The most disconcerting parts
of A Knight’s Tale are the
bizarre choices for the soundtrack. It’s
trying to be hip, but the choices are so horribly lame that the film begs for derision. I liken it to having your balding,
white-socks-wearing father DJ the prom. The
selections haphazardly flaunt the notion that this is a clever idea, invoking a doctrine
stating that Jock Rock is indeed Music For All Time.
During the opening, the dirty slack-jawed peasants, drool and roasted meat dripping
from their chins, uniformly bang their fists three times in succession, indicating that
“We Will Rock You” is somehow being pumped through the loudspeaker. But wait! It’s
1350! The place is lower-caste Britain, but
the time is at least six centuries pre-Freddie Mercury.
How can this be? Has Brian Helgeland
bent time to a place similarly occupied in history, thus proving chaos theory in
literature? Has he proved Einstein correct,
that time exists in its own separate fourth dimension?
Will he bookend the movie with “We Will Rock You” AND “We Are the
Champions?”
I was thrust into further confusion when Heath and the boys, while engaging in some
jousting drills in the woods, were working out to “Low Rider.” Looking at Heath Ledger perched atop his trusty
steed, I sensed a paradox in Helgeland’s artistic vision, but perhaps I missed
something. Did Heath’s horse have stubby
legs? Would that be an advantage during a
joust? All was well, though, when Heath
finally entered a competition and dispatched of his inferior adversaries to the tune of
“Taking Care of Business.” By no
means original, but at least consistent with the overbearing literalness I perceived thus
far.
But my contentment was only temporary, though.
When Heath and his girl attempt a variation of the palmer’s dance using only
their pinkies, the musical jongleurs—somewhere in the background of the
scene—must have dropped their lyres and flutes in favor of bass guitars so the dance
could magically evolve into a ballroom David Bowie disco.
An interesting choice by Sir Helgeland: I
would have preferred a wooden flute led “That’s the Way I Like It,” or even
more bombastically, “I’m Your Boogie Man,” but I think anything by KC and
the Sunshine Band would have done. In any
case, this would all be quite a trick, considering that western music had only
conquered polyphony in the 1150’s. But
alas, we then become stuck with some generic guitar blues to drink our mead by, and we get
a curious chanting of “Haec Dies” in a cathedral with no singing monks anywhere
in sight. Triumphant return begets “The
Boys are Back in Town,” and pre-joust preparation requires “Get Ready,” of
course—I’ll forgive a lot of things in the movies, but when Helgeland chooses to
besmirch The Temptations, my tolerance ends. Moreover,
when Heath’s woman requires that he take a lance in the chest to prove his devotion,
“Love Hurts” is nowhere to be found.
But the final straw comes in the grand finale:
surely, somewhere in A Brief History of Time it is written that if you begin
with “We Will Rock You” that you must end with “We Are the Champions,”
but Brian Helgeland, damn him, gives us AC/DC. If
Helgeland were a real visionary, he would have employed Angus as the personal troubadour
of Sir Ledger, or even gone a step farther to institute an all-Queen motif. Surely Heath would be honored to be underscored by
“Another One Bites the Dust, “Under Pressure,” or “Somebody to
Love.”
If you haven’t gathered it already, A Knight’s Tale is mostly
embarrassing. It’s standard,
underdog-hero-conquers-all-odds-and-gets-the-girl stuff, told though the conceit of
fictional medieval jousting tournaments. Helgeland
leaves no melodramatic stone unturned, but I have to ask one simple, not insignificant,
question: If jousting is to be done only by
nobles, with notarized proof of blue blood, then why does Dad sell his son to be an
apprentice knight if he is just a poor thatcher? By
that time in the movie, I didn’t care: I
had seen enough of the low-rent Gladiator rip-off sets; I had seen enough of Heath
Ledger trying to be earnest. He may someday
be a real movie star, but right now he’s too boyish to carry anything other than a
teen exploitation flick. He certainly
doesn’t have the sort of magic to sell me on this anachronistic hokeydom. Ledger has that brand of androgynous sexuality
common to teen idols—in fact, he looks like a blonde Leif Garrett. I do have to admit that he earned his paycheck,
though; I found amusement watching Heath get bludgeoned and contorted by various
rudimentary contraptions made of wood and rusty metal.
What also kept me in my seat was Paul Bettany’s performance as Geoffrey
Chaucer. Never mind the fact that Helgeland
reduced the English language’s first great writer into a wildly gesticulating Michael
Buffer, I admired Bettany’s willingness to be a good sport. He is introduced to us dirt-smeared and
butt-cheek naked, brought on by his gambling problem, which, in an odd way, sounds sort of
Chaucerian. Chaucer’s job is to function
like a professional wrestler’s entrance theme: he
gets the crowd riled up for a hero who can’t possibly match the boasts of his
overture. Bettany’s “Chaucer”
has all the smarmy charm of a young lounge lizard or a struggling stand-up comedian, but
with the brooding posture of a desperate poet—like he’s channeling the spirit of
Joseph Fiennes’ William Shakespeare. And
as an added bonus, the screen crackles with homoerotic tension whenever Bettany and Alan
Tudyk share the screen—kind
of like Goose and Maverick, but with balsa wood lances, not fighter planes. I also
enjoyed his moments of satisfaction after a particularly crowd-rousing speech (“Damn,
I’m good!”), but don’t take this praise as an excuse to see the film:
Oliver Stone and Ridley Scott have already covered this sports-as-metaphor territory in
the last two years. What you get with A
Knight’s Tale is the XFL version of Gladiator and the suspicion that if
Russell Crowe is the Dan Marino of sexy Australian action stars, then Heath Ledger is
Tommy Maddox. |
