Good monarchist movies are hard to find, very few are done and even fewer are done well. Alas the 1999 Luc Besson film, “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc” is no exception to this generality. It was to be expected but, at the time, I had no idea that this movie about one of the most famous monarchists in history and a Christian saint revered by millions was directed by an avowed atheist. In my ignorance I was excited when “The Messenger” came out and eager to see the life of Joan of Arc brought to the screen with more money, more filmmaking wizardry and so on than was available in past attempts. Oh, how disappointed I was. Overall it is actually soul-crushingly bad. Painful bad. Horrid. More than that it is downright insulting to virtually every group connected with the story portrayed. However, I am getting ahead of myself and should try to start by saying something kind.
As is usual with Hollywood (yes, a French-made movie but I think you know what I mean) these days, the technical side of the movie is great. Some have complained about it but I thought the look, the sets, the battle scenes, the special effects and so on were good or at least good enough. Granted, there was only one really big battle portrayed in the movie (lifting the siege of Orleans). Also, unlike some others, I thought the actors all did a pretty good job, even Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc. That is not to say that the part was good but I will get to that in a minute. One thing I did like was the greater realism than seen in other films (though this has more to do with when the film was made) and that carried to Jovovich’s Joan of Arc. I liked the level of emotion on display. I never could imagine St Joan riding serenely through the butchery of battle, untouched by the chaos around her. That is certainly not the case with this movie. Joan gets frustrated, she gets inspired, ecstatic, angry and anguished. She is very emotionally involved to say the least. Again, on the whole, I thought the acting was good and it was certainly not a list of no-names on the bill of players.
However, that being said, the big, huge, gargantuan, behemoth problem with this movie is how history was cut to ribbons to pursue an agenda. The word “inaccurate” does not begin to describe it. Spiteful, libelous, atrocious, insulting and even downright blasphemous would not be going too far. From the very start the Joan in this movie is portrayed as suffering from some sort of obsessive-religious disorder. She is not shown as anything that could be described as devout by any stretch but as a compulsively religious maniac, swept up in ecstatic religious visions one moment and then terrified to the point of paranoia the next over divine judgment. Then enter the English. Since the filmmakers seem incapable of believing that someone could go off on a mission to liberate their country and restore their rightful king based purely on religious devotion and pious patriotism they have to give Joan a motive. In this case it is watching in horror while her older sister is killed and raped (yes, in that order) by an English soldier. It is possibly the most disgusting scene of the entire movie and seems to serve no other purpose than to rob Joan of pure motives in her quest but to hold on in her mind to be brought up in the end that it was all about hatred and a thirst for revenge on her part tied to feelings of guilt that her sister had died after giving up her hiding place to Joan.
This ends up being rather central to the story as Dustin Hoffman (my least favorites character by far) appears at the end listed in the credits as “the conscience” and basically relates that Joan had been driven by vengeance, vanity and that her visions were nothing more than delusions she chose to interpret as divine instructions to serve her own ends. That overall theme is the largest insult of the movie but it is certainly not the only one. No opportunity is lost to take cheap shots at virtually anything Joan of Arc or the people of her time held dear. Further, these were all completely needless insults that did nothing to advance the story but simply serve to make the viewer feel worse and destroy any possibility of anyone in this movie coming away with a good reputation. There was Yolanda of Aragon replacing the Holy Oil of Clovis that had “run out” and calling it a “miracle”, the scene of that same Queen Yolanda and her son King Charles VII deliberately betraying Joan to the Burgundians and the (thankfully unseen) rape of Joan in prison.
Absolutely no one comes away looking good in this movie and it is a common problem with spiteful, bleeding-heart liberal filmmakers of today. Everyone is bad, everyone has wicked motives, Joan of Arc is a phony, the French are a bunch of sniveling, back-stabbers, the churchmen are all corrupt and self-serving and the English are crude, sadistic barbarians. Not surprisingly the reviews for this movie when it was released were predominately bad. There is no hero, no one for the uninformed audience to root for and if you do the director ensures you will feel guilty for doing so by the time it is all over. It is a movie that brings audiences down plain and simple. What frustrates me the most is the obvious talent that is on display. This could have been a great movie, it easily could have been the quintessential bio-epic of St Joan of Arc. The historical narrative is one tailor-made to thrill, uplift and inspire audiences. That this movie could have done that but the filmmakers chose to do the opposite infuriates me more than anything else. They had everything needed to make a magnificent film about Joan of Arc, and you even get glimpses of it now and then, but they simply chose not to. They chose to insult and slander.
As is usual with Hollywood (yes, a French-made movie but I think you know what I mean) these days, the technical side of the movie is great. Some have complained about it but I thought the look, the sets, the battle scenes, the special effects and so on were good or at least good enough. Granted, there was only one really big battle portrayed in the movie (lifting the siege of Orleans). Also, unlike some others, I thought the actors all did a pretty good job, even Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc. That is not to say that the part was good but I will get to that in a minute. One thing I did like was the greater realism than seen in other films (though this has more to do with when the film was made) and that carried to Jovovich’s Joan of Arc. I liked the level of emotion on display. I never could imagine St Joan riding serenely through the butchery of battle, untouched by the chaos around her. That is certainly not the case with this movie. Joan gets frustrated, she gets inspired, ecstatic, angry and anguished. She is very emotionally involved to say the least. Again, on the whole, I thought the acting was good and it was certainly not a list of no-names on the bill of players.
However, that being said, the big, huge, gargantuan, behemoth problem with this movie is how history was cut to ribbons to pursue an agenda. The word “inaccurate” does not begin to describe it. Spiteful, libelous, atrocious, insulting and even downright blasphemous would not be going too far. From the very start the Joan in this movie is portrayed as suffering from some sort of obsessive-religious disorder. She is not shown as anything that could be described as devout by any stretch but as a compulsively religious maniac, swept up in ecstatic religious visions one moment and then terrified to the point of paranoia the next over divine judgment. Then enter the English. Since the filmmakers seem incapable of believing that someone could go off on a mission to liberate their country and restore their rightful king based purely on religious devotion and pious patriotism they have to give Joan a motive. In this case it is watching in horror while her older sister is killed and raped (yes, in that order) by an English soldier. It is possibly the most disgusting scene of the entire movie and seems to serve no other purpose than to rob Joan of pure motives in her quest but to hold on in her mind to be brought up in the end that it was all about hatred and a thirst for revenge on her part tied to feelings of guilt that her sister had died after giving up her hiding place to Joan.
This ends up being rather central to the story as Dustin Hoffman (my least favorites character by far) appears at the end listed in the credits as “the conscience” and basically relates that Joan had been driven by vengeance, vanity and that her visions were nothing more than delusions she chose to interpret as divine instructions to serve her own ends. That overall theme is the largest insult of the movie but it is certainly not the only one. No opportunity is lost to take cheap shots at virtually anything Joan of Arc or the people of her time held dear. Further, these were all completely needless insults that did nothing to advance the story but simply serve to make the viewer feel worse and destroy any possibility of anyone in this movie coming away with a good reputation. There was Yolanda of Aragon replacing the Holy Oil of Clovis that had “run out” and calling it a “miracle”, the scene of that same Queen Yolanda and her son King Charles VII deliberately betraying Joan to the Burgundians and the (thankfully unseen) rape of Joan in prison.
Absolutely no one comes away looking good in this movie and it is a common problem with spiteful, bleeding-heart liberal filmmakers of today. Everyone is bad, everyone has wicked motives, Joan of Arc is a phony, the French are a bunch of sniveling, back-stabbers, the churchmen are all corrupt and self-serving and the English are crude, sadistic barbarians. Not surprisingly the reviews for this movie when it was released were predominately bad. There is no hero, no one for the uninformed audience to root for and if you do the director ensures you will feel guilty for doing so by the time it is all over. It is a movie that brings audiences down plain and simple. What frustrates me the most is the obvious talent that is on display. This could have been a great movie, it easily could have been the quintessential bio-epic of St Joan of Arc. The historical narrative is one tailor-made to thrill, uplift and inspire audiences. That this movie could have done that but the filmmakers chose to do the opposite infuriates me more than anything else. They had everything needed to make a magnificent film about Joan of Arc, and you even get glimpses of it now and then, but they simply chose not to. They chose to insult and slander.
