Arthur Goes Armageddon

KIDS AND ADULTS, the prevailing dichotomy of moviegoers, has unfortunately come to mean Ignorance and Intelligence. But this difference gets stupefying when movies treat adults like ignorant kidswhich is the case with King Arthur, Jerry Bruckheimer's Armageddonizing of the Arthurian legend. Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) jacks up the classical story by imitating action-movie formula. This isn't just seasonal product. (Fuqua's not just one of the boys of summer; he's a hack of all genres.) It's proof that even a foolproof story can be ruined by Hollywood cynicism. There's danger if kid and adult audiences can no longer tell the difference.

In 1974 Robert Bresson pared down the King Arthur tale in Lancelot of the Lake (newly released on New Yorker Films DVD), but not for purposes of simplification. Bresson's retelling of the trust broken and honor sustained between Arthur, his queen Guinevere and his boldest knight Lancelot was a kind of purification of the oft-told tale (one critic properly described it as "severe"). Although romanticism was downplayed, wonder remained. Bresson explored each character's spiritual urgingand each one's bafflement. He caught that quintessential element of Arthurian myth (dovetailing with the German mythology and the story of Parsifal). It is both history and an imagining of the foundations of Western Christianity.

Bresson doesn't make any of the dishonest political presumptions of Bruckheimer-Fuqua's King Arthur, which is merely a noisy battle royale. In fact, Lancelot of the Lake begins and ends with blunt, bloody slaughter that is uncharacteristic of Bresson except for its seeming matter-of-factness. There's even a decapitation. (I'd bet Bruckheimer-Fuqua dreamed up a beheading or two but deleted them out of current, political "sensitivity.") This severity is more challenging than King Arthur's pop-art rawness. Bresson's denial of bloodlust (the thrill of killing that has been the bane of Hollywood filmmaking since The Godfather) forces a consideration of the morality of violence, the inevitability of death.

Bruckheimer-Fuqua's grungy battle scenes only offer specious realism. These bouts are as muddy and messy and fake as the cgi battles in Gladiator and the Lord of the Rings movies. Their brutal extravagance is designed to rouse viewers' popcorn appetite (sparked by Slawomir Idziak's shimmering backlight); it has the opposite purpose of Bresson's plain, unhyped, ghostly representations of violence. Bresson's Arthurian legend is a metaphysical vision. Much more than an action picture featuring rivalry, jousting and chivalry, Bresson examines the way that his characters, in the midst of medieval life, are also in death.

Lancelot of the Lake has that spooky museum quality of evoking human history through eerie artifacts and among common spacesforests, castles, canvas encampmentsmade to seem unfamiliar. The past is undeniably past, but Bresson, working with cinematographer Pasqualino de Santis, who had won an Oscar for Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet, uses color photography that has an almost limpid authenticity, so that the period settings suggest modern-day immediacyan irrefutable time-machine effect. Reviewers typically call Bresson's technique "austere," but that doesn't account for the sensuality of his imagery. From Les Dames du Bois du Boulogne and Diary of a Country Priest right up to Au Hasard Balthazar, the soft natural scenery and visible material textures (including flesh) are extraordinary. His color films from Four Nights of a Dreamer to Lancelot and The Devil, Probably feature an array of physically striking performers. (It is pompously said that Bresson referred to his blank-faced actors as "models" without admitting that these performers could, in fact, be Vogue models.)

As much as Carl Dreyer, Bresson sought spiritual truth through sensitively perceived physical reality. In this way, the Arthurian myth maintains its cultural significance. The reality of spiritual quest is made believable, not merely spectacular. A rough, grubby and tawdry depiction of the legend is simply an unoriginal stylization, one that Bruckheimer-Fuqua might never have attempted without the blockbuster example of Mel Gibson's Braveheart. Screenwriter David Franzoni's pretense of having unearthed a more anthropological version of the legend is exposed by the pile-up of cliches and anachronisms. Turning Guinevere (Keira Knightley) into a raggedy Bond girl, then an Amazonian warrior wearing blue face paint, might be the most insulting. But King Arthur is also weakened by marginalizing Merlin (Stephen Dillane), the tale's important figure of mysticism and the unconscious. Franzoni doesn't mask an agnostic perspective; Bruckheimer-Fuqua simply care less for what this revised mythology symbolizes than for the box-office buttons they can push.

King Arthur's literal-minded attempt at "keeping it real" scoffs at the romanticism of Camelot (1967) and Excalibur (1981); this approach underestimates the enlightenment that comes from romanticism. It's how the video-game mentality exploits a narrative concept (knighthood's early history of Christianity, the founding of moral principles) for instant, violent gratification. Deprived of significance, the warring Roman, British, Saxon tribes are part of a cultural hoax. By deromanticizing the Arthurian talesdumbing them down for the kidsBruckheimer continues his destruction of movies. Romance was crucial to the Arthur myths, because it gave emotional access to the tale's spiritual importance. "Some force is manipulating us. Arthur cannot govern it," Bresson's knights surmise as chaos falls upon them. Their credible dismay also shows when watching clouds devour the sun, an image recognizing that superstition is simply a sign of mankind not knowing.

Bresson's penchant for discerning superstition from faith also distinguished between trivial and serious content, adult and childhood interest. The knights' clanging, unwieldy armor that hides their identity or issues forth fountains of blood was his plainestmaybe wittiestsymbol for the body as spiritual vessel. That's the common theme of Fritz Lang's Siegfried, Bresson's Lancelot of the Lake and John Boorman's Excalibur. Each film explored the idea of heroism to reveal the essential moral dilemmascourage, adultery, pursuit of the Grail. An adolescent moviegoer could come of age through following this archetypeif it is told right. Lang, Bresson and Boorman proved it didn't have to be told the same way. But Bruckheimer-Fuqua have taken the shabbiest approach yet.

Another movie that might as well be kid stuff is The Door in the Floor. Sounds like Dr. Seuss, but it's really a John Irving goof about a writer who splits with his wife after the death of their twin sons. Jeff Bridges plays the author of children's books who expresses his grief in punishing affairs with local matrons. (They pose nude for his erotic painting when he isn't writing.) Kim Basinger plays the grieving wife who begins an affair with the college student (Jon Foster) assigned to assist her husband. She's traumatized, which weakly explains her quasi-incestuous interest in a boy who resembles her sons.

Except for that lousy title (made a literal metaphor for emotional withdrawal in a pretentious final scene), everything about The Door in the Floor is routine. Even its condescension is the same millennial malarkey already seen in In the Bedroom, The House of Sand and Fog, The Secret Lives of Dentists: high-toned middle-class behavior passed off as contemporary tragedy. It's too unsavory for children, but screenwriter-director Tod Williams treats his adult target audience like moral idiots. He appeals to a sense of nastiness as truth, as when Mimi Rogers exposes her middle-aged body in a self-destructive characterization as a rich-bitch mistress that just seems exploitive. Scenes like this signify pop artists who can't countenance the richness of life and settle for offering ugly joltsoften as bitter jokes. There's even a sad, climactic monologue.

For a truly grown-up movie, seek out The Clearing. Robert Redford and Helen Mirren play a rich couple repairing their broken marriage when a kidnapper (Willem Dafoe) shows up, demanding ransom, bringing death. Director Jan Pieter Brugge uses annoying time shifts; the class and sex warfare themes are all overly refined. Yet the ending packs a sweet, personal wallop. It makes you think back on this less-than-entertaining film's consistent scrupulousness.

Naive Tod Williams, however, thinks he's eulogizing the collapsed American family. Too bad his role model is the insufferably fatuous Neil LaBute (saluted on a background movie marquee when Basinger meets her boy-toy.) This is merely an expose of middle-class prudery. Why else would Bridges' WASP patriarch indulge his decadent slide by listening to hiphop? (A key scene features Khia's tramp classic "My Neck, My Back" featuring the classy invitation "My neck, my back, my toes, my split.") In this movie, sex and sadness are only exterior; Tod Williams doesn't know enough to reveal the soul through sex as Josef von Sternberg did. That's what makes this supposedly adult movie childish. o