When they go to the movies to see a feature dealing with their part of the world, Arabs are predisposed to think the worst: Here we go again, some wretched Hollywood filmmaker is out to besmirch our name, distort our history and degrade our identity.
Well, folks, when you stand in line to buy a ticket to “Kingdom of Heaven,” the much anticipated big budget epic about the clash of Islam and Christendom, set between the second and third Crusades in the 12th century, directed by the legendary Ridley Scott (“Gladiator”), don’t be. The film is fair, balanced and respectful of the grave historical material it deals with.
The problem with “Heaven” is that it is ostensibly about the Crusades — which would have made it a cerebral production on a par, say, with David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” — but in reality it is a love story, and a picaresque one at that, told against the backdrop of that medieval conflict, when both civilizations were in cultural and military equipoise.
If this column were a review, “Heaven” would get two stars out of five, that is, decidedly two thumbs down. It is not. Rather, this column is about how these politically correct times we inhabit, with Americans being more intellectually dexterous and socially aware, have finally caught up with Hollywood, its studios, its directors, its scriptwriters.
This is a movie that no one can accuse of not being sympathetic to, or at least fair in its depiction of the Arab side during the Crusades — those bloody orgies of European piety, that to this day still resonate in the historical archetype of the region — which began with the dreadful massacres of the local population of Jerusalem following its downfall in July 1099.
This was a time, mind you, when, as we see in one of the scenes in the movie, it was de rigueur for the clergy, in order to assemble the needed armies to go off to war and conquer the Holy Land, to inspire the rabble with: “Killing an infidel is not murder, but the path to heaven.” The point is not missed here. These religious exhortations are seen in William Monahan’s script as indeed egregious.
So, in the end, after much palace intrigue and political infighting inside the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, we get to the final showdown — the battle of Hittin in 1187, an extravaganza of computer generated but well choreographed mayhem of fire and brimstone, catapult shelling, and hand-to-hand combat among sandal-and-robe costumed, sword-wielding extras. All of which culminates in the handover of the city to the chivalrous Saladin who spares its Christian defenders and offers them safe passage.
As movie entertainment, please wake me up when it’s time to leave the theater. As a movie that probes — however clumsily in this case — the roots of the conflict in Palestine between the Islamic Commonwealth and Christendom, it may for some have uncomfortable resonances in the present. Do we today have a clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the Euro-American world? Does the movie evoke a parallel between those bloody times and the American campaign in Iraq? Is Ridley Scott awakening, however subliminally, ancient animosities between Muslims and Christians?
“Battles raging in wind-whipped deserts, ancient cities under siege and civilians cowering,” wrote Alan Riding in the New York Times. “Is this really a good time to show warring Christians and Muslims as entertainment?”
Some self-styled pious Christian and Muslim viewers were not pleased with the movie either. Cheering for the Templars, Prof. Jonathan Riley-Smith of Britain is quoted by the Times of London as declaring that the film is “not fair” because “it depicts Muslims as sophisticated and the Crusaders as brutes and barbarians.” From the other rafters, rooting for the fundamentalists, an Arab academic, one Khaled Abu Al-Fadl, professor of Islamic Law at the University of California at Berkeley, is quoted by the BBC’s website as saying that not only will the film promote the idea of “a civilizational showdown between Islamic and Christian cultures,” but that there “will be hate crimes committed directly because of it.”
Oh, come, come now, fellows.
Let’s get to the bone of the matter. Scott deals with his material delicately. Muslims, as embodied in the persona of Saladin, are chivalrous, noble and tolerant. And the Christians are accounted for in like manner by the peace loving, let’s-open-Jerusalem-to-all-faiths King Baldwin. And please don’t use this rousing tale to extrapolate about Apache helicopters bombing Baghdad. That’s a stretch.
See “Heaven” as a period epic, a blockbuster that you would sit in a darkened theater with a bucket of popcorn to watch, and leave it at that. Blockbusters are not meant to flex their brow in thought, and engage us in intellectual self-address. See it as you had seen “Braveheart,” “Gladiator,” “Troy,” and “Alexander,” on the big screen recently. Don’t go after the ancillary message Scott is making here on behalf of peace and cultural understanding, that is, let’s thwart those dastardly warmongers on both sides and, darn it, Rodney King had it right, why can’t we all just get along? That kind of message is a touch pedestrian, though commendable.
I’m glad to report, then, that political correctness about dealing cinematically with our part of the world has at last reached Hollywood, long after it had been embraced by the citadels of higher learning, by the progressive media, by multiculturalists and by liberal commentators.
But if you want to know, truly know, about that long, grim duel between East and West called the Crusades — a duel that altered the contour of the medieval age — and that remains to this day near every Arab’s historical skin, you have to go to your friendly, neighborhood public library. The story of the Crusades is best gleaned from the printed page not the big screen.
As for “Heaven,” it can wait — for that day when it’s raining out, you got two hours and twenty minutes to kill, and you feel like seeing an afternoon flick. No more, no less. It’s not the brouhaha that some bigots, such as Arab purists and American racialists, are stirring over it.
