Despite the sea of schlock that
surrounds the subject, all of the best and most famous stories of great
romances testify to the essential impossibility of anything like a lasting
love. The common thread winding through all those tales — of Hรฉloise and Abรฉlard, Lancelot and
Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet — suggests that the only love that endures
forever is unrequited love, lost love, doomed love.
The unlikely new movie Tristan & Isolde,
yet another variation on a much told tale of love and death, once again
underlines the truth of that belief, but includes a number of new wrinkles
without somehow in any discernible way improving upon the ancient material.
Set in the Dark Ages, as the first of
many paragraphs of on-screen prose helpfully informs us, the movie shows a Britain
sunk into chaos after the fall of Rome
and the departure of the occupying legions. The once unified island has
disintegrated into a group of separate regions, ruled by a number of competing
tribes whose names the characters reel off throughout the film — the Picts, the Jutes, the Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, etc.
Worse, the king of Ireland,
just across the water, who dreams big, sends raiding parties on the usual
missions of pillage, rape, and slaughter, ultimately hoping to conquer the
whole island and its warring tribes.
The movie opens with such a raid,
where the Irish brutally slay the parents of young Tristan (Thomas Sangster), and cut off the hand of his Uncle Mark (Rufus
Sewell), ruler of Cornwall, who
saves the boy and raises him like his own son in his fort in Cornwall.
Tristan grows into a fine young man (James Franco) and
a brave warrior, the apple of his uncle’s eye. Wounded by a poisoned sword in
another attack and assumed to be dead, he floats on his funeral boat to
Ireland, where the beautiful Isolde (Sophia Myles),
daughter of the evil king, heals him with a special antidote (most versions of
the story feature a magic potion of some kind), and of course the handsome
young people fall in love.
In keeping with the tragic
circumstances of the legend, when he returns to Cornwall,
Tristan must aid his uncle’s cause, in this case fighting in a tournament to
win the fair Isolde as Mark’s bride, all in the
service of a complicated stratagem of the duplicitous Irish king. After the
marriage of Isolde and Mark the movie settles into a
sort of tedious intrigue, in which the young lovers steal moments of passion
together while Mark preoccupies himself with the task of uniting England
once again.
A sort of double treachery, on the
one hand working against Mark from within his family and on the other revealing
Tristan’s trysts with Isolde, not only endangers the
kingdom but of course alienates the young man from his uncle. Despite
reconciliations and last-ditch heroics, the whole sorry mess ends, as it must,
with tragedy for the beautiful and doomed young couple, thus celebrating the Liebestod —
literally “love-death” — that occurs in all the versions of the story in many
eras and languages and of course in Wagner’s famous opera.
The filmmakers, I suppose, deserve
some credit for tackling a legend more literary than sensational and attempting
to place it in some sort of useful temporal context, but beyond that effort, Tristan & Isolde often seems laughable in its earnest little history lessons. The frequent prose
interpretations on the screen, printed in a barely readable, pseudo-medieval
script, vary between the redundant and the ridiculous. When Mark unfolds a
perfectly accurate map of England, the Dark Ages seem much more advanced in
cartography and literacy than most of us previously imagined; and when Isolde reads what sounds very like polished and intricate
17th-century metaphysical poetry to her beloved, the whole anachronistic
business simply disintegrates into sheer silliness.
In a cold, damp England
where the sun rarely shines, the director makes the Dark Ages look very dark
indeed. The dull gloom of the interior and exterior settings apparently seeps
into the actors as well, since they mostly talk in sullen, angry tones and move
with a brutish languor. None of the actors distinguish themselves, but then
again, the material hardly allows them much beyond mere emoting without a good
deal of conviction.
That sound you hear may be Richard
Wagner spinning in his grave, possibly accompanied by a Heldentenor and a chorus of Valkyries.
Tristan & Isolde (PG-13), directed by Kevin Reynolds, is playing at Culver Ridge Cinema, Eastview Mall, Henrietta 18, Tinseltown, and Webster 12.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2006.
