of Kingdom of Heaven, where the director’s cut restored the characters to the film (where the theatrical cut was all politics), I really hope that Robin Hood gets the politics put back in. I’m not saying this cut exists, I just hope it does. Because if somebody where to make a movie about medieval English politicking, I want that somebody to be Ridley Scott. He creates a singular verisimilitude in his period pieces that I think is absolutely necessary for this type of film. The technical side of this film is near perfection, which just adds to the frustrating nature of the film.

Watching the movie, you get the idea that Scott really doesn’t dig on Robin Hood. First off, there is no real Errol Flynn-like good-natured action; while relatively bloodless (especially in comparison to Kingdom of Heaven) the violence is brutal and realistic. There is also very little of the Robin Hood myth in here. There is a little bit of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but it’s narratively more of an aside than the main thrust of the film. There is very little humor; Scott would appear to be one of the more dour and humorless filmmakers out there and thus a poor choice for something like Robin Hood, if that Robin Hood was to be a traditional kind of RObin Hood movie. A movie that Scott is uninterested in making.

Not only that, but there are just so many good ideas that are just completely undeveloped in the film that you really wonder weather they had a full script when they started. First, you got the orphan thieves who live in Sherwood Forrest; visually exciting and new, and frankly, the only real bit of swashbuckling you get in the move. I would have loved to see a movie that was 1 part Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and 1 part Lord of Flies that takes place in medieval England and was directed by Scott. Second, you got Isabella of Angouleme, kingly-bed-usurper and political player in the making. Third, how can you make a movie that is more or less about the Plantagenets and not get down with some hard core political conniving from Eleanor of Aquitaine? The worst part is, that with the exception of the orphan thieves, you can see that that was the direction that Scott would have rather gone in, but he was signed on to make a Robin Hood movie.

The historical record for this particular era (1199-1216) is absolutely fascinating. There is so much a writer or a filmmaker can do here. First you have the fact that before the Plantagenets, most of the politicking going on in Europe was more-or-less tough guys with type-A personalities going around and raping and pillaging; the type of back room dealings, marriages for power and the clandestine maneuvering were relatively new to the European stage (or at least relatively returned to the European stage after the fizzling out of the Roman Empire). Also, there is the ethnic divisions going on in England at the time. The Plantagenets were Normans, which is to say they were French, and the upperclass was pretty much divided between Saxons and Normans, and the underclass was Saxon, with celtic fringes. The cultural identification that we think of as English was still two hundred years off (it was mostly a product of the Hundred Years’ War); England was not a homogeneous whole. Ethnic strife was the rule of the day. That’s where you get to the meat of what the movie could have been: a movie about the Baron’s Rebellion and the creation of the Magna Carta. All of this makes it hard to wedge Robin Hood in, especially considering that Robin Hood was a folk hero that has little to do with actual history, and since the real history of it all is so rich, kind of superfluous.

But there are other problems with the film, aside from the fuzziness of what it’s about.

The first act is essentially lifted in total from the beginning of Robin and Marian, the 1976 film about an aging Robin Hood starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. The final action sequence, an amphibious landing of the French army at Dover, poses even more problems. First, Dover does not have beaches. Second, the entire sequence cribs from Saving Private Ryan, with a few Star Wars: A New Hope bits thrown in as well. Marian shows up with the orphan thieves, for more or less contractual reasons.

All of this nit picking is mostly because I wanted this movie to either be incredibly surprising, like the Kingdom of Heaven directors cut, i.e. an intelligent, astute, historically respectful film about people and politics, or to be a rip-snorting-swashbuckling-fun action movie. It is almost both of them, but the filmmakers waffled and didn’t make a fully satisfying movie, but another beautiful failure.