Robbing the
Hood:
Robin Hood, directed by
Otto Bathurst, 2018.
Reviewed
by Kevin J. Harty
La
Salle University
The legend of Robin Hood celebrates transgressive
behavior. King Arthur is authoritarian—the
focus of a structured legend rooted in long foundational medieval texts by the
likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Sir Thomas Malory. Robin Hood is anti-authoritarian—the focus of
an unstructured legend rooted in popular culture and shorter anonymous
texts. In literature, the Hoodian legend
begins as what Roman Catholics used to call an occasion of sin. In the B-text of Piers Plowman, William Langland in the late fourteenth century presents
an idle priest, a figure of sloth, who has failed to learn his prayers but who
knows instead the “rymes of Robin Hood.”
Those “rymes” mark the literary beginning of a legend that would grow by
bits and bobs and cross genres for centuries, adding along the way characters
and incidents with which we have become more than familiar, and, at one point,
resituating itself in the time of King Richard I, some two hundred or so years earlier
than when it sprang up.
Film began
its fascination with Robin Hood at least as early as 1908; television, in 1950
in the United States, and three years later in England. Rarely, it is safe to say, no matter what
genre or media is employed, does someone retell the story of Robin Hood without
nodding to earlier versions of the tale and to contemporary politics. In the case of cinema, arguably the three
best Robin Hood films react to world conflicts past (the 1922 Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks,
Sr.), present (Richard Lester’s 1976 Robin
and Marian starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn), and future (the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol
Flynn). The Robin Hoods of television
have similarly been used for political purposes: opposing the Hollywood Blacklist
(the 1950s’ The Adventures of Robin Hood),
opposing pollution and attacks on the environment (the 1980s’ Robin of Sherwood), and opposing the
policies of Mrs. Thatcher (the 1990s’ Maid
Marian and Her Merry Men).
Film’s latest
foray into the Greenwood—Otto Bathurst’s 2018 Robin Hood—nods to earlier versions of the legend and to
contemporary politics. We have some of
the usual suspects—Marian, Little John, Friar Tuck, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy
of Gisborne, Will Scarlet (identified in the final rolling credits as Will
Tillerman). Prince John, Queen Eleanor,
and King Richard, along with a number of the usual merry men, are AWOL. Parts of the plot seem familiar enough. The Sheriff, here in cahoots with the Church,
is taxing people to death. Robin is
intent on stopping him. Robin’s weapon
of choice is a bow and arrow—his archery skills unmatched. But as familiar as all this may sound, the
film as a whole takes a decidedly different course with already well-known
Hoodian naremes, and not with total success.
Indeed, it is fair to say of the film that its whole is not greater than
the sum of its parts.
As the film
opens, Robin of Loxley (Taran Eggerton) is leading a devil may care life comfortably
ensconced in ancestral family home. He
stumbles on a horse thief, the not very well disguised Marian (Eve Hewson), who
advocates a sort of income-inequality-is-bad philosophy light. Marian’s costumer designer for this scene
seems to have decided for some unknown reason that she needs to display as much
of her breasts as it is possible to do so.
To be fair, the camera’s cinematic gaze here knows no gender
prejudices. Later in the film, Robin is
wounded in the thigh by an arrow but must remove his shirt, and thereby display
his twelve pack, to receive treatment.
While Robin
has been away, all has not been well at Loxley Hall. Indeed, the Sheriff has declared Robin dead
and confiscated his lands. Marian, who
had pledged undying love to Robin when he set out on Crusade, has found
consolation in the arms of Will (Jamie Dornan, late of The Fifty Shades of Grey franchise who, in a wonderful visual joke,
only wears grey costumes throughout the film).
Dornan’s Will is some sort of labor organizer as Nottingham is not only
the center of all things England, but the city also sits atop a huge mine into
which workers are sent at their peril.
Exactly what is being mined is unclear, but the working conditions seem
to have been inspired by those in any number of sci-fi intergalactic prison
films (think Judge Dredd).
The Sheriff
is intent upon exploiting the citizens of Nottingham to raise as much money as
possible, supposedly for the Crusade. In his endeavors, he is aided and abetted
by the local clergy who attach themselves to a huge cathedral that seems the
center piece of Nottingham, though the cathedral doesn’t look all that medieval,
nor do the costumes of the clergy, of the Sheriff, or of the other characters
in the film. My guess is that the
Sheriff shops at Kenneth Cole; Robin, at Alexander McQueen; and Will, at
Abercrombie & Fitch. Even Friar Tuck
(Tim Minchin), who functions as an agent
provocateur within the church, sports a bright green tunic, which seems as
far removed as possible from what we might expect for a medieval clerical habit—the
same is true of the costumes of his clerical superiors. Indeed, the film’s costumes and the sets are
at times designed consciously not to be medieval. The costumes in particular remind me of the
wonderful exhibit last year at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art called Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic,
which displayed papal regalia along side nearly 150 contemporary ensembles
inspired by them. The film’s costumes
resemble the contemporary ensembles more than they do the vestments which
inspired them. And Nottingham Cathedral seems modelled on the Temple of the
High Sparrow from Game of Thrones
more than on any genuinely Romanesque or Gothic structure.
Tuck, Will,
Marian, and Robin are convinced that the Sheriff is up to no good—when is he
ever in a Hoodian narrative up to anything but no good?—but the Sheriff’s aims
and motivation escape them, so Robin pretends to ally himself with the Sheriff
against the peasants who in the film are—bad pun à la Mel Brooks coming
here—always revolting. We soon learn the
Sheriff was an orphan cruelly reared by abusive clergy—nod here to the ongoing clerical
abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church—but he himself is the creature of
the film’s true villain simply called the Cardinal (played by an oleaginous,
snarling F. Murray Abraham). What the
two are up to is raising great amounts of money to support the Arab efforts in
the Middle East, so that, once the Arabs win, the Cardinal can basically rule
the world with the Sheriff at his side.
Robin,
after some training by Little John in a sequence that nods to, of all cinematic
predecessors, Rocky, then springs
into action to defeat the Sheriff and the Cardinal—Will advocates a less
confrontational response, which only exacerbates the tension between Robin and
Will over the affections of Marian.
Robin, Tuck, and Marian manage to hide all the wealth that the Cardinal
and Sheriff have accumulated in Sherwood, but Will becomes a casualty in the final
battle. Wounded and horribly disfigured, he appears in the film’s final scene as
the Sheriff’s new sidekick intent upon opposing everything we previously advocated,
think Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.
As I
indicated earlier, this latest Hoodian film is, in the final analysis, less
than the sum of its parts. The film’s
opening and closing graphics are borrowed from Arrow, the popular Hoodian television series on the CW channel.
Familiar characters appear in unfamiliar situations—not unheard of in previous
Hoodian films. Bathurst’s film gives us
Robin Hood before he took to Sherwood and began to rob from the rich and give
to the poor—but so did the last Robin Hood film, Riley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood with Russell Crowe in the
title role, and Cate Blanchett as a Marian modelled, it would seem, on Ingrid
Bergman’s Joan of Arc in Victor Fleming’s 1948 film. Throughout the 2018 film,
there are nods to earlier films, Hoodian and otherwise. Contemporary political and social issues get
thrown into the mix higgledy-piggledy. Bathurst’s
film even presents a Hoodian bad-boy parallel to the King Arthur whom we had
from Guy Ritchie in his 2017 film, and, like King Arthur, it was clearly filmed with a series of sequels in
mind—in neither case, however, will such sequels be forthcoming, so badly have
both films tanked at the box office. But
to be fair, the Ritchie film offers a fresh take on the Arthuriad, as I have argued
earlier in Medievally Speaking, and deserves
a better critical reception and more appreciation than it has received. The same can’t be said for Bathurst’s
film—here the legend of Robin Hood gets robbed!
Robin Hood, directed by Otto Bathurst. Screenplay by Ben Chandler and
David James Kelly. Summit Entertainment,
Appian Way, Pixoloid Studios, Safehouse Pictures, and Thunder Road Pictures.
2018. Running time: 1:56.
