Sherwood Week: No, I obviousy did not say "playing Capet and Roberts"

ROBIN HOOD

2010

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, and Brian Helgeland

Spoilers: moderate, but higher than you'd think possible in a movie described as "the origin of Robin Hood"

You can't say that the 2010 film bearing the simple title Robin Hood isn't doing something novel with the legend, to the extent that its simple title is basically a lie, and the only way to understand why it's even about Robin Hood (a name I believe is uttered only once, as "Robin of the Hood") is that's how the screenplay started out, even if it didn't start out being called Robin Hood.  Instead, though tracing it back can only illuminate how inspiration can be mangled beyond recognition rather than illuminate much about the movie itself, it was originally a mid-00s spec script called Nottingham written by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, which as its name suggests asked if the Sheriff of Nottingham is only the villain from the perspective of a fanatical insurgent, such as all previous Robin Hood stories had been told from.  I can say nothing definitive about Nottingham, though I would make the observation that it's got that post-9/11 scent to it, ready to operate in the moral grayscale but ultimately not likely to entirely take the side of the terrorists (or at least I feel safe assuming that about Reiff & Voris's show, Sleeper Cell, on the basis that it was ever aired on television).  So you have Nottingham, combining Reiff & Voris's apparent dual interests in grim 21st century ambiguity and English folklore (long before, they'd hoped to adapt the Arthur vs. future space aliens comic book, Camelot 3000, and you know that must not have went anywhere, because you'd remember).

We might or might not deem "if you think about it, the colonizer's tax collector is the real hero, and also maybe the babe should consider dating that cool guy instead" a good idea for a Robin Hood, but even if I'm being mighty sarcastic about it because, GWoT aside, it seems so of-the-00s in its reevaluation of a villain who only exists to offer uncomplicated antagonism, producer Brian Glazer must've thought it sounded neat, since he exchanged money for it; and, honestly, I think we'd have to have ever seen it to know for sure.  Because now enters Ridley Scott, and it's hard to imagine he ever thought it sounded neat, as likely to have badly misheard Reiff or Voris say it was like medieval "cops and robbers," thereby being inspired in turn.*  Either way, we never saw it, not even a bad or strained interpretation of it.  Their original titular character (Matthew Macfadyen) is only not a more venal and undignified figure than any previous screen version—an adaptational history that includes Alan Rickman's largely-realized ambition to destroy Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from the inside, as well as a fat cartoon wolf—because The Adventures of Robin Hood's vestigial sheriff is still slightly dumber.  He's not less vestigial, and I'll never need to mention the sheriff who was once this film's star again.  And "star" is correct: when Scott came aboard, it was natural enough for his Gladiator, Russell Crowe, to have come along, and Crowe, even inveigled to co-produce, started the project cast as Nottingham.  Now, it probably had more to do with how collaborating with Scott kept breaking his bones, but it's notable that they haven't worked together since.

Scott's iterative changes to the script (via his picked man, Brian Helgeland) eventually resulted in something entirely different, somehow pulling the story back onto its preestablished rails and flying off them completely simultaneously, at once exactly what you'd expect from the basic statistics "Robin Hood, made in 2010, by Ridley Scott" and so dashing of the expectations inherent to a Robin Hood, made at any point, by anybody, that I wouldn't be surprised, if we could somehow see Nottingham, that the Robin Hood we actually got is even more off the target than it threatened to be.  It is, anyway, a movie succinctly described—and here we are, a meaningful spoiler for a freaking Robin Hood!—as "the one where Robin isn't an outlaw, where he and John Plantagenet team up."

Slightly less succinctly, it's a prequel to the Robin Hood legendarium, that still starts where Robin and Marian does, with a lead of precisely the same age.  So: despite its obvious liberties towards the matter of Robin Hood, it goes to my refrain that after Ivanhoe the most unthinkable thing is to expressly place Robin in any other time period but the turn of the 13th century, despite none of the oldest tales actually being set there, because it begins exactly where Robin and Marian does, with Robin Bigdick I mean "Longstride" and Little John (Kevin Durand)—plus Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes) and Allan A'Dayle (Alan Doyle), so that I'm kind of surprised they don't go the path of complete least resistance and place mead-brewing Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) there too, because it's a Robin Hood prequel too busy with other stuff besides being a Robin Hood prequel to bother with first-act-of-other-shorter-Robin-Hood-movies activities, such as "assembling his gang"—all still in service to Richard (Danny Huston), on Richard's final campaign.  (The only unfamiliar part is that Chalus-Chabrol is fiercely defended rather than virtually abandoned, though the point, that Richard is arrogant and bestial, is similar—they even add the context that it was Richard, not his brother John (Oscar Isaac), who impoverished England—which bangs uncomfortably against another two-plus hours of movie where, with the obvious fraternal exception, the dialogue uniformly refers to Richard as a beloved king of England, sketched with the kind of anti-effort at ethnographic precision where this son of a Norman and an Aquitanian (Eileen Atkins), with an army of Normans and Aquitanians, keeps screaming about "THE FRENCH," which, in fairness, is more this movie's thesis than literally anything else.)

Richard perishes, and Robin's company decides this would be a good time to desert.  This places them on the right path to intersect with the troop of knights led by Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge), on their way to deliver the news back to England, at the moment that Loxley's men are murdered by the traitor, Godfrey (Mark Strong; it faintly vexes me that he's not "Gisbourne"), who thought he'd be assassinating Richard for Philip Capet (Jonathan Zaccai) rather than merely interdicting Richard's crown.  But Godfrey doesn't even manage that much, for Robin drives him off, and then comes up with a ghoulishly clever gag to get his group passage to England, disguised in the raiments of Loxley and his retinue.  Unfortunately, to Robin's mind, this incurs a debt, so they trek to Nottinghamshire to return to Loxley's blind father (Max von Sydow) and his wife Marian (Cate Blanchett) the knight's sword, and Robin is startled when the dying old man offers to make his imposture official and give Robin his son's name permanently (if the movie is aware he already has his son's Christian name, it makes no gesture of this toward its audience), as a hedge against his daughter-in-law's childlessness and the prospect their whole estate will pass to the crown.  Robin agrees, as does Marian despite her skepticism, and nobody realizes their lord's scion has a completely different face now, and Robin retains his "men at arms," engaging in some low-intensity derring-do for the good of his new tenants.  But a crisis is coming, thanks to Godfrey, entrusted by John with the chastisement of those tax-dodging northerners, who instead takes his French ninjas up and down the countryside committing false flag atrocities until the barons rise in revolt, furthering Philip's plan to divide England, then conquer it.

Up until the end there, I don't outright dislike it, and somewhere inside this customarily-long, customarily-multiple-choice Ridley Scott effort (I watched the 155 minute director's cut), there is some manner of good movie, that's basically a purified version of Prince of Thieves that does what its screenwriter had originally set out to do: examine class and explore revolutionary leadership with an eye towards contemporary relevance while still grounding it in semi-decent Angevin sociohistory, essentially explaining how some guy became Robin Hood.  Scott had been fortunate enough to put together a top-tier team for Gladiator, who'd largely rejoined him on Kingdom of Heaven, and they largely came back for Robin Hood, too, and the most important members of that team have some good notions about how to go about revising Prince of Thieves: it strikes me as one of the most eminently reasonable medievalist pictures I've ever seen (there are obviously going to be some caveats to this), with production designer Arthur Max and costume designer Janty Yates declaring, "yes, the middle ages sucked, but come on," without erring in the other direction into shiny pageantry.  Likewise, in what seems like a minor miracle, Scott actually recognized that if his whole movie was going to be set in one country, even a northern one (which didn't stop him from doing it in The Last Duel, so maybe it had more to do with a protagonist associated exclusively with the greenwood, in the warm months of the year), then Robin Hood was not likely to benefit from his most overbearing instincts regarding regional color correction, and DP John Mathieson is allowed a substantial measure of "normal" dedicated, principally, to nothing more nor less than handsomely taking in Max and Yates's efforts by way of what convincingly persuades as natural, motivated light.  Scott didn't get Hans Zimmer back, but composer Marc Streitenberg makes a perfectly suitable replacement, equally concerned with situating us in this simulacrum of the 13th century as he is with rousing war music—Allan A'Dayle draws more focus than in any Robin Hood besides Disney's—and even if I wouldn't vouch to any rigorous historical accuracy, as far as creating a credible place where medieval politics and medieval society feel like they could happen (or even just a credible place where trees grow without constant supervision), I've not yet seen a Robin Hood better at it.

Now, the question probably occurs to you, "how much mileage does a Robin Hood get out of 'reasonable medievalism'"?, and, obviously, not that much.  (It may be summed up thusly: Will Scarlet doesn't wear red, because where the hell would he get that; he's just red-haired.)  It doesn't go to the fundamental quality of the film but it's hard not to knock some points off its physical production when one learns how incontinent that physical production was, potentially costing as much as $237 million—$364 million today—to mostly just build a fake medieval farm and scout suitable forests.

And since it'll come up eventually, best to deal with it now while we're still reeling from sticker shock, because while you'd probably imagine that Scott's Robin Hood would be pretty action-packed, I have some bad news, because this would be sparse on action for a movie two-thirds its length.  (I'm not exaggerating to say my favorite "action" scene in the entire movie before its finale—and I think I'm clearly just giving into the costliness of the one self-evidently stupidly-expensive scene in the movie, to exclude it as some too-obvious-to-deny "best"—is that almost-microscopic sequence wherein Robin acts upon Tuck's insider info and, in an insouciant and stylish manner, steals some seed grain back from an overtaxing clergy.  Partly this is because I enjoy harking back to Robin's anticlerical origins, and partly it's because it's the one action scene that I'm certain has Robin-y fun attached to it.  My second-favorite non-climax action scene is more typical: the old blind man getting a hit in before being slaughtered like a dog.  Or, if it counts as action though I doubt it does, those "French ninjas" I mentioned silently rising out of a forest floor and massacring Godfrey's unwanted soldiers in their sleep.)  But in the main, it's not an action movie, and if it's a war movie, it's more a matter of politicking and spycraft, so to the extent it is a war movie with action in it, it can be slightly awful.  You know I love Gladiator; Robin Hood vindicates the Gladiator-haters' every complaint.  Pietro Scalia works some truly satanic montage here at Scott's behest, paradoxically managing quick-cutting you can't follow with continuity gaffes that you can still somehow perceive, and while that improves (the worst cutting is in the "Richard" phase) what persists is chaotic shots slammed into chaotic shots but mystifyingly timed to some immutable idea of what the sequence's duration is "supposed" to be, so frequently some random shot will be smeared with post-production slow-motion; and, though we can't lay this at Scalia's feet, the shutter angle fuckery that worked for the constrained arena-based fighting of Gladiator is an eyesore here.  Even beyond the action, it's some of the worst direction I've seen from Scott during a period where I usually still find him appreciably great, not entirely hapless, but much less able to find the iconic imagery, or the soulfulness, than in Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven, though the most absurdly dysfunctional thing he's up to here is putting locational subtitles in what feels like every third shot, usually only irritatingly but hilariously when we're heading to London, by sea, and Scott makes it known that the ESTUARY we're entering is THE THAMES'.

But I mentioned a good movie inside Robin Hood, and it exists.  I like how it upends Robin's usual deal, turning his post-16th century aristocratic gloss inside out to make him the prince of identity thieves.  This is the main way the vestiges of Reiff & Voris's intermediate drafts still make themselves known (their last ditch attempt to keep it Notthingham, by having Robin be the sheriff, did not survive), but it's also very much a "Scott thing," Scott seeming to have been fairly obsessed with this idea of class inversion in his historical epics, with either a great man falling to the bottom (Gladiator, then in Exodus: Gods and Kings) or a rough-hewn subaltern rising through random chance (Kingdom of Heaven, then here; it's still surprising his Napoleon is such shit).  And it has the Robin it requires in Crowe, for the same reasons that Gladiator had its right Maximus, only he's allowed a mellower temperament because no one's murdered his family yet.  (When they do start murdering his adoptive family, he tortures a Frenchman, because it's still a post-9/11 film even if it's not Reiff & Voris's post-9/11 film.)  Parenthetical cruelty aside, this is the good movie, concerning Crowe's awkward but affable integration into the Loxley household and Blanchett bit-by-bit beginning to suspect that her long-since unmaidened Marian's new Robert could be a better husband than her old Robert, offering a slowly-subsiding dramedic sharp watchfulness while Crowe gets to be the better-humored suitor; and the movie isn't humorless, despite its priorities.  It maybe gets too cutesy-poo, but I frankly enjoyed every time these Game of Thrones characters made a pun about being "merry," which is more than Prince of Thieves did.

And then, at least if you'd forgotten the sour reactions back in 2010, you'll begin to ask: this movie's real long, but aren't we still running out of time?  It's at least not fallen into the mid-century Robin Hood Barons' War trap of deploring John's (domestic) enemies, but you also begin to recall how superfluous its Capetian scheming has always been,** when John's been there the whole time being callow and evil, at least if the goal wasn't to make an intentionally-incomplete Robin Hood.  But there you are: that was the goal, Crowe much later describing an overcomplicated trilogy they never even announced.  (I swore an oath that if he at least didn't fuck Marian I was going to take a full point off the score, but at least they're unmistakably going to fuck; though even in the director's cut I'm only half-clear how she caught up to the final battle in full armor except that they suddenly remembered it was 2010.)  Anyway, Scott clearly believed this dovetailed with the film's secondary goal of being an intentionally-incomplete Gladiator, so that by the final third, it's transmuted from a story of Robin fighting unjust taxation into the pseudohistory of that time a third-tier aristocrat restored the English Republic—it's remarkable how much the way it gets there fucks up the most obvious strength of this Robin Hood, its particular conception of Robin—and hell, "Maximus Hood" still might've been an artistically-valid possibility, because why shouldn't the rogue of Sherwood, a completely ahistoric character anyway, have taken his great peasants' rebellion all the way against the tyrant John?  And maybe that did happen in this flop's nonexistent sequel, but the answer to "why not?" in this one is "because Robin and John are reluctant allies against the real enemy," and Scott's real fixed idea will have, by the end, distracted him from telling a "Robin Hood" story altogether.

That fixed idea: basically the kind of Francophobia that feels more appropriate to a storyteller working in the 1810s (or 1410s, or 1060s) than the 2010s (it's an astonishing commonplace in his movies, five of which have been partially or fully devoted to vilifying the French***), and I can only assume that Scott, however delusionally, saw an opportunity in his medieval English period piece he couldn't let slip by, even if that period piece was called "Robin Hood," to relitigate Hastings, and then in the particular staging thereof (which is D-Day from Saving Private Ryan to such a stunning degree that the French have brought LSTs across the channel for their heavy cavalry), I guess he decided to also relitigate the invasions of Julius Caesar, because fuck them Italians too, with Philip likewise making his Caesarean opposed landing at what might actually be the site of Dubris.  I mean, it is the best action in a movie that's been in need, but the cost in integrity is pretty fatal.  It'd be hard to run the experiment, but I would love to show people stills from the last twenty minutes of this movie and ask them what medieval figure they thought the movie was about.

Score: 5/10

*Not really, of course; I pretty much ruptured myself stretching for the pun on this one.

**And accelerated: you'd imagine Philip's main business right this second would be taking France.

***Counting Kingdom of Heaven.