Review: Robin Hood
I was pretty ‘meh’ about Robin Hood. It wasn’t great. The storyline is long-winded and dull, and I constantly strained to hear Russell Crowe’s muted grumbles, only to be rewarded with boring ye olde-sounding dialogue. Nor was it altogether terrible. There is a little artistic mastery within. Some of the rustic details appealed to my folksy side. A brief appearance by a truly magnificent hunting owl shits all over the one in Harry Potter. Ridley Scott’s archaic, fairytale vision of French boats-of-war invading an English beach is visually affecting, all awash with rich wooden surfaces, men with rugged hair and black eyeliner, iron clanging and blood in the water. The real highlight though was the end titles, which wiped clean Ridley Scott’s drab colour palette with a luscious sequence of hand-drawn paintings by Italian artist Gianluigi Toccafondo, animated by ‘design concept’ studio Prologue.
Moving on, the most interesting thing about this film is not the film itself, but some of the language flying around about its historical authenticity. For example, a humorless freak listed all the historical inaccuracies in the ‘Goofs’ list on IMDB, pretty much discrediting everything I enjoyed about the film. Falcons were used for hunting, not owls. And the boats used in the invasion look ‘suspiciously’ like Higgins boats, 700 years out of date. Surely a story as laden with pop culture mythology need not be framed in terms of authentic historical representation? But this framing of the film in terms of its historical authenticity has been encouraged by Ridley Scott himself.
Not only does he claim that his feature-length prologue to the Robin Hood legend is based on real events, but he also wrote, directed and produced a historical doco called The Real Robin Hood that was released on American television around the same time as the feature.
Across the board, many critics are not pleased with Scott’s choice to move away from the cinematic tradition of Robin Hood. Anthony Lane observes that his re-imagining of Robin Hood as a plausible, humble national hero completely misses the point of the puckish, transgressive nature of the mythical hero in popular culture. More telling, Justin Chang thinks “they’ve fashioned a fresh origin story for a well-known hero and excised all the material’s potentially campy aspects in favor of a downbeat, detail-oriented realist approach.” According to Scott’s logic, if historical subject matter is brought to film it should be realist in style, convoluted in narrative and muted in tone.
Of course, an historical film need not be measured by the factual proximity it conveys. Accurate set and costume details do not constitute authenticity. Nor do the highly constructed genres of documentary or realism convey truth. Historical films, relying heavily as they do on invention, are essentially fictions. A good film playing with subject matter about the past can successfully use experimental cinematic techniques, mythical characters, bright colours and intelligently address philosophical questions about the past asked by historians and audiences alike.
Even if a film does not engage with historical ideas, another useful way to look at films as history is to view them as artifacts. Then they might reveal all kinds of weird and wonderful things about their temporal cultural context, which might be the best way to look at Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. But sadly, it doesn’t reveal much that is radical or interesting about our time and place. Scott’s drone about the film’s historical authenticity is more marketing ploy or ego-maniacal delusion to differentiate it from the rest of the Robin Hood films as the most authentic portrayal of Robin Hood that ever was. It is a ‘prologue’; has a convoluted narrative; it’s ‘based on solid research’; it uses realist cinematic techniques and has accurate set and prop details. It must be really real.
"I will be your father figure."
As a cultural artifact, a deeper examination of Robin Hood is probably best left for someone’s cinema studies thesis. But off the top of my head, it could be argued that Robin Hood is driven by a conventional and predictable devotion to nationalist sentiment. It’s all about righteous citizens fighting for the real England and protecting it from filthy outsiders. There’s also a Freudian thing going on with the father/son theme. Unfortunately, in this film it is a mild assertion of the regenerative spirit of patriarchy than a vision of a son’s instinctive desire to eliminate his father and take control! Robin Hood depicts the goings-on of a kindly white men’s club, and they know what’s right for England.
Like Alan Rickman’s Sheriff in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, it’s the greedy Prince John who is the real hero in this film. He spends all day in bed with his hot French girlfriend, consorts with the nation’s traitors and just wants a bit of culture in his life, god damn it.
