Arts
Friday, May 22, 1981
The Michigan Daily
Page 9
EXCALIBUR'
A mess in King Arthur's court
By DENNIS HARVEY
Perhaps due to its release in one of
the worst pre-summer-rush moviegoing
deserts in memory, and to an ad cam-
paign that makes the inovie look like
Star Wars in armour (an unfortunate
idea that the film itself is often guilty of
sharing), Excalibur has become
something of a fluke hit. A fluke to my
mind, at least, because it's had to battle
more bad word-of-mouth (of that fatal
what-a-drag variety) than any large
fantasy epic since the Star Trek movie.
At the theatre I saw Excalibur at, a few
lonely folk broke into applause during
the final credits; a lot of others seemed
to be grumbling something about wan-
p ting their money back. I can under-
stand the enthusiasm some might have
for it - the movie is big, loud, vulgar
and prententious enough to dupe those
who want to be convinced that sword-
and-sworcery can be high kultur. They
get conked on the head for 2% strenuous
hours, and the stars circling around
their dizzy heads are mistaken to be the
rosy afterglow of art.
Excalibur isn't a fun failure, although
in twenty years its queasy mixture of
full-dress pomp, dumb dialogue and
cheesy absurdity may have a frilly
unintentional charm. Right now,
though, is't a drag, disheartening
because it tries so long, and so hard,
thwacking away at thin air like the vic-
tim in a hopeless game of Blind Man's
Bluff. John Boorman has shown an
unreliable but real gift for crazy
visionary fantasy in the past - Exor-
cist II: The Heretic was a riot of idiocy
and insane visual risks, at once
ridiculous and dazzling. But Excalibur
is deadly serious, not the best thing to
be when Boorman's development of
characters is more shallow, and his
imagery more mannered, than ever.
Unleavened by humor, the un-
believably self-conscious parade of
calendar-art images becomes ugly in
its emptyness - depressing, as expen-
sive, decadent waste always is.
THE FILM crams the whole Ar-
thurian saga into its length, a daring
move but a big mistake. The events and
years do whiz by, but this frantic con-
densation strips the story of depth and
emotional charge. So much goes on all
the time that it all muddles together,
and becomes a bore rather than the
rapid-fire adventure Boorman must
have envisioned. As the title indicates,
Excalibur's emphasis is not on its
legendary heroes or romance - both
reduced to knee-jerk puppetry - but on
battles, medieval hardware, post-Star
Wars gimmickry. The famous sword it-
self has a sickly green glow, and it
whooshes through opponents like Luke
Skywalker's laser beam. The frequent
battle sequences are a big bloody din,
loud and gore-laden. Why do filmmakers
who want us to bill and coo over their
visual prettiness always have to do the
required about-face to graphic war-is-
hellisms, shoving innards at us to
debunk the romantic mythos they want
otherwise to celebrate? Richard
Lester's Robin and Marian had a
similar schizm betwees taromance of
one moment, camping hard on a grim
raised-eyebrow prophecy the next,
subdued and even bored at other times.
This Merlin is a sardonic, modern out-
sider, closer to a Connecticut Yankee in
his how-about-a-leetle-yoke
prankishness, cynicism and removal
than the traditional mysterious,
mystical power. Williamson is out of
control, chewing up the scenery, but at
least his showing off has an energy and
interest that the rest of the cast is
barred from. He's a chaotic, ill-defined,
silly Merlin, but at least the knowledge
that this is the actor's intent makes
him more watchable than the rest of
this chaotic, ill-defined, silly movie.
The most we learn about Lancelot,
basically, is that he's a handsome guy,
and Guenevere is rather pretty; this hot
romance has all the perfunctoriness of
the love-at-first-sight banalities it ar-
tlessly replays. Nigel Terry's Arthur
seems to get better as the film goes
along - or maybe it's just that his later
mildness is a step up from his dopey,
too-old juvenile Arthur, a figure so
unappealing that he draws derisive
audience laughter.
Excalibur approaches its legend as
flashy adventure, but with grim and
shallow seriousness - a disasterous
combination. If it had approached its
wham-pow conception with some glee,
the movie might have, at least, been fun
for Star Wars-spoiled kids; but the
result as it stands its too bloody and in-
coherent for children. For adults, it's
like seeing a Camelot display at
Madame Tassaud's - elaborate, yes,
but it just sits there.
"But I love my
764-0558
This betrothal pose featuring King Arthur (Nigel Terry) ans Guenevere
(Cherie Lunghi) is just a hint of the chi-chi splendour to be found in John
Boorman's medieval still life, Excalibur.
its concept and the appalling detail of
its world view. But that was a sour,
small movie; Excalibur offends more
in that it's hugely, vainly pretty most of
the time, with occasional forays into
senseless and contrived brutality.
There's a shot involving a raven and a
decaying corpse that's as obscenely
gratuitous as anything I've seen in
a movie.
Images from Excalibur may
dominate the more chi-chi film journals
for years to come - a torrent of flower
petals rains on Arthur (Nigel Terry)
and hisk i~has they ride to battle;
armour always seems to be polished to
the brightness of aluminum foil; Lan-
celot (Nicholas Clay) and Guenevere
(Cherie Lunghi) make out in the forest,
naked, posed to lifelessness, etc. It's
all gaudy as hell, and in the sorts of day-
glo colors that can make a delicate
aesthete retch. Merlin's (Nicol
Williamson) magic is visualized in
special effects that might have wowed
'em in a Sinbad movie but look pretty
shoddy in this grade-A "epic."
WILLIAMSON gives the only per-
formance. He's performing, in fact, all
over the place, tossing off the one-liners