Robin Hood, a hero for gargoyle

grandmamas, and the rest of your aged

retinue

Review of Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood”

By Patrick McEvoy-Halston
May 2010

One of the surprising things about the “tea-bagger revolution,” is that

without any of the sort of in-film help kindly proffered in “Life of Brian,” it
suddenly becomes much harder to hear of peasant revolts against unfair taxes,
and instantly hate the surely unjust, greedy lords at work cruelly starving the
populace, just to fight primarily vanity-driven, foreign wars. Instead, for at least a
moment or two, we wonder if there might in fact have been some justice in the
taxing, and some (not starvation driven) insanity in the peasants, and further that
if we continue to cheer on those we are directed to cheer for, if we’re not in some
way taking in of the same very bad inputs which produced these American
misanthropes in the first place.
This isn’t the first time with Ridley Scott, but despite every bit of force
motioning us to despise the new king for dismissing the long-serving Earl
Marshall, I cheered for the royalty. In this case I specifically cheered -- build ’dem
roads! get ’dem taxes! Even if in this film universe the money’s primarily going to
wars and not as the king argues, to run the country, and even if the reticent
withholding northern lords aren’t withholding from the king because grain isn’t
even on hand to supply their own dinner plates, let alone feed their people, but in
fact because they horde away their riches in gross portions in the fashion of Friar
Tuck and his stored-away barreled conglomeration of honey, I know that the
royalty, the government, elsewhere --most everywhere -- has a good point: how
do you do anything new with your country when well-positioned people in your
own retinue judge all change as lapse of wisdom in pull of impulse and whimsy?
Scott didn’t intend this, but when good people are for one, mostly old, and
completely frozen in disposition -- in grimace -- and outlook, all his ostensible
villains need to do is poke at their stoned faces with the slightest bit of sneer or
mockery, have the slightest bit of teasing fun with them, and our sympathies
should be theirs.
The film would have us believe that the greatest unearthed treasure here is
the revelation that way back in the 12th-century, a man produced a document
with implications so revolutionary they might stop us in our tracks, even today, if
we allowed ourselves to think on them a bit. But for me it was the young to-be-
king’s continuing to sex his french vixen, while his wizened, wrinkled,
grandmother, impotently beamed all her supply of wrathful looks upon him.
What a treasure! He understood his grandmother as just another of England’s
stony looming gargoyles, who scare away with show of eternal judgment but who
are born out of fear of life, of stupid ignorance and misunderstanding of anything
beyond familiar reach, not lifetimes of accrued wisdom; and showed himself in
tune with the slow breaking of routine and duty in favor of mischief, mirth and
experimentation that marked the beginning of the English learning from the
French and the Italians, which marked the beginning of the roots for the English
renaissance!
Intriguingly, Scott doesn’t actually have it in for the French. They are it
seems by nature driven to be smartly and ruthlessly conquistatorial and
scheming -- it’s just who they are -- and they aren’t so individually self-inflating
they can’t readily accept that they might function better as each one of them part
of a larger state, and so at worst always have a comprehensive functioning state
while England could at any turn disintegrate into a swath of broken, squabbling
chiefdoms, and are possessed of an arrogant -- and actually in a way, self-
diminishing -- and ultimately limited, but still formidable understanding of
human tendencies. They are a formidable opponent; are right to doubt that there
is anything actually really existing and worthy when the English are in mood to
bash their shields and herald their virtue before them; and they serve as a test as
to how well the English are embodying their in-truth potentially superior selves --
as truly uncompromised, noble individuals, obliged to a King but whose castles
are their own homes, who when united can repel huge armadas and armies as can
any vibrant young body, multitudes of weakness-drawn contagens. Who he has it
in for are the English who don’t understand that their way to best form, is not to
be seduced by French novelties, things suited really only to those of apparently
unadulterated French constitution, but to uncover basic truths concerning their
nobility they seem everywhere either prone to forget or cover over, or to twist into
worst possible deviant forms. This means remembering / learning to be honest,
forthright, brave, unrelenting, and so forth. It means boasting the soul of a stone-
mason -- bearing-out truths you’d inscribe on an otherwise unadorned sword: It
means life becoming about not an increasing awareness of, and adding of and an
appreciation for complexities, but about refusing to add layers, life, story, to sully
perfect and simple beginnings.
To say that Scott would have the English, would have us, work against life
amounting to a story, to make maturity delightful because it means a constant
conversation of previous experience, perspective, with the newly encountered and
just understood, is, for the most part, actually fair. His heroes are too often
attractive men and woman who ultimately disappoint because they not just
accord themselves with but seem trapped in code: they are trapped to be noble
because they exist to show up other people’s deficiencies or fallenness, and take
vengeance on them for it. But there is enough of another possibility at work in his
work that I’ll certainly mention it: and that is, an argument not against change,
but in favor of cultivating a state of being that makes you able enjoy a life of
mature enjoyment and development, without diverting oneself onto wayward
paths opened up by the pettiest of motivations. You sense amongst his main
principles, that is, self-esteem. You do. Robin Longstride is the better man for
returning the sword to the family of a deceased good-hearted man, and acting
without pretense while returning it. His stay in Nottingham, with Marion and
father Loxley, offers what you never believed would have opened up in
“Gladiator” had the turn in that movie had been to allow Maximus to return to his
family -- namely, a fairly convincing show of amiability, friendship, comfort and
good living, you would be hard-pressed not to kill and kill again, if such was
necessary, to have some chance of reclaiming or returning to it. But since his
characters for the most part seem to stop developing at some point, at exactly the
same point, it seems, that they finally learn how to properly comport themselves
and become wholly principled, Scott ultimately does not make self-esteem the
beginnings of onward journeys, but it’s termination -- the beginning of character
stasis. To be noble is to lose self-confliction, but to become a bore -- and just look
what that did to the English king’s foxy vixen French wife: Plunge the dagger into
yourself, my dear, you’ve surrendered your sizzle and mischief in your giving in to
grandma -- don’t allow yourself to live long enough to prove an example of how
others similarly vitally sexed can sabotage everything great in them to show off
the knowingness and majesty in vastly too long-lived, aged owls.
What Scott does, though, is make character cementation the beginning of
their involvement in his movies greatest battles -- and as such there is a sense
that they’ve been molded into familiar pieces that will be involved in none the
less surprising, you-never-know -- even when at some level, you do know --
military engagements. Chess pieces -- rooks, bishops, knights, pawns, kings --
that can each be downed by strategy or errant happenstance, at any instance.
Where bravery and skill we find really does count, but in execution seems so
much more subtle, invisible, amongst the multitudes of intentions, one-on-ones,
variant goings-on, that even a charging, competent king at the front of the battle
seems in need of having his bravery being recounted afterwards -- so that it can
be poetically foregrounded -- to seem as glorious as we might have wanted him to
be in the instant, and who could be quitted -- and not just killed -- by attendance
to something else unusual or at least unexpected but not in fact out of ordinary
for the occasion, like a cook experimenting away from his post to crossbow (what
turns out to be) a king, or even -- for me at least -- just his bringing up of soup,
for a brief time-out for harried, exhausted soldiers, at top of the castle’s turret.
For Scott, battles are where we get what we would have hoped to receive in
conversations between characters -- where unexpected turns are met with
improvisations that show our heroes as heroic for inspired reactions to
developments before them, for being able to see the battle as a story they can yet
sway into some variant form rather than another. Yes, Robin’s “ask me nicely,”
the whole bedchamber sequence with Marion, is an example of wonderful
improvisation and discovery through conversation, but it is not Scott’s main
fortay or inclination. Instead, heroes are mostly plain and stalwart in
conversation -- this shows their minds already know everything they need to
know, so every conversation away from the everyday is just a potential lean on
them toward the bad -- and villains, those most prone to complicate what we
might expect with turns toward some possibility we might not have accounted
for. Villains will show that they shouldn’t be killed, because their best-loved
cousin is french -- a farceful play, that seems to have swayed his french foe -- or
that they shouldn’t accord their self-righteous mothers’ wishes, because though
confronted with those wearing-thick plain virtue, they can easily, correctly, but
still remarkably show how even while themselves undressed and in seemingly the
baldest of compromised positions, they’re actually evidently right in insisting
they’re not the ones foremost in bed with those shorn all decency and allegiance
to duty.
In battles, everything seems tossed up and kind of random and
unpredictable -- in the moment of it, and despite all experience of how these
things normally go, still hard to foretell -- and so it is in Scott’s battles where
everything that the healthcare-fearing tea-bagger would despise -- the chance for
meaningful change and unpredictable, onward growth -- is manifested. The
battles are where we still may sense Scott embraced by baby boomers who
remember how the 60’s social battles were moved by sufficient expectation for
change, that every twist and turn in any particular engagement might just
determine exactly how the future would take shape. You could be great and
fearless, and yet find yourself suddenly surprised by beginning a battle with two
arrows in you that have already doomed you -- as happened to the german
warrior in “Kingdom of Heaven” -- that ensures we’ll mostly just see in your
perseverance just how good you must have been in the battles that built your
reputation. Or in a moment of slight over-extension, be ended after a lifetime of
killer-blows to everyone else -- as happened to the muslim knight, again in
“Kingdom of Heaven.” You could deliver what we have been given every bit of
evidence -- in battles that rain arrows just about everywhere -- to suspect as just
as likely as any other possibility, a purely random shot that ends the life of a king.
Your efforts may amount to cruel nothing, or make the greatest of differences.
And so while I feel I haven’t much more interest in Scott, for I loathe his
foreclosing of character development, his making of potentially interesting people
into dull chess pieces, his most boring, dumb, and unmoving solutes to
democratic principles, I still see in his work some evidence for understanding
living best as being open to unexpected nuances that could lead to grandscale
changes, of being open and desiring of life amounting to the surefooted engaging
willingly in forays that could have them slip, for the unexpected -- and maybe
even -- the better.