Product: The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (Region 2) (1999)
Rating: 2.0
Who Was More Schizo: the Protagonist or the Screenwriter
I bought this in the vague hope of stumbling on one more underpublicized and underappreciated (in the US) French masterpiece such as Claude Berri's Queen Margot. Not quite! There are certainly aspects of brilliance here both in the cinematography and Mila Jovovich's performance, but there is a tremendous amount of anarchy and occasional apparent aimlessness in the plot. Of course the Joan of Arc story is well known, but many times, the director seemed to let things ramble on without good tie ins. It's a long film, but that shouldn't be a vice. Here it is, because long portions could be cut without harming the overall effect. Better yet, the themes could have been better established and linked and the character development focused better. Apart from the title character, everyone else was pretty much constructed of cardboard.What really offended me about The Messenger was the dialogue, which in many places is simply ludicrous. There is plenty of 90's colloquialism and plenty of medieval cliche, but very little authentic sounding conversation reflecting the status relationships between French nobility (and royalty) and peasants. At the same time, there are some cheap, Keystone coppish antics in which the ostensible army leaders bumble like the Three Stooges, while Joan takes some implausible action. In these respects, at least, The Messenger demonstrates that the Hollywood lowest common denominator can be at home on the Continent as well. This sort of triviality really disappoints me, as I think it did a lot to mediocratize another film which should have been very good, Mel Gibson's Patriot. All in all, what is frustrating is that this could also have been a very worthy effort, perhaps memorable, but fails because the whole was far less than the sum of the parts.