Reprise pairing of actor and director works again
Ten years ago this month, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, that year’s Academy Award winner for best picture, first appeared in theaters. So if Friday’s release of Robin Hood — another action-adventure period piece starring notoriously temperamental Australian thespian Russell Crowe, with Scott again at the directorial helm — awakens in you an uneasy sense of decadal déjà vu, it’s not without cause.
The film offers audiences insight into the backstory of the famed British rogue bent on the redistribution of wealth. When Robin Longstride (Crowe), a skillful common archer in King Richard the Lionheart’s army, is asked by the king for his frank opinion of the unpopular religious crusades from which they had just returned, Robin answers the king the only way he knows how: with unfailing honesty. Clapped in the stocks as a reward for his truthfulness, he and his men miss out on the battle that takes the king’s life, but are freed in time to witness a French ambush that ends in the death of the knights bringing news of his demise back to London.
Armed with the conviction that the only thing distinguishing a common archer from a man of nobility is his clothing, Robin adopts the vestments and identity of Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge), whose dying request was that Robin return a sword taken in spite long ago to Robert’s father, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow).
Once in Nottingham, Robin finds he must commit himself even further to the ruse to protect the now-widowed Marion (Cate Blanchett) from the threat of losing the Loxley family’s land when the aging Walter dies.
Scott, whose directorial credits run the gamut from the 1979 sci-fi horror flick Alien to 1991’s girl-power western Thelma & Louise, has increasingly tended toward historical pictures in recent years. Since his 1977 debut The Duellists, set during the Napoleonic wars, he appears to have only grown more interested in perfecting his approach to period dramas.
Though Robin Hood’s startlingly beautiful cinematography and impeccable costumes could be quickly chalked up to the natural beauty of the British geography and the established talent of Scott’s frequent collaborator, costume designer Janty Yates, it would be a mistake to forget that Scott has made a career out of his uncompromising eye for detail. Scott’s films provide an immersive, total experience precisely because he is so unwilling to spare any expense in transporting audiences to faraway lands, as they would have appeared long ago. For this painstaking attention to detail, which is patently evident in Robin Hood, the name Scott has made for himself as a consummate and meticulous filmmaker is well deserved.
Robin Hood marks Scott and Crowe’s fifth collaboration to date, the first being 2000’s Gladiator, a favorite of critics and moviegoers alike, and the second being A Good Year in 2006, roundly dismissed as a flop. Scott’s eagerness to work with Crowe is surely a product of the actor’s famously intense approach to his trade — his process is said to resemble Robert DeNiro’s “method acting” tactic of embodying his character around the clock, on and off set.
When an actor experiences the level of success in a particular genre that Crowe has enjoyed in historical epics, he forever runs the risk of being typecast. In the case of Robin Hood, however, the very decision to cast Crowe as the outlaw hero was enough to defy expectations. Conventionally imagined as charismatic, svelte and light-of-foot — perhaps charming, even, as far as bandits go — Robin Hood experiences a total reinvention with Crowe’s gruff, intensely physical interpretation of the legend.
Crowe’s portrayal flies in the face of audience expectations established by the likes of cinema legends Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn and marks an altogether different treatment from Kevin Costner’s essentially same role in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which Costner gives a more traditional performance as a seductive lady-killer of a bandit.
After experiencing Scott’s vision of 20th-century England, it’s clear that only a performance like the intensely physical and hyper-masculine one Crowe gives as Robin would fit with the brutish world presented by the veteran director in Robin Hood.
Blanchett’s Marion is similarly rough around the edges, a far cry from the definitively feminine Maid Marians popularized in contemporary lore by the pretty she-fox in Disney’s 1973 animated feature Robin Hood and Audrey Hepburn in 1976’s Robin and Marian, in which Hepburn starred opposite quintessential man’s-man, Sean Connery.
Another safe casting choice in the realm of historical dramas, Blanchett has already earned an Academy Award for her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s period piece The Aviator (2004) and has garnered international acclaim for her performance as the queen of England in 1998’s Elizabeth and its sequel nine years later, Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
In all of these, Blanchett portrays unequivocally strong women. And given Scott’s history of directing talented actresses in films — such as Alien and Thelma & Louise — that highlight their female characters’ power, it was only a matter of time until the two collaborated.
From her character’s outspoken opposition to the crown’s unfair taxation to her muted, practically unreadable reaction to news of her husband’s death, Blanchett’s Marion is a stoic anti-damsel whose impenetrable shell Robin is only able to break into after proving himself with acts of bravery, chivalry and vigilante heroism spread throughout many months in his role as surrogate husband.
If only to see the unlikely evolution of an amorous dynamic between the similarly steely characters of Robin and Marion, Robin Hood is worth watching. Solid performances by William Hurt and Max von Sydow round out the film, but they only complement — without overshadowing — the centerpiece performances by the Australian-born Crowe and Blanchett.