There is a reason that the story of TRISTAN AND ISOLDE has lingered. The original telling from the Middle Ages was a heartbreaking tale of the true love, albeit inspired by a love potion gone astray, of the eponymous couple at painful odds with the heartfelt loyalty they both felt for her husband, King Mark. And while it is true that all legends have their variations, and this one is no exception, there is no getting around that as screenwriter Dean Georgaris has cherry-picked his way through them, he has been unable to synthesize what he has chosen to use into anything close to the compelling, passionate, and achingly poetic tale that has come down to us. Instead we are faced with a story of a pair of very good-looking adulterous lovers played by actors who seem to think that they are on a fashion shoot rather than recreating one of the great tragic romances.
There are no love potions, and were that that were the worst of it. In this version, Tristan (James Franco) is the foster of son of King Mark (Rufus Sewell), who loses his right hand saving the boy from the nasty Irish who are terrorizing Britain. The Irish, it seems, have been keeping the British tribes at each other’s throats in order to oppress that island and to keep it from uniting and coming after them. In light of later events, not a bad plan.
But I digress.
Mark tries to unite Britain with diplomacy on the home front, and clever warfare against the Irish. The plan works, with Tristan bringing down the biggest and baddest of the Irish invaders. Alas, in the process, Tristan falls victim to the poison on his late opponent’s blade, something distilled from the livers of puffer fish, that would be fugu for the sushi fans out there. Thinking he’s dead, his comrades-in-arms send him off to the afterlife in a traditional boat sent out to sea and then set afire. Don’t ask. Mostly because it doesn’t work and our hero washes up on the shores of sunny Ireland, practically at the feet of the lovely Isolde (Sophia Myles), daughter of Ireland’s king and the unwilling betrothed of his most vicious warrior who looks very much like a lump of hairy lard.
Fortunately for Tristan, Isolde knows the antidote for the fugu extract. And fortunately for Isolde, the guy Tristan offed was her fiancé. Fortunately for them both, they’re young, good looking, and Tristan’s abdominal wound affords them both the distraction of Isolde rubbing all sorts of herbs onto the afflicted area. Fortunately for the audience, Franco has been to the gym and has the abs to prove it. Isolde, in a singular bout of rebellion against her father, hides her bounty from the sea and spends much time ministering to his wound and reading very bad poetry to him. It may be bad, but it does the trick as far as getting their juices flowing. When he’s not being ministered to, Tristan wiles away his time sitting out in the open where anyone can see him and wearing some fetching items from what must be the J. Peterman Dark Ages collection. It’s idyllic all around until someone else comes upon the boat that brought Tristan thither and Isolde packs him back to Britain. Naturally he’s reluctant to leaver her, despite the bad poetry, but instead of leaping into the boat with him, she stands in the surf while declaiming inanities about his survival being her ticket to being able to believe that there is more to life than just the Dark Ages mud, disease, and patriarchy.
If possible, it’s even sillier than it sounds.
Things take an unexpected turn when the Irish king decides that the way to get even with the British is to have them compete for Isolde in a tournament. The winner gets a chunk of Ireland as a dowry and Isolde as the wife that comes with it. Tristan, who never found out Isolde’s name, volunteers to compete for Mark. Naturally, he wins. Naturally, they are both miserable. Naturally, hormones take their course and things get dicey.
The biggest problem is that Franco and Myles are so boring that rather than generating any real heat, they provoke a sigh and a yawn. It’s not just the dialogue, to which I referred before, or the completely flat direction by Kevin Reynolds. It’s them. Sure, Franco has his hair carefully moussed such that the mass of curls is always perfectly tousled no matter what vigorous activity he engages in. Under the hair, though, he has two expressions, neither of them particularly moving, and both of them centered on getting the most sensuous curl out of his lower lip. Myles doesn’t seem to have anything going on behind that lovely face. Love, despair, hatred, a hangnail, it’s pretty much all the same to go by the lack of anything registering between hairline and chin. It’s made worse by the fact that Sewell is the most interesting thing in the film, and not just because he is easily as good looking as both his co-stars, if not moreso. There’s a fire in Mark’s belly as well as a sweet romantic streak, as Sewell imbues him with a full range of emotions that actually are actually moving and that all but sweep the audience away.
TRISTAN AND ISOLDE was co-produced by Ridley Scott and has his classic darkness. Would that it had his directorial touch, as well, which might inject a little life into a film that makes even a tournament with maces and broadswords static. The only tragedy here is what Hollywood has done to this story.
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