Product: The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Region 2) (1999)
Rating: 2.0
Fatally flawed - Leeloo meets Joan
NOW what? For the life of me, I can't imagine why Besson thought that the world needed (yet) another Joan of Arc movie. The "real" Joan wasn't even considered important in France until the 1800's, when her story was resurrected (and embellished - current scholarship doubts whether Orleans was actually under siege at all!) But (sigh), he decided to give it his *treatment*, and this is what we end up with: two and a half hours of his wife (and "Leeloo" from "The Fifth Element") alternately screaming, shrieking, or whimpering in the face of anyone who happens to be standing by. The scrolling text at the opening of the film was illegible and flipped by so quickly no one could read it, not that it seemed to matter. Any "plot" is sublimated to the "art" - gorgeous photography, lush scenery, and realistically violent battle scenes. Warning - this is serious stuff, not a candied-up rendition of medieval warfare. Back in those days, you took out your enemy not by gunfire, but by debilitating them in as serious fashion as possible, including maces, axes, the ubiquitous swords, and some even less pleasant and graphically-demonstrated methods. But along the way, Besson loses whatever guiding vision originally prompted him to make this film. Characters start to answer questions with "Whatever", the Dauphine (John Malkovich playing the usual invertebrate) seems less interested in being King than he is in where the cast party will be, Faye Dunaway snaps and snarls in a puzzling way (one minute she's Joan's biggest patron, only to turn on her with no discernable motivation), and in one of the BIGGEST casting bloopers in the last half of the 20th century, Dustin Hoffman shows up looking like a retread Obi Wan Kenobe, sounding like Dustin Hoffman, and is supposed to be "The Conscience" (apparently because the gaping plot holes required SOME sort of cinematic asphalt to keep the audience at least partially "in" on what is supposed to be transpiring). This is certainly the most serious problem with the movie: if Hoffman is intended to be a sort of mental foil , voicing Joan's inner doubts, he certainly takes his time in making his presence known. If the movie is intended to illuminate Joan's "human" aspects (as opposed to her spiritual side), then three-quarters of the film is wasted on one battle scene after another with nary a glimmer of self-doubt or moral questioning. Buckets of blood, to be sure.No, this isn't the "thinking man's Joan" by a looooong shot. The film is irritatingly anachronistic (see "whatever"), and crippled by hopelessly befuddled motivations and seriously one-dimensional acting by people who should know better AND by the lead, but in her case, being the director's current "significant other" must have gone a long way. Besson's fans will appreciate the cinematography and the hyper-kinetic pacing of so many scenes, but those with a taste for subtlety, or serious philosophic enquiries, or even historical accuracy will find the two and a half hour length about an hour too long.