Last year, director Andy Tennant transformed the tale of Cinderella into "Ever After," one of 1998's most endearing sleeper hits. For his follow-up, he's tackled the culture clash between British governess Anna Leonowens and King Mongkut of Siam, the same material that's previously been dramatized in the 1946 film "Anna and the King of Siam" and musicalized as Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I."
Was another telling of this story absolutely necessary? Perhaps not, although "Anna and the King," like "Ever After," puts forth some intriguing new ideas about its characters while providing a banquet for the eyes and ears. This is precisely the kind of "cast of thousands" extravaganza Hollywood rarely produces anymore and the movie's seductive visuals, charismatic performances and glorious scenery make for two and a half hours of immensely pleasurable viewing.
For those who grew up with the 1955 Yul Brynner/Deborah Kerr version of "The King and I," "Anna" comes across as slightly disorienting at first. It feels slightly strange not to hear "Getting to Know You" when Anna is introduced to her scores of Siamese pupils and though the screenplay retains the famous scene in which Anna is literally swept off her feet by the king at a ball, "Shall We Dance" is conspicuously absent from the soundtrack. Accept Tennant's film on its own terms, however, and you'll be rewarded.
Thematically, the biggest difference between the screenplays of the two movies is found in their approach to the king.
In "The King and I," Mongkut is portrayed as a steely but slightly goofy monarch whose fascination with science and English customs is often played for laughs. Anna, on the other hand, is the walking embodiment of all the glorious traits Britain once attached to its policies of Colonialism: She's single-minded but proper to a fault and knowledgeable but not overbearing. She handles Mongkut with the same firm hand and gentle manner a well-bred mother in 1862 might have used to control a temperamental child.
There's never any doubt in "The King and I" that Western ways are superior to the mysticism and superstition that rule the East, and those attitudes have led some contemporary critics to label the musical as an example of benign racism.
"Anna and the King" offers a more balanced picture of the two worlds. As portrayed by Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat, Mongkut is exceedingly intelligent and powerfully sexy, a man who's not about to let an outsider rearrange his traditions. Jodie Foster's Anna is a strong-willed widow with backbone and determination, who announces upon her arrival in the Orient that "the ways of England are the ways of the world," but slowly begins to find value in certain aspects of the Siamese approach to life.
"Anna and the King" is drawn from the diaries Leonowens kept during the six years she spent in the palace and the later part of the story diverges markedly from "The King and I," as Mongkut and his family fend off a plot to seize the throne and venture into the jungle to escape a rebel army. Whether this is ultimately more accurate than Rodgers and Hammerstein's version of the story is hard to say since historians continue to argue over how much of Leonowens' writing was a romanticized embellishment of life in the royal court.
Regardless, it makes for exciting viewing, with cinematographer Caleb Deschanel providing some of the richest on-location photography since David Lean's "A Passage to India" and Sydney Pollack's "Out of Africa." Unlike "Africa" author Isak Dinesen, the Victorian Leonowens was not bold enough to reinvent her love life in the name of a good story so the romance between Anna and Mongkut remains strictly platonic -- even though the heat between Foster and Chow is all but palpable. James Sanford
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