Medieval madness

Vincent Cassel as Lord de Guise

10 April 2012

If I were young Paul Bettany, I'd find it hard not to be ambitious. Despite colouring that's a touch rosé, and a nose which looks as if it has been pinched between nifty pliers, he is a handsome devil, with his long white limbs and his pious cheekbones.

He can act too. In Paul McGuigan's first feature, Gangster No.1 (2000), Bettany made a most sickeningly comme il faut psychopath, who neatly divested himself of his Savile Row suit before selecting the appropriate tool, and then ended up howling and yammering as he daubed himself with the blood of his victims.

In Peter Weir's Master and Commander (2003), Bettany was the intellectual ballast to Russell Crowe's man of war; he did it well, brows arching cutely behind his rimless specs as he pondered proto-Darwinism.

And in Lars von Trier's Dogville (2004), he threw himself into the psychodrama with true brio. As the naive ideologue of an allegorical America, his Thomas Edison Junior was a nauseous amalgam: two parts John-Boy Walton to one of Bill Clinton. Throughout the three long hours that I spent in Dogville, I watched Nicole Kidman because she was unavoidably there, but I watched Bettany because he was acting.

To do another film with McGuigan, rather than powering on into Hollywood, or working with a higher-profile independent director, smacks of sincerity on Bettany's part; but unfortunately the result looks like taking him two steps back as far as his career path is concerned.

I wonder if he fell for a Playerstyle pitch: "It'll be a great film Paul, think of The Seventh Seal crossed with The Name of the Rose, with a pinch of Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man thrown in for good measure. You get to be a self-doubting priest, a lusty adulterer, a natural actor and an ace detective all at once!" I like to think so, because if he took the role of Nicholas - who, in The Reckoning, is all of these things - on the basis of reading the script, he's far more credulous than the average film-goer.

Cast out from his parish, after not only screwing one of the congregation, but also knocking off her jealous husband, Nicholas drops his frock off a bridge and falls in with a troupe of travelling actors led by Martin (Willem Dafoe) who are en route to Durham.

Forced to detour, they end up in a benighted town where a deaf mute woman is about to be hanged for murdering a boy. When their stanbaronialdard repertory fails to do well at the box office, and they haven't enough money to repair their cart, Martin seizes the opportunity to invent two new theatrical forms - improv and docudrama - by dramatising the case.

However, in the course of researching their new play, he and Nicholas discover that the deaf mute is not the real murderer, but a recusant and champion of the oppressed poor. In a bizarre inversion of the conventional investigation, the actors play the detectives and seek out the truth.

Oh, and did I mention that this all takes place in 1380? I add this as an afterthought, not because The Reckoning doesn't look authentically medieval - it does, for the most part - but because of the way that the script builds a paperthin bridge between a fantastical present and a credible past.

Perhaps Barry Unsworth's novel Morality Play manages the job better, but Mark Mills's script adaptation has an uneasy modernity from the outset, when we see Nicholas preaching a very Anglican, wishy-washy sermon to a gang of unwashed Papist villeins. It isn't the language that's hard to swallow, it is the notion - presented sans phrase - that men in the 1300s could not only think outside of conventional morality, but also arrive independently at such notions as liberty of conscience and existential choice.

But if Nicholas provides the philosophic doubt with which to assault the ultramontanism of Medieval England, it's Martin who initiates the genre-bending. Played by Dafoe - perhaps unavoidably - in a Terry Gilliam fright wig, Martin has been mulling over the idea of revolutionising the archetypal Mystery play, with its hieratic presentation of a timeless moral sphere, for some time.

His initially sceptical fellow players, buffoonish Tobias (Brian Cox), cynical Stephen (Simon McBurney), and his lugubrious sister Sarah (Gina McKee), are not only easily converted but also readily mount a play that could put them all on the scaffold. If the hoary old ham's cry, "what's my motivation?", were to be heard from any of them the answer would have to be: you get to advance history by 200 years in 20 minutes.

THIS plangent anachronism is a pity, because Paul McGuigan has a fresh, lively cinematic vision. His Middle Ages is dirty, smelly and colourful; as plague-ridden corpses are disinterred by the thespian detectives, fingernails are properly chipped and bloodied. He and his cinematographer, Peter Sova (who also shot the beautifully stylised Gangster No.1), are a little too addicted to the slomo pan accompanied by an amplified "swoosh" but, mostly, their interpolations of dreamlike fugues - actors performing gymnastics, water flowing down faces like quicksilver - are apposite as well as atmospheric.

The nameless town looks great, especially in long shot, with its half-timbered houses wattling their way up the flanks of the castle, but too much use is made of crane shots, which, paradoxically, far from opening out the action, make the purpose-built set feel like just that.

If McGuigan and Sova had gone back to Bergman's The Seventh Seal, they could have learned a thing or two about how to make the medieval look perfectly authentic at ground level, and how to capture the spirit of an age when religion- - both Christian and pagan - penetrated every aspect of men's thought.

As for young master Bettany, his Nicholas never managed to convince at all. His priest was insufficiently Godfearing, his adulterer not lusty enough, his actor too facile, and his detective too forensic. I suppose the lesson is, play a curate by all means, but not a curate's egg.

The Reckoning
Cert: 15

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