99. Excalibur

John Boorman, 1981

This movie is huge in every conceivable way. First off, it’s like three hours; so it’s a long sucker. Over the course of the film, we seem to traverse most of England while dealing with bigger than life characters in the bigger than life legend of King Arthur. Unlike, say, The Sword in the Stone, Boorman’s scope is epic. With Excalibur, he has decided to tell more of the Arthurian legend than any other film made at the time (and perhaps even now, although last year’s Arthur* may encompass more; I didn’t see it; it looked stupid), and, while it doesn’t recount every tale from Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Boorman’s primary text, the film does make the effort of showing everything from Arthur’s birth, a result of an affair between his father Uther and the Lady Igrayne, to his death and journey to Avalon. Still, as flashy and legendary as the whole thing is, with beautiful suits of armor and enormous castles, all bathed in green light (a byproduct of the green gels used to try and make the landscape appear more lush), the film is intensely gritty and real. While Boorman devotes a good portion of the film to, if I may paraphrase Broadway, the brief, shining instant of Camelot, he does not shy away from the tragedies of the legend, devoting just as much time to the Arthur, Lancelot, Guenevere triangle and fall of Camelot. He makes no qualms about Mordred being the son of Arthur and his half-sister, Morgana and even offers a surreal and disturbing quest for the holy grail, particularly the scene in this sequence featuring several dead knights hanging by the neck from the branches of a dead tree as ravens pluck their eyes out. The reality is underscored by the often gritty photography and the dark, confusing final battle, which remains one of the finest ever filmed.

I began this write-up by explaining how big the movie is and it is clear from watching it that the actors all have the same impression. I swear, nearly every line in this movie is shouted. The cast itself is a veritable who’s who of ‘80s British actors, including Nigel Terry, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, and a young Liam Neeson. Still, there are two performance which really stand out for me. The first is another screen vamp, Helen Mirren as Morgana. Mirren plays the woman to a ‘t,’ embuing her with a guile, cunning, and sexuality that I think is rarely seen. The other is certifiable mad man Nicol Williamson as Merlin. Nicol brings his usual trappings to the character, creating a Merlin who may well be a raving, jibbering lunatic, with a fine sense for theatrics. I really love this Merlin. The way he talks to himself and swings in range of intensity really creates the sense of a man unstuck in time that legend attributes to Merlin, but which few filmmakers ever bother to attempt. His costume, consisting of battered, vaguely Celtic rags and a steel skull cap, are another excellent touch, suggesting a man of untold age from an unknown place who belongs just as little in the time of Arthur as he would here and now. Again, there’s just no overstating how big a movie this is. Admittedly, it can be so big that it does get a little goofy, but, unlike with Masters of the Universe, everyone here is selling the movie on every level, whether it’s the actors or the production designers or the cinematographer or the director. It’s all so convincing in its own way that it has forever supplanted any other telling of the Arthurian legend for me, becoming my definitive text of the round table.

*I should probably point out right now that by Arthur, I mean Arthur, the legendary king of fifth century England, and not Arthur, the legendary drunk of 80s New York, played by perfection by Dudley Moore in Arthur and for a check in Arthur 2: On the Rocks.