Kingdom of Heaven may be the single most anachronistic motion picture ever made. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan would have you believe that there was once a utopian moment when the city of Jerusalem was a multicultural and multiethnic paradise, run by wise men deeply suspicious of religious fanaticism. Try to catch your breath from the laughing jag you just enjoyed, because I haven’t yet told you the capper, which is that this moment of wondrous comity supposedly came smack dab in the middle of the Crusades–the series of five wars between Christians and Muslims that altogether comprised the most vicious religious conflict in all of human history.
Kingdom of Heaven attributes to its heroic Christian and Muslim characters a cosmopolitan skepticism about faith, and a healthy tolerance for other cultures, that would have been literally unthinkable in the 12th century–an era in which there was absolutely no frame of intellectual, historical, hermeneutical, or philosophical reference for cultural relativism or agnosticism. God was an almost literal presence in the lives of the real people we see fictionalized on screen here. But rather than acting as though their duty in life is to do God’s work, or to subjugate themselves to God’s will, the good folk of Kingdom of Heaven tell each other that all they need do is keep an open mind and follow their hearts.
Our hero, young Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), is taught this lesson twice in the course of the movie, once by his Crusader father, and once by Baldwin IV, the saintly leper who is the ruler of Jerusalem. There was an actual Balian of Ibelin. He was a remarkable man who was forced by the dictates of his chivalric code to lead the defense of Jerusalem against the conquering army of the great Arab general Saladin in the late 12th century, even though he had personally guaranteed Saladin he would not do so. Rather than tell Balian’s stunning story–which included writing a chivalrous letter to Saladin begging the Muslim’s forgiveness, an apology that Saladin accepted from a fellow man of honor–Scott and Monahan have thrown out most of the real details of his life in favor of a misbegotten plotline that turns Balian into a lowly French village blacksmith.
When Kingdom of Heaven begins, Balian is in shock because of the suicide of his wife, which followed the death of their child. (The only reason I can see for this unnecessary plot point is that killing off a wife and child worked as a motivating device for the title character of Ridley Scott’s huge hit Gladiator, which won the Oscar for best picture four years ago.) A nobleman named Godfrey (Liam Neeson) appears out of nowhere and announces that he’s Balian’s father, that he’s come to apologize for his sins toward his son, and asks Balian to join him on a trip to Jerusalem. Balian has no interest in joining his father. Then he flies into a rage when he discovers that the local priest stole his wife’s cross off her dead body, and tosses the creepy curate into the smithy. (Every priest Balian encounters in his travels is unctuous, cowardly, and venal.)
Balian decides he must be cleansed of his sins, and also thinks maybe he can save his wife from the fires of Hell, by going to Jerusalem. He joins Godfrey, and his dad gives him a 30-second lesson in how to use a sword. This turns out to be a fortuitous fencing lesson indeed, because almost instantly the local constabulary sets upon Godfrey and Balian. Balian survives without a scratch, but Godfrey receives a fatal wound that turns the blacksmith almost instantly into a high nobleman.
Everything that happens to Balian in the course of the movie happens in a matter of seconds. He goes to Jerusalem and immediately becomes the king’s most trusted adviser. The king’s pretty sister Sibylla falls for him on the spot. And, with no military training whatsoever, Balian devises an ingenious battle plan that defeats a larger Muslim army in no time.
All movies require some suspension of disbelief, but the head-spinning celerity of Balian’s rise is just absurd–and made even more risible by the vacuousness of Orlando Bloom’s performance. Scott made a superstar out of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, and he tries to give Bloom the same big sendoff here. Certainly Bloom seemed as if he might have leading-man potential during his three outings as the long-haired blond guy who could scale tall horses and fat elephants with a single bound in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Kingdom of Heaven sadly proves that the real star of Lord of the Rings was Bloom’s wig: Without it, he just blends into the scenery. When other characters praise Balian’s wisdom, his skills, his talents, and his nobility, you have no idea what they’re talking about. If you were the king of Jerusalem, you wouldn’t trust this guy with your army. You wouldn’t even trust him to fill your order properly at the Shawarma City drive-through.
Balian continues to receive a quality education in ethnic sensitivity from none other than Saladin, whose march toward Jerusalem forms the narrative spine of Kingdom of Heaven. At a critical moment, our noble hero Balian encounters Saladin and asks him, “What is Jerusalem worth?”
“Nothing,” answers Saladin (played brilliantly by the Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud) with a slight grin. He begins to leave, then turns back, smiles, and says, “Everything.”
Muslims have venerated Saladin for nearly a millennium as the great liberator of Jerusalem. Evidently, his actions have been misunderstood all this time, because Kingdom of Heaven makes it crystal clear that what Saladin and Balian and all the good Crusaders really wanted was a United Nations to come into existence circa 1186 to ensure a multicultural, internationalized Jerusalem.
The very liberal-minded Kingdom of Heaven is successful in one respect, however. Ridley Scott and William Monahan have managed an amazing hat trick: They have made a very expensive film that manages to be annoying, in equal measure, to Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
