Screen
Alleva, Richard
GOODBY. COLUMBUS RIDLEY SCOTT'S'1492' erhaps it was inevitable. Making a movie about Columbus for this year of all years was bound to unnerve any filmmaker. Yet it's impossible to forgive what...
...Nobody either in the movie or in the movie house is ever allowed a moment of silence or even a chance to breathe at a normal rate...
...were responsible for frustrating his petitions to Isabella...
...As a sometime actor, I can testify that there are thespians who never take the least notice of their fellow passengers to the grave...
...The only other hero of this movie is Adrian Biddle, the cinematographer...
...Scriptwriter Roselyne Bosch may have researched Columbus and his times in depth but apparently didn't arrive at a unifying vision of the man and his achievement...
...As Counsellor Sanchez, Commonweal Armande Assante looks terrific, like a figure out of Velasquez, and speaks his mediocre dialogue as if it were a decent translation of Lope de Vega...
...Is Bosch relying on the well-known fact that Americans don't read history...
...No actor in 1492 is allowed to speak without competing with a swelling sea of sound...
...Or perhaps Bosch considers us simpletons...
...It wasn't a bad idea to have the actor made up as an evil hippy with the voice of an obscene phone-caller, but Wincott's unvaried, self-caressing hamminess suggests that he not only lacks talent but has never laid eyes upon another human being...
...As the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Gerard Depardieu gives not a rich performance but a rich actor's performance...
...She has him lopping off hands, working slaves to death, and violating native women while Columbus only...
...Worse still, Bosch wants to present the atrocities perpetrated on the natives but also wants to exonerate Columbus...
...We've seen these before, used to finer effect...
...Therefore, we don't truly feel the exultation of the men when they reach land...
...Yet it's impossible to forgive what Ridley Scott has delivered...
...But putting a synthesizer into Vangelis's hands is like introducing Al Capone to the Tommy gun...
...For when Columbus finally does perceive that all is not well and disposes of the villain, are we then to assume that all chattel slavery ceased in the colony...
...He doesn't seem to know how to place bodies and camera so that we know exactly where to look amid the swirl and sumptuousness in the palace...
...Scott's desperation shows both in talky, informational scenes and in those of sheer physical sensation...
...Biddle photographs Columbus's New World as a place where such "soft shining" might be perpetual...
...Yet we never receive a real insight into Columbus's religious feelings and how his spirituality may have enhanced or mitigated or confused his questing spirit...
...I know that Columbus was as bad at administration as he was great at navigation, but was it necessary to make him a simpleton in order to exculpate his possible guilt...
...But once Columbus has founded a colony, his fervent construction of a cathedral is filmed so elaborately (with Vangelis pounding away, of course) that the scene becomes practically the centerpiece of the movie...
...That all torture, rape, and mutilation were stopped...
...Three lacks that Columbus, for all his many faults, never had...
...As far as I could tell, he seemed to be making the rounds of his colony without being able to understand exactly what was going on as Indians fell dead at his feet...
...He coasts on a lot of old tricks: the husky voice that turns feathery whenever the hero gets dreamy, the transfixed gaze of a hypnotized bull, the fluttering fingers...
...So she invents a villain, based on the historical character, Francisco Roldan (a man never proven to have acted more criminally than Columbus), on whom she loads all the crimes often imputed, rightCommonweal ly or wrongly, to Columbus himself...
...But for a twenty-minute stretch, beginning with Columbus setting foot on American soil, Biddle, using Costa Rican locations, really does make us see the glistening America that the wondering eyes of the crew see...
...Most of his work here is as cluttered as his director's...
...The crowd scenes at court bring out an unexpected clumsiness in a director who is usually visually acute even when working on lame scripts...
...No patch of nature can be observed by the audience in 20: 20 November 1992 silence...
...In this film, Columbus is, by turns, the Renaissance man hungering for knowledge ("I want to find out for myself...
...The composer is not without ideas but brings no taste or economy to their execution...
...To portray the explorer as a humanist rebel, Bosch shows him running amok in a monastery's copying room as if all those abysmally medieval, vilely obscurantist theological manuscripts (or are some of them treatises on navigation...
...In both cases, the sheer volume of attack leads to terrorization...
...Yet the director is no better, in this movie, with action than with dialogue...
...Everything is clotted and confused...
...As the arch-villain, Michael Wincott is an unintended joke...
...The soundtrack by Vangelis epitomizes the giddiness of the movie while greatly adding to it...
...The supporting cast is lackluster...
...He had his work cut out for him, because his fellow workers were evidently mighty confused indeed...
...I long for the skinnier, hungrier, focused Depardieu of The Return of Martin Guerre and Danton...
...He aims to make of the musical idiom of the American natives (or at least the composer's imagining of that idiom) an aural world that first lulls the European intruders, then traps them in a nightmare...
...Two performances stand out, for very different reasons...
...Actually, the scene is about Ridley Scott worrying about his audience being bored when there's no sex or violence on screen...
...Given any visual cue whatsoever (a raised eyebrow, a sip of wine, a witty epigram, the fall of Granada), the Greek maestro lets loose a sonic attack—a billion bees stinging each other to death—that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse might find difficult to live up to...
...well, what is Columbus doing while rape and rapine are destroying paradise...
...When the new colony's cathedral is struck by lightning during a hurricane, a sign of God's anger at the colony's injustice, Scott stages the moment as if a gigantic ray gun had hit the church, so that 1492 momentarily turns into Blade Runner, an earlier and better Scott opus...
...James Agee once wrote of the "soft shining of spring...
...Now I realize that Columbus was certainly a complex fellow and his actions may not have always squared, but there is a great difference between juxtaposing contradictory actions in a dramatically illuminating way and simply bouncing from one view of Columbus to another with no regard at all for dramatic logic...
...RICHARD ALLEVA...
...But, though Vangelis is the virtual star of 1492, he is not its chief villain, only a hired gun brought in to distract us from the confusion of his collaborators...
...And Depardieu is defeated by English...
...1492: The Conquest of Paradise exudes desperation, panic, and the sort of hysterical rhetoric that is born of desperation and panic...
...Example of the former: when Counsellor Sanchez is hearing his secretary read a list of Columbus's demands, Scott has Sanchez putting a horse through its paces, so that the scene seems to be about equitation instead of Columbus's troubled relations with the Spanish court...
...Only about two-thirds of his lines are understandable...
...Scott's direction is as confused as Bosch's writing...
...he declares when warned about the unknown dangers on the other side of the ocean), the true son of the Catholic church, a gold-hungry conquistador, and a multiculturalist who wants to protect the lives and civilization of the Tainos tribe that has welcomed him to America...
...But the rest of 1492 betrays lack of nerve, lack of imagination, and lack of faith in a difficult but fascinating undertaking...
...Scott fails with the voyage, too, treating it so eliptically that we don't feel the strain and fear of the crew as the fleet sails an unprecedented distance...
...In his final showdown with Columbus, a scene the explorer is supposed to dominate, Assante knocks Depardieu off the screen simply by employing focused intensity and crisp diction...
Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 20
