When will you make an end?

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

1965

Directed by Carol Reed

Written by Philip Dunne (based on the novel by Irving Stone)

Spoilers: Michelangelo did, in fact, finish the Sistine Chapel ceiling

The Agony and the Ecstasy is a little off, I find, and a lot of it comes down to—whether or not it would actually benefit from it—that I think it wants to be longer, although maybe not as long as the (nearly 800 page) Irving Stone novel on which it's based, inasmuch as Carol Reed's film and Philip Dunne's screenplay has at least pared down the "biographical novel about Michelangelo Buonarotti" of Stone's book, which encompasses basically the whole shebang, down to what I reckon is probably its most exciting and filmic episode, regarding Michelangelo's artistic conflicts with his papal patron and (as the film has it) more-or-less captor, Julius II.  But by the standards of its contemporaries, this historical epic seems kind of scrawny at just 138 minutes.  Just as far as 20th Century Fox-financed period pieces go, it lags behind 1963's Cleopatra and 1966's The Bible ...In the Beginning; it shares a year and a studio with The Sound of Music (a film that would prefer not to be an historical epic and would like to be shorter!), and it shares a year and a Charlton Heston with The Greatest Story Ever Told. (It of course likewise shares a Rex Harrison—even a Harrison playing a guy named Julius, not so coincidentally—with Cleopatra.)  Every single one of these is, at a minimum, within six minutes of three hours long, if not much longer.  That some of these are part of the Bible movie cycle and hence apparently divinely ordained to be long, well, so could we say that The Agony and the Ectsasy is, at least honorarily, part of that whole "mid-century Bible film" wave; it is, in any case, concerned with the visual depiction of Bible stories, obviously enough, and very interested in religion, and to some degree its central conflict is the inability of its deuteragonists to understand the different ways they approach God.

But if it feels a little unbalanced, maybe that's most of all because it opens up like only a movie pushing three hours, where duration is an integral component of the experience, ought to open up, with an entire short film documentary on the subject of Michelangelo's artistic legacy, basically a slideshow narrated by an uncredited Marvin Miller, to the tune of twelve and a half minutes.  (Later, it has an intermission just like a real roadshow movie, yet it's mainly by the virtue of its documentary prologue that it even exceeds two hours.)  This isn't necessarily a "good" way to open a movie—and I daresay the objective wisdom of it is downright obscure—but even if I was getting antsy about it in a way I don't think I would have if the movie were, say, 174 minutes long, it's absolutely my kind of square.  (The initial plan wasn't even this: after the film was done, Stone had suggested, and Reed and Heston concurred, that what The Agony and the Ecstasy required was a fully narrative prologue about Michelangelo's David.  Fox chief Darryl Zanuck nixed it for budgetary reasons—turns out the wisdom of this wasn't obscure, for The Agony and the Ecstasy didn't do very well—and the stopgap Reed and Heston acceded to was technical advisor Vincenzo Labella putting together this virtual art exhibit as a preface instead.)

History is silent on whether the all-David prologue would've also been a giant pussy about David's tiny dick.

As we proceed, there is, to be fair, the obvious obstacle to it being longer, and it's also the reason I'm probably glad it's actually not: it's kind of the same scene over and over, especially in the back half, and I would not be exaggerating too much if I described the final hour of the film as literally just Julius inquiring of Michelangelo, "When will you make an end?", and Michelangelo giving him the same answer he did the last several times he asked, "When I am finished." I still promise it's a good movie, even a very good one, at least if you're into the period pieces of its era.

But there is also a sense throughout that even though it's resigned itself to its streamlining, to do so was a strain on it.  At times, it can seem like it wants to start encompassing Italian Renaissance politics as a whole secondary subject—I don't suppose you need to have a grounding in the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, but the movie surely assumes you've got one—to the extent it sort of openly wonders if Julius has fully resolved as a character rather than merely Michelangelo's antagonistic taskmaster, even when it needs to push him into the narrative background to work as a coherent story, and it still comes off slightly envious of all those other 60s historical epics that actually do have a broader sweep, meaty political intrigue, and big-ass battle scenes.  In any case, the first scene after that prologue—well, the first scene is the credits, over some imposing photography of a mountainside marble quarry in Carrara, mostly because it looks awesome and that's where Michelangelo's marble comes from, and partly because this location will have plot importance later—but the first scene after that, may in fact benefit from you not knowing anything about the Italian Wars or Pope Julius II, as I did not.  This is a big-ass (well, medium-ass) battle scene, seeming to center upon a nobleman in gaudy, identity-obscuring armor chasing fleeing, defeated soldiers into a sugarcane field and running them down, in a sequence weirdly prefiguring Planet of the Apes (shot by the same man, Leon Shamroy), whereupon he sweeps into the city (it turns out it's Bologna) at the head of a cavalry squadron, and this warrior turns out to also be that selfsame pope (Harrison), possibly disorienting you even if you did know of Julius's reputation.  And Dunne's script, and presumably Stone's novel, seems to be in conversation with the sources of that reputation, the bloodthirsty asshole and worldly pope presented, inter alia, in such proto-Protestant satires as Erasmus's "Julius Excluded From Heaven," a very long editorial cartoon with no pictures that, even so, does feel like it was somehow written in 1514 with Rex Harrison in mind to recite it in his clipped, irritated, but self-amused manner.  Or maybe it's just that its 1989 translation by Robert M. Adams was executed with Harrison as either the conscious or unconscious mold for that scholar's Julius II, and I think that's fun to consider.

Now having liberated (or whatever) Bologna, Julius returns to Rome, where the new St. Peter's Basilica is being built, both as a church by its architect, Bramante (Harry Andrews), and as Julius's monarchical tomb by its sculptor, Michelangelo (Heston), and they dislike another and get in one another's way but this particular conflict is about to come to an end, because what Julius wants Michelangelo to do right now isn't sculpture, or even in the basilica: he brings him over, gestures to the vault of his uncle Sixtus's chapel, and tells him to paint it.  The commission is the twelve apostles, and is intended as fairly modest—"an appropriate design"—and it makes Michelangelo want to puke.  He's not a painter (that docuprologue's narration and much of this movie's dialogue is concerned with Michelangelo rebelling at the thought of wasting his time on painting), and while he has no real choice, he is eventually moved to destroy the work halfway through, flee Rome, and become an outright fugitive.  But during his flight, he is compelled to climb a mountain, and he is inspired by beholding God's creation from this vantage point; he comes back to Julius and tells him he'll paint, all right, but his design, and by the end Julius has had many causes to wonder if he shouldn't have hanged him anyway, but it's hard to argue with Michelangelo's results.

There's nothing too unlikeable about the first half, but the movie only starts really moving, paradoxically, once its hero stands still and accedes to his task, in a big, burly effects sequence right before that intermission that works better for being uncanny and fakey in that mid-60s way—it's maybe a little too corny, but it's supposed to be, and I love the series of iterative giant effects-juiced background paintings in which Michelangelo beholds the centerpiece of his own future masterwork—and if I've fairly accused The Agony and the Ecstasy of being repetitive, it's the repetition that does it, or the variations within its repeated scenes.  To no small degree, what the film's "about" is the scaffolding, and Reed and Shamroy and production designer John DeCuir coming up with ever-more elaborate angles (amidst muscular camerawork and, ultimately, an arch-Shamroy "nighttime lighting scheme" that's supernatural in its artifice) by which to film Harrison hissing at Heston and Heston hissing back from his perch above the pope's head.  The movie is, though I don't believe people talk about it in such terms, genuinely funny—it is almost a comedy—and Julius's repeated question to Michelangelo isn't funny the first time but it starts getting funny the second time and it's hilarious by the third, strangely enough as much as a matter of sound design as shot design*, with the chapel's functions overlapping with Michelangelo's grand work, and for the final beat of this running gag, if that's what we may call it, it's Harrison and Heston literally just mouthing the words they don't even really need to say to one another anymore.  In some respects, or maybe just from Julius's perspective, it's about an annoying contractor who won't give you a solid estimate about when the renovation will be done.

It's also, probably not entirely intentionally, about the creation of any kind of large-scale art—so, "filmmaking"—and how the artist must drag the patron (or the studio) across broken glass to see their true inspiration realized, when all the patron, or the studio, wanted was some hackjob regarding, for instance, the apostles.  The specific applicability to film is but a resonance more than a theme (though Reed, and Heston upon Reed's behalf, hoped that this would be his comeback after a debacle on Marlon Brando's Mutiny On the Bounty), and naturally I'm glad it's only a resonance; it gives it a more timless quality that the exact same sort of tacky, lowest-common-denominator, and even pecuniary concerns that might animate a capital-driven executive once animated a murderous, corrupt head of a major world religion.

The actual creation of the art, inside a Cinecitta-staged recreation of the Sistine Chapel (so just down the road), gets fairly lavish attention, more as an impressionistic idea of the creation of art than hard-nosed procedure.  (There is some procedure even so.)  And still, I'm awfully fond of a well-executed montage, courtesy editor Samuel E. Beetley, of Heston throwing himself bodily into the work, and of the way that our Michelangelo, perceiving something beyond humanity, exceeds his own human limits in his ceaseless pursuit of trying to capture it in paint.  (This is where Michelangelo's former lover, or former suitress, or something, the married Medici, Contessina (Diane Cilento), is awarded her most substantial plot function, as a nursemaid.  I would've initially clocked this as simply the Hollywood movie's need to put a chick in it somewhere, but I like where they eventually take it—when she says "that's what you meant," right near the end—and, for what it's worth, this prestige movie smack in the middle of the 1960s also has the cutest little aside about what I gather were Michelangelo's equal-and-alike proclivities.  So if that means this 1965 film with basically the same plot and which activates the same fundamental notions as The Brutalist is more sensitive in this as well as other matters, well, I guess that's just how it shakes out sometimes.  It also has cooler ideas about marble quarries.)  Heston is great, though as I'm a Heston superfan that might go without me saying it.  Maybe without it being obvious, this is a necessarily physical performance, and Heston was a necessarily physical performer; it's not as showy as some of his more widely-seen roles, certainly, but there's always something of Renaissance painting to the actor (though I usually say "Baroque") that almost seems to defy the moving image—his penchant for strong, even graphic poses—and there's a good handful of wonderful choices Heston is making about his body in conjunction with Reed here, my favorite being the louche repose in his spot way up in the marble mountain, though I'm also quite fond of a dangling leg off the scaffold.  In any event, the star was the main instrument by which this art came into being, yet he later said he found Michelangelo "elusive."  He needn't have worried too much: if there's one thing Heston is exceedingly good at, it's a character who reflexively scoffs at power and has determined to painfully, shall we say agonizingly push through all obstacles (including himself) down the path of most resistance towards a barely-comprehended goal.

But Heston is, even if it's what the movie needs of him, a force of nature, a relatively unchanging character even if he does change his mind; it seems the character being studied, strangely enough, is much more Julius.  This isn't peak Harrison (even "Harrison in a 60s historical epic," as he's superb in Cleopatra), and Harrison isn't really the best in show here—Harrison didn't like Heston, and that certainly works for their interactions, but it also means you can kind of tell Harrison wants the movie to make an end, which only somewhat dovetails into Julius's similar goal—but the movie requires him, and his particular contribution, at least as much as it needs Heston's angry, questing visionary.  Julius is the one who changes, who does come to understand his turbulent artist—I do like that Heston's initial response is to be utterly confused, even humbled by the signs of this change—and Harrison gets at the awe that we'd like to believe that Julius felt before what his hireling has wrought in his name.  Harrison's Julius, anyway, knows he's going to purgatory (at a minimum), despite his efforts in the name of a temporally-powerful church (it is a bit of an unhammered nail: you'd think the movie would have some critique of "theocratic monarch" even if we were to take Julius II's self-serving descriptions of his motivations at face value), but this reawakens faith he wasn't entirely sure he still possessed.  That this is a movie about faith is emphasized by Alex North and Jerry Goldsmith's gorgeous score, as loud as any epic's, but tilted far more towards spiritual yearning than usual (a score that I surely ought to have mentioned sooner than the last paragraph because I cannot imagine The Agony and the Ecstasy working without it).  And now that whole visual scheme of Michelangelo held aloft and looking down at Julius, that had been so amusing, offers another meaning now—the barely-restrained jealousy of the head of the Roman Catholic Church, for the mere workman, who was nonetheless much closer to God than he—and there are some delicate conversations between our principals as this jealousy and irritation becomes admiration and gratitude, amidst the most beautiful colors of Shamroy's photography.  Later, Michelangelo goads the ailing pope into living long enough, out of spite, to see their fraught joint work completed.  They manage, as much as is possible, a rapprochement between their worldviews, and the film, as an intellectual argument, makes the case that as troublesome as the process of making art often is, maybe it's as close to God as humans are likely to get.  That's a pretty damned self-aggrandizing argument for artists to make, of course, but The Agony and the Ecstasy makes it well.

Score: 8/10

*Which makes it all the more perplexing why a whole scene gets played out with the most blatantly fucked up sound recording imaginable in 1965, with this weird metallic echo; though as it involves Michelangelo's ex-girlfriend, it's by default not that important a scene.