Most films require some suspension of our relationship with perceived reality. Even `realistic' films ask this, perhaps just for a moment, as the plot hinges on some convenient, manufactured circumstance in order to move in the necessary direction. Other films simply demand that our notions of the credible either be left entirely at home, or at least checked at the box office. But that's part of the fun, right? No film has ever made this type of demand with such insistent grace as John Boorman's Excalibur. Boorman certainly has no trouble creating believable cinematic worlds. Witness his charming Hope and Glory or, diametrically, Deliverance, both founded on an innocent vantage point, the latter's brought forward into manhood to break on the granite of the Chatooga River gorge. But it is his `unbelievable' worlds that resonate on a very special frequency; spacious, seductive, and organic, whether removed to a distant yet mythic future as in Zardoz, or a distant past as in Excalibur.
Not an epic in the sense of the magnificent Fellowship of The Rings, the more compact Excalibur still feels like one. It's definitely gorgeous, so much so that it's easy to overlook knights lumbering around in, ostensibly, early post-Roman Britain wearing Renaissance-era armor. Such things are simply elements of the film's intensely poetic style. Excalibur has a breathless quality as it leaps forward, giving the sense that it's being recited as well as screened. Never has living by torchlight seemed so inviting and the film's mossy glow can make you wish to never see asphalt or concrete again. Set against this lush, sanguine backdrop is what makes Excalibur so much fun, its vivid characterizations. No introspection here, please. All lead and principal supporting players seem poised to leap out of their skins merely from being alive. To really appreciate this quality, stand on any street corner and watch people pass morosely by for a while, then pop Excalibur into the VCR. You'll see what I mean.
At Excalibur's heart is Nicol Williamson's intense, quirky Merlin. The Merlin of our minds is probably a more wizened, Disneyesque figure; long beard, pointy hat. Although Ian McKellan's Gandalf was wonderfully portrayed in Fellowship of the Rings, Williamson's Merlin would have him sliced and diced before the old boy could get his staff pointed; something like the final duel in Sanjuro. His Merlin is the natural world focused like a laser into humanoid form, a fact revealed in a poignant moment about midway through the film. Williamson brilliantly embodies a Merlin who seems to know everything, and nothing, simultaneously. At the point where these two opposites intersect, something primordial and unsettlingly neutral seems to well up. Merlin strides from scene to scene, seeing near and far, speaking as much to himself as he speaks to others. One moment he is at Arthur's side as Excalibur is drawn from its stone. The next, as Arthur turns to him for counsel, Merlin is already almost out of sight, striding toward the next moment of his agenda. Nature waits for no man, even a king. Merlin's world of the old gods, of pure water and primeval forest is on the brink of religion and Merlin is trying to expose the innate, natural goodness in man that might render Jehovah irrelevant. But only Arthur's heart is sufficiently pure to carry that weight.
The Round Table may seem invincible but just two women, not even working together, are more than powerful enough to splinter it. Merlin cautions Arthur against the profound charms of Cherie Lunghi's Guinevere. She lacks Merlin's future-vision but knows so completely what is happening at any moment that she does not really need it. Arthur has no chances. Their initial meeting is one of the film's best moments. Arthur has led a small group of knights to relieve the siege of Guinevere's father's castle. He hurls himself into the melee with abandon while Guinevere, dead calm in the midst of the hack-fest, watches him with quizzical detachment: Who or WHAT is this? When she applies a post-battle poultice to Arthur's wound, her possession of him is complete. Guinevere is certainly impressed by Arthur. She likes him. He is the king. But he is not the one. When her affair with Lancelot is confirmed, the heart of the Round Table is mortally wounded.
Merlin gets a girl too, in a manner of speaking: the relentless Morgana (the ultimate Helen Mirren), whose mother's rape, which produced Arthur, was reluctantly engineered by Merlin. Morgana wants Merlin's magick before taking her revenge. She is the edge along which no man should walk but Merlin is not really a man and rolls the dice: snake-eyes. Morgana, an amateur sorceress with real promise, graduates cum laude from eye of newt by cajoling from Merlin his most powerful spell, then places him on ice with it. But she is just warming up. Morgana assumes Guinevere's form and conceives a son on the heartbroken Arthur. The king may know that the woman writhing on him is not really his wife but is past caring. The tryst spawns Mordred, the wormy apple of his mother's eye. He morphs quickly into a vicious, gangly adolescent who sits his horse like a metallic spider in bizarre gold armor (the good guys wear chrome) and brings Camelot down into bloody chaos.
Excalibur the film is not a literal reading of Malory and Sir Perceval, not Bedivere, who is not in the cast, is tasked with hurling Arthur's sword back to the powers that wrought it. When the waiting hand draws Excalibur into the lake, it does so with striking finality. If you've allowed yourself to fall under the film's spell, you'll feel a pang of regret here. Chivalry may not be entirely dead but it is left in critical condition. The opportunity for a just but pagan world has passed. Humanity has cast off an irretrievable kind of happiness and the Christians are coming.
Not an epic in the sense of the magnificent Fellowship of The Rings, the more compact Excalibur still feels like one. It's definitely gorgeous, so much so that it's easy to overlook knights lumbering around in, ostensibly, early post-Roman Britain wearing Renaissance-era armor. Such things are simply elements of the film's intensely poetic style. Excalibur has a breathless quality as it leaps forward, giving the sense that it's being recited as well as screened. Never has living by torchlight seemed so inviting and the film's mossy glow can make you wish to never see asphalt or concrete again. Set against this lush, sanguine backdrop is what makes Excalibur so much fun, its vivid characterizations. No introspection here, please. All lead and principal supporting players seem poised to leap out of their skins merely from being alive. To really appreciate this quality, stand on any street corner and watch people pass morosely by for a while, then pop Excalibur into the VCR. You'll see what I mean.
At Excalibur's heart is Nicol Williamson's intense, quirky Merlin. The Merlin of our minds is probably a more wizened, Disneyesque figure; long beard, pointy hat. Although Ian McKellan's Gandalf was wonderfully portrayed in Fellowship of the Rings, Williamson's Merlin would have him sliced and diced before the old boy could get his staff pointed; something like the final duel in Sanjuro. His Merlin is the natural world focused like a laser into humanoid form, a fact revealed in a poignant moment about midway through the film. Williamson brilliantly embodies a Merlin who seems to know everything, and nothing, simultaneously. At the point where these two opposites intersect, something primordial and unsettlingly neutral seems to well up. Merlin strides from scene to scene, seeing near and far, speaking as much to himself as he speaks to others. One moment he is at Arthur's side as Excalibur is drawn from its stone. The next, as Arthur turns to him for counsel, Merlin is already almost out of sight, striding toward the next moment of his agenda. Nature waits for no man, even a king. Merlin's world of the old gods, of pure water and primeval forest is on the brink of religion and Merlin is trying to expose the innate, natural goodness in man that might render Jehovah irrelevant. But only Arthur's heart is sufficiently pure to carry that weight.
The Round Table may seem invincible but just two women, not even working together, are more than powerful enough to splinter it. Merlin cautions Arthur against the profound charms of Cherie Lunghi's Guinevere. She lacks Merlin's future-vision but knows so completely what is happening at any moment that she does not really need it. Arthur has no chances. Their initial meeting is one of the film's best moments. Arthur has led a small group of knights to relieve the siege of Guinevere's father's castle. He hurls himself into the melee with abandon while Guinevere, dead calm in the midst of the hack-fest, watches him with quizzical detachment: Who or WHAT is this? When she applies a post-battle poultice to Arthur's wound, her possession of him is complete. Guinevere is certainly impressed by Arthur. She likes him. He is the king. But he is not the one. When her affair with Lancelot is confirmed, the heart of the Round Table is mortally wounded.
Merlin gets a girl too, in a manner of speaking: the relentless Morgana (the ultimate Helen Mirren), whose mother's rape, which produced Arthur, was reluctantly engineered by Merlin. Morgana wants Merlin's magick before taking her revenge. She is the edge along which no man should walk but Merlin is not really a man and rolls the dice: snake-eyes. Morgana, an amateur sorceress with real promise, graduates cum laude from eye of newt by cajoling from Merlin his most powerful spell, then places him on ice with it. But she is just warming up. Morgana assumes Guinevere's form and conceives a son on the heartbroken Arthur. The king may know that the woman writhing on him is not really his wife but is past caring. The tryst spawns Mordred, the wormy apple of his mother's eye. He morphs quickly into a vicious, gangly adolescent who sits his horse like a metallic spider in bizarre gold armor (the good guys wear chrome) and brings Camelot down into bloody chaos.
Excalibur the film is not a literal reading of Malory and Sir Perceval, not Bedivere, who is not in the cast, is tasked with hurling Arthur's sword back to the powers that wrought it. When the waiting hand draws Excalibur into the lake, it does so with striking finality. If you've allowed yourself to fall under the film's spell, you'll feel a pang of regret here. Chivalry may not be entirely dead but it is left in critical condition. The opportunity for a just but pagan world has passed. Humanity has cast off an irretrievable kind of happiness and the Christians are coming.