Review: The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
Starring Milla Jovovich, John Malkovich, Faye
Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman, Tcheky Karyo.
Written and directed by Luc Besson.
It’s so tempting to make fun of this movie. Luc Besson (“La Femme Nikita,� “The Fifth Element�) insisted on casting his girlfriend in the title role over the objections of the original director, who was fired from the project. Milla Jovovich herself, model / pop singer / actress, seems like a classic case of celebrity over-reaching. She is probably best known in the U.S. for lisping her way through those Feria Hair Color commercials on TV and for her role in “The Fifth Element,� a Bruce Willis sci-fi spoof where she played an alien. (She kept saying “Multi-pass�; I think it was about her only line in English in that movie.) Milla is drop-dead gorgeous: she looks like she’s about six feet tall and weighs maybe seventy-five pounds, so she must be as dumb as a post, and the idea of her taking on a role as complex as that of the legendary, enigmatic Jeanne D’Arc has got to be some kind of joke.
Well, surprise of surprises. I went to this movie to make fun of it and ended up liking it. A lot. It captivated me right from the beginning and just kept getting better all the way through to the end. Besson presents a modern interpretation of Jeanne, a Jeanne driven more by psychological damage than by religious inspiration. She has visions and hears voices all right, but that’s because she’s clearly schizophrenic. They begin when she’s a little girl. The local priest is light-heartedly chiding young Jeanne about her twice-daily visits to the confessional when she tells him about her visions. She’s both compulsive and she has hallucinations, setting off alarm bells in a modern audience.
This medieval priest doesn’t know what to make of her. He’s not alone; neither does the Dauphin Charles (Malkovich), who would be King of France but for the occupying English forces. Exiled to the provincial backwater of Chinon, he’s a man grasping at straws. When Jeanne arrives claiming to be on a mission from God to drive out the English and have him crowned King, and she passes a little test he has devised for her, he gives her an army to go relieve the besieged city of Orleans. He figures he has little enough to lose.
This is all very improbable. If it weren’t real history, it would be downright unbelievable.
What this seventeen year old peasant girl accomplished is well documented. How she managed to do it is fertile ground for speculation. Countless historians and novelists have tried, and there are nearly as many different Jeanne D’Arcs as there are writers about her. (Even Mark Twain had a go at it.) Luc Besson’s Jeanne, schizophrenic and manic-depressive, is very persuasive during her manic episodes, which are many. Her visions are utterly real to her and her manic energy is both refreshing and inspiring to the Dauphin’s dispirited followers. Gallows humor prevails among the professional soldiers in command of the hopeless defense of Orleans: they gave themselves up for dead months ago. Almost as soon as Jeanne arrives, she begins screaming hysterically at them because they won’t listen to her. With a collective Gallic shrug, they acquiesce. They suspect she’s kind of crazy, but as soldiers they know that leading a frontal assault against heavily defended enemy positions, being a little crazy is a good thing. Jeanne is ignorant of the methods of warfare, and her tactics are unorthodox to the point of being comical. The English are soon laughing out of the other side of their necks though. Are her successes just beginner’s luck? On this point as well as many others, this film is deliberately ambiguous.
Jay Carr, film critic for The Boston Globe, stated flatly in his review that Jovovich can’t act. Well, it sure looks like acting to me. The character walks a fine line between being very peculiar indeed and being deranged, and she has to hold the audience’s sympathy while doing it. In one key scene, Jeanne is wounded by an arrow. It’s unclear whether it’s in her shoulder or her chest (there’s that ambiguity again.) She’s carried off the battlefield and surrounded by the Dauphin’s captains, who are terrified that she’ll die. Impatient of the arrival of a physician, she yanks the arrow out herself, like a particularly stoical John Wayne. But then she starts to cry, because it hurts, and she’s scared. Jovovich jumps between these different modes like a switch being flipped, making Jeanne a fascinating, puzzling yet somehow coherent character. Standing in a cold rain outside the city walls, shivering in a splendid suit of armor while her attack on Paris fizzles around her, she’s noble and pathetic, absurd and absurdly courageous all at once. Maybe Jovovich would be lousy doing Jane Austen, but she’s perfect in this role, where she’s bouncing off walls, being three things at once.
Besson brings a thoroughly modern sensibility to his interpretation of Jeanne’s story. There is no attempt to make the dialogue sound fifteenth-century, and the characters’ motives never seem quaint. In terms of character, there are even similarities between “ The Messenger� and his “La Femme Nikita.� Yet he sticks closely to the historical record. He uses visual symbolism to effectively blur the line between reality and hallucination, without getting cute about it. His quick edits have the same effect, and have the added benefit of keeping the narrative from becoming too seamless and self-assured, something that would undercut the ambiguity. (These quick edits that have been derided as “MTV-like,� as if montage was something invented by American television!) The battle scenes do for medieval warfare what “Saving Private Ryan� did for the landing at Omaha Beach, and are almost worthy of Akira Kurosawa. Lastly, “The Messenger� isn’t without humor; it even has some Pythonesque bits.
Don’t let the negative reviews keep you from seeing this movie. It won’t be the same experience on video.
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