[I apologize for the delay in this and subsequent reviews. I was on vacation for three weeks and they piled up. I will get them out as fast as possible. -Moderator]
1492: THE CONQUEST OF PARADISE
A film review by Scott J. Gorcey
Written October 11, 1992
Published in GENERATION MAGAZINE
on October 19, 1992
Copyright 1992 Scott J. Gorcey
A Film by Ridley Scott. Gerard Depardieu, Sigourney Weaver, Armand Assante. Paramount, 150 Minutes, PG-13
Christopher Columbus did not discover America.
He discovered the Bahamas, built the first Club Med there, extended his hand in greeting to the Natives, and proceeded to kill every last one of them.
At least--that's the quarrel.
Was Columbus the romantic visionary, who struck a deal with Queen Isabella to sail beyond the sunset--and return with a secret shortcut to Asia? Or was Columbus the vicious technocrat, who chanced upon Eden in the 15th Century, bled it dry and razed it to the ground?
"For a long time, there was the cliche of the hero," says Roselyne Bosch, the French journalist who wrote 1492. "Now I'm afraid there is the cliche of the genocide. The truth is in between."
Director Ridley Scott seems to think the two are not mutually exclusive--and it's a good thing. In all the controversy surrounding the 500th anniversary of his Landfall, what people arguing on both sides of the issue have forgotten is this: Columbus was a man.
1492 is a remarkable two-and-a-half hour epic character study examining that "in between."
Perhaps for the first time, Columbus is put in his place: Inquisition-Era Spain, a place where people were burned as heretics for eating meat on Good Friday. A place where Moors and Jews were being slaughtered or deported in Christ's Name.
A place, Columbus says, where hope is dead.
"He was a Renaissance Man looking for a renaissance," says Scott. He found one across the sea, and planned to built Utopia as envisioned by Leonardo da Vinci there.
But Columbus' Paradise became his Hell.
Ridley Scott brings both the Paradise and the Hell--and the environs of 15th Century Spain, from monasteries to cathedrals to royal palaces--to gorgeous, captivating life on the screen. But visual ecstasy is just par for the course from the director of ALIEN and BLADERUNNER. It's expected.
Here's the unexpected: 1492 is Scott's most beautiful film to date. Perhaps this is only because these locations are real--as opposed to the gothic corridors of the space freighter Nostromo, or a hundred-mile high Los Angeles "twenty minutes into the future"--but to think so undercuts the director's greatest achievement: the portrait of the man.
Ranging from culture clash to class conflict, to the political climate that both forced Columbus to make the voyage and ensured its failure, Scott has brought a substance and complexity to 1492 that is notably absent from most of his previous films.
As on his last project, THELMA & LOUISE, Scott seems to have become as obsessed with painting a picture of the person, and his personal voyage, as he is with painting a picture of the world that person lived in.
Bringing that painting to life is Gerard Depardieu, who took the Best Actor prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for CYRANO DE BERGERAC. Depardieu can summon fire to his eyes and ice water to his veins; he can age twenty years in two hours without the benefit of prosthetic makeup. He makes us feel as if we know Columbus without making us choose which Columbus to know.
If Depardieu doesn't present a definitive Columbus--how could anyone even try?--1492 does present a man who fits Columbus' description--all the descriptions. 1492 does carry us to the heights of his hope and inspiration, and it does drop us into the puts of his tragedy and genocide.
It's a memorable voyage.
Scott Gorcey.
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