Raising the Bar

Twenty-five years ago, at a moment when the publishing industry had gone mad for magazine and newspaper parodies, I wrote a proposal for a parody of TV Guide, then the most popular weekly in America. Unfortunately for me, some National Lampoon writers had the same idea the same week. They got the publisher, I didn’t, and so my spoof never saw the light of day. (I must report with more than a trace of schadenfreude that the National Lampoon version was a disaster.) One of my parody listings was for a made-for-television movie airing Tuesday night at 9 on CBS starring Ed Asner and Cloris Leachman. It was called We’re Gonna Beat This Thing: The Alexander Solzhenitsyn Story.

This only minimally fanciful conceit–at the time, Ed Asner had won seven Emmys and was considered television’s most distinguished actor–came rushing back when I saw Mongol, one of this year’s Oscar-nominated foreign films. At first blush, it could not be more different from a TV movie of the 1980s. Mongol has a Russian director, a Japanese star, is in Mongolian, and was produced in part by the National Film Commission of Kazakhstan. It attempts to chronicle the true story of the rise of Genghis Khan, filmed on and around the untouched Mongolian steppe. The images have a stunning rarity to them, since Mongolia was closed off to the outside world for most of the 20th century. The powerful and very bloody battle scenes are eye-catching, stirring, and chilling. Even the subtitles are handled beautifully, popping up all over the screen to ensure they are not lost in scenes in which snow and white fur dominate the lower part of the frame.

Dramatically, however, the movie is a welter of embarrassing clichés. Genghis is paired off with a sassy, politically savvy wife notable for her complete lack of subservience to the man who put the bar in barbarian. And given the amount of time devoted to the many ways in which young Mongols were taken prisoner in the 12th century, it could have been called We’re Gonna Beat This Thing: The Genghis Khan Story.

Time and again, as a preteen with flowing black locks, young Genghis finds himself in some form of imprisonment, usually with a wooden stock around his neck. Somehow, he manages to get himself extricated from the wooden stock only to find himself in it once again. After a while, it looks like a hip new Lower East Side necklace. A few years later, he becomes a man–actually, since the adult actor playing him is 31, he seems to have fallen asleep for a decade or two like Rip Van Winkle–and to celebrate his coming-of-advanced-age he gets a steel ring slapped around his neck before he is thrown in a jail cell for a few years.

Through it all, Genghis is motivated only by love–love for the wife he chose for himself when he was nine, goes to war to save, and by whom he is saved in return from one of his innumerable incarcerations. Yes, the man who brought raping and pillaging to a whole new level as he swept across Asia is portrayed here as monogamous to a fault–even to the point of accepting as his own a child born to his wife during a period of sexual servitude.

It is unlikely, in the extreme, that the real Genghis Khan was quite so evolved about the role of the women in his life. But who cares about the women in Genghis Khan’s life, anyway? One doesn’t attend a movie about Genghis Khan because one is interested in the domestic manners of the Mongolians. One wants to see how he became a conqueror. And this crucial detail is entirely missing from the script by director Sergei Bodrov and Arif Aliyev. After 90 minutes of jail and more jail, Genghis finally sets himself to the task of uniting the Mongol clans. He rides away from the missus and the kids–and then we cut forward to six years later, when he has an army of thousands and is preparing to wage war against the remaining Mongol holdouts before he proceeds to take over much of the known world.

Why any of these people have decided to follow him, and what happened as he gathered supporters along the way, is entirely absent from the film. Mongol is supposedly the first of a trilogy of films about the life of Genghis Khan. If Bodrov and Aliyev are unable even to imagine just what qualities of character and leadership made their subject one of the most formidable human beings ever to walk the earth, there doesn’t seem much reason to go on with their project.

Now, if Ed Asner had played him back in the early 1980s, that would have been something to see.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.