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Sean Connery taps into his inner Sherlock Holmes in The Name of the Rose |
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Cast: Sean Connery (William of Baskerville), F. Murray
Abraham (Bernardo Gui), Christian Slater (Adso of Melk), Michael Lonsdale (The
Abbot), Helmut Qualtinger (Remigio de Varagine), Elya Baskin (Severinus),
Volker Prechtel (Malachia), Feodor Chaliapin Jnr (Jorge), William Hickey
(Ubertino de Casale), Michael Habeck (Berengar), Urs Althaus (Venantius),
Valentina Vargas (The Girl), Ron Perlman (Salvatore)
Umberto Eco’s erudite medieval murder-mystery was about the
wonderful power of books, as much as murder mayhem in a medieval abbey. A
surprise bestseller, the story is a perfect mix of intellectual playfulness and
Agatha Christie whodunit, with suspects left, right and centre and bodies
piling up faster than you can count. Jean-Jacques Annaud fought for years to
bring the book to the screen, and his vision of it might well sacrifice much of
the depth of the original (it even cheekily refers to itself as a “palimpsest” of
the original novel – something reused but still bearing traces of the original)
but brings enough to the table to have its own life.
In 1327, monks and high churchmen assemble at a Benedictine
abbey in Northern Italy, famed for its voluminous library. However, all is not
well at the Abbey with one monk already dead in mysterious circumstances, and
soon many others join him in death, each of the later victims with mysteriously
blackened fingers and tongues. The Abbot (Michael Lonsdale) asks renowned
Franciscan monk William of Baskerville (Sean Connery) to investigate – and his
efforts will reveal the dark truths at the heart of the abbey and place him and
his novice Adso (Christian Slater) on a collision course with Inquisitor
Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham) who sees not a human hand, but the hand of
Satan, in the murders.
Annaud’s film perfectly captures the mud and grime of the
medieval world, with its murky visuals of the cold and damp in a building like
this in winter. To be fair, the film is helped in its sense of oppressive medievalism
by its frequently choppy editing and less-than-obvious camera angles (at times making
it hard to tell what is happening), while James Horner’s score may hit its notes
hard at points, but does sound like a successful pastiche of choral music of
the time and creates an ominous air.
Annaud searched far-and-wide for his ideal cast to populate
the monastery – and he seems to have assembled actors based on the closeness of
their resemblance to Holbein, Bosch and Brugel grotesques. The monks are a
distinctive set of oddball weirdos, often pale of face (non-more so than obese
albino Beringar, whose effete campness tips a little uncomfortably into
homophobia today), with oddly tonsued facial hair, and prominent facial features.
To be honest it makes the movie-stardom of Connery (and Slater) stand out even
more, as practically the only members of the cast who don’t look like they
could audition for the Addams family. Ron Perlman in particular labours under
such carefully applied make-up, matched with a faultlessly committed
performance of physical and verbal childishness mixed with animal instinct, it
was a shock to find out from other films that he was not hideously deformed!
William of Baskerville, as imagined by Eco, was a mix of
William of Occam (him of Occam’s razor) and Sherlock Holmes (hence the
Baskerville) – the book even matched almost word for word, Watson’s first
description of Holmes from A Study with
Scarlet with Adso’s first description of William. (Adso himself is also
basically W-atso-n). The film is at its strongest when focused in William’s
deductions, his lightening intellectualism and his ability to bring even the
smallest fact or note to bear in order to shape a conclusion. The film
front-and-centres William’s investigation over and above the other themes of
the book (around faith, books and intellectual freedom), but this works for the
requirements of a film’s narrative.
It also helps that William is played by Sean Connery in one
of his finest performances. Heading into the film, Connery’s career was in a
seemingly terminal decline (indeed the Great Scotsman was seen as such
box-office poison, a Hollywood Studio pulled their funding after he was cast).
Connery had to work hard to persuade Annaud – but thank god he did, as he plays
on his fatherly and intellectual strengths here. In real life a committed
autodidact, Connery perfectly captures the curiosity and love-of-learning of
William, and also invests him with a profound moral sense, shaded by his guilt
at past failings and playful understanding of how the moments when we fail to
live up to expectations do not mean we are damned. It’s one of Connery’s finest
performance – and unarguably changed his career, as he headed into a five year
purple patch of increasingly impressive performances.
Connery’s compelling performance is the real meat of the
film, and he creates a character who feels warm, rounded and a perfect mix of
contemporary and of-the-period. He’s also well supported by a young Christian
Slater as his sidekick novice, who also gets a surprisingly raunchy sex scene.
It’s unfortunate the rest of the cast don’t get as much to play with. The rest
of the monks are oddballs, or drift out of the film as the plot requires
(Michael Lonsdale’s abbot simply disappears, despite hints of a darker role in
the plot early in the film).
In particular F Murray Abraham devours most of the
impressive set as a lip-smackingly cruel inquisitor who delights in handing out
the judgement of God. The film repositions him as a hissable villain, and
reduces his impact accordingly, including placing him in an “you’re off the
case William!” role. The final, murkily done sequence (featuring fires,
heretics punished and a couple of nasty accidents) does tip into the sort of
Grand Guignol gothicness that the book itself more or less avoids. But then
it’s part of the general boiling down of the novel – making it that palimpsest
– and also part of Annaud’s Euro-epic style, with its melting pot of accents
and touches of clumsy editing and filming.
The balance of the original novel between ideas and
sensation gets more or lost in sensation here – indeed the book that all this
murderous behaviour is all about gets rushed over and its impact poorly
explained, as are the motives of the eventual killer – but it all still kind of
works because it looks more or less perfect and because of that Connery
performance. Annaud was probably not quite the director to successfully marry
the two parts of the book – and his direction is adequate in many places rather
than inspired, with too many awkward handbrake turns – but this is still a film
I have enjoyed many times over and will do so again.
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