Robin Hood

It’s got a screenplay from Hollywood hackmeister Brian Helgeland that suffers from a near-terminal case of prequel-itis and is loaded with on-the-nose emotional beats and blasts of present-tense American ideology. Turns out Robin Hood wasn’t just some dude in Sherwood Forest who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He also brokered the deal between England’s King John and the landed aristocracy that produced the Magna Carta, the foundational document for civil liberty in the English-speaking world! He was also George Washington’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, and sent the Gettysburg Address to Lincoln via a time-travel mind-meld!

OK, that last part isn’t really in the movie. But it sure felt that way. Helgeland probably put quotes from Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry into Robin’s climactic monologue before concluding, with great reluctance, that they just wouldn’t fly. Then there’s the question of the man uttering that monologue, sex-god bruiser Russell Crowe, who plays Robin with his customary blend of brooding, manly rectitude and ferocious hangover.

Crowe has never possessed much dramatic range, but he can be — and sometimes is here — a tremendously charismatic screen presence who imparts an air of naturalness even to stupid roles in stupid movies. There’s something off about this performance, though. It’s got a calculated movie-star-ness about it, as if Scott had assured him that every character issue and every plot point could be resolved by striking a gloomy non-expression at the perfect angle and holding it for five seconds. Hey, don’t worry about any of that acting-school bullshit, Rusty. They loved you in “Gladiator”! (Which is, at the risk of being obvious, the career-topping, Oscar-sweeping formula Scott and Crowe long to recapture here.)

What I’m working my way around to saying (talk about damning with faint praise!) is that despite its abundant flaws and historical howlers and generally dimwitted tone, “Robin Hood” is a surprisingly enjoyable work of popcorn cinema, if you’re willing to take it on its own terms. As ever, Scott hires the best production-design teams in the business, and his muddy vision of late medieval Britain — where even London is little more than a collection of wood-and-wattle huts built around the royal castle — is richly detailed and totally convincing. Much more important, this is a knockout love story built around two adult characters who’ve learned some of life’s toughest lessons and faced real responsibilities.

I don’t know how much money Cate Blanchett got paid to play Marian Loxley, the aristocratic widow who will become — in the story’s future tense — Robin’s Maid Marian. It was probably more than you and I combined will make in 10 years, but in terms of redeeming this film as a viewing experience, it might not have been enough. For my money, Blanchett’s beauty only grows more luminiscent as she gets older (she celebrates her 41st birthday this week, if you haven’t sent a gift), and in this role as a rural woman forced to run her absent husband’s estate she commands the screen with supernal grace and a fiery sense of purpose.

Moreover, when paired with Blanchett, Crowe’s gloomy demeanor and noncommittal expression — he looks like a man unsure whether what he just ate was chocolate or cat shit — seems directed at a worthy object. In this before-the-man-became-a-legend prequel, Crowe’s Robin Longstride is an archer who skips out on the army of King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as it pillages its way homeward from the Crusades, perhaps because he’s developed a conscience about all that wanton killing of Muslims. (Ascribing a 21st-century sense of morality and cultural sophistication — not to mention literacy — to the uneducated son of a 13th-century stonemason is nice and all. But, you know, not that plausible.)

After Robin and his band of fellow deserters fight their way through a series of narrow escapes and schmooze their way across the English Channel wearing knightly get-ups they stole off dead guys, he fulfills a battlefield promise to return one dead knight’s sword to his family. The sword has some weird stuff written on the hilt, which makes Robin have these acid-flashback childhood memories. (I believe it’s the Middle English equivalent of “Luke, I am your father!”) The family turns out to be the Loxleys of Nottingham, and Robin finds Marian and her aged father-in-law (Max von Sydow, in another enjoyable crusty old guy role) barely clinging to their estate against bandits, rapacious tax collectors, and the buffoonish Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen, and they’re really going to have to make him more imposing if they want to make a credible sequel).

If you think that sounds complicated, we haven’t even gotten into all the political back-stabbing, some of it ripped from the pages of history and some of it total bullshit: Vain and cruel pretty boy King John (Oscar Isaac) accedes to the throne after Richard’s death, only to become the object of universal hatred and sinister French plots. This story’s central bad guy is bald-headed, black-clad Godfrey (Mark Strong), an Anglo-French double agent with the scar, sneer and rapacious appetites to match — along with an ability to be in all places at all times that suggests a DC Comics supervillain. (One could point out along the way that this movie presumes a conception of nations and nationality that simply didn’t exist at the time, and that Richard the Lionheart was himself French. But why be pedantic?)

When Robin agrees to pose as Marian’s missing husband in order to restore stability to Nottingham — well, we know what’s coming. At first she makes him park his manly hunk of flesh on the hearth to sleep with the dogs. Arf, arf! Owoo! But let’s just say that this lady’s been on her own for a while, if you catch my drift, and just to get the grime of 10 years of Crusadin’ off Robin, she’s got to help him wrestle all that chain mail off his impressive torso.

Seriously, though, the sexual chemistry between Crowe and Blanchett is fully convincing, and acts as an electrical field that energizes the mediocre movie around it. New romance after age 35 always carries an element of relief and reprieve, and this hard-luck couple find each other in the Middle Ages, when to be not yet dead of dysentery or gangrenous infection at that age required a minor miracle. When they look at each other with evident hunger, you can feel their shared wonder: Can it really be true that, in the middle of this miserable existence, God has granted me this? Solely because of its triumphant central coupling, this labored prequel — which doesn’t get Robin Hood and his Merrie Men into the forest until the very end — may form the basis for a viable franchise.

Still, there’s something different about this year. When I read the other day that Cannes was adding “Route Irish,” the new film from 2006 Palme d’Or winner Ken Loach, as a last-minute competition entry, I was momentarily confused: But they’ve already got a Ken Loach film.

In fact, no, they didn’t. What Cannes programmer Thierry Frémaux already had was a Mike Leigh film, and while they may both be aging, left-wing Brits with social-realist tendencies and monosyllabic names, they are not the same person. (Spare those e-mailin’ fingers: Accents aside, their movies aren’t all that similar either.)

My confusion, however, does point to a problem with the 2010 Festival de Cannes lineup: A whole lot of Loach and Leigh and other films and filmmakers at about that respectable but unglamorous level. I’ve spent a lot of time parsing the Cannes roster, and have concluded that, film-buff-wise, it offers the possibility of being absolutely great, in an earnest, artistic, quietly ambitious kind of way. But the Palais des Festivals, that splorgulous concrete ’80s monstrosity on the Mediterranean beachfront, was not built on earnest aesthetic ambition.

It was built on the discordant, schizophrenic marriage between art and commerce — between European pretension and Hollywood shamelessness — that has made Cannes a headline-grabbing event around the world, for ordinary moviegoers as much as for cinephiles. And this year’s edition, arriving precisely as the worst economic crisis in the brief history of the European Union hits bottom, suggests that model is itself in crisis.

I’ll be in Cannes Wednesday night for the world premiere of Ridley Scott’s splashy, ultraviolent men-without-tights update of “Robin Hood,” starring Russell Crowe as the heroic bandit of Sherwood Forest and Cate Blanchett as his Maid Marian. Friday offers the premiere of Oliver Stone’s long-awaited “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” with Michael Douglas reprising his generation-defining role as greed guru Gordon Gekko, and supported by Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin and Carey Mulligan.

But after we see those two films — and maybe Doug Liman’s “Fair Game,” with Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (about which more below) — many of the paparazzi and gossip columnists will depart the Cote d’Azur for sunnier, or at least more celebrity-kissed, climes. It may be an enriching week after that, and I’m exactly the sort of person who’s supposed to welcome that. Mais je dis non! Bring on the salon-bronzed legs, the camera-hogs in form-fitting tuxedos, the supposedly famous Ibiza club DJs. Is it too late for Frémaux to get “Sex and the City 2″?

That was never in serious consideration (sadly) but lots of other movies were. Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” starring Penn and Brad Pitt, isn’t finished, and the selectors simply passed on such varied big-name delights as Sylvester Stallone’s action-dude roundup “The Expendables” and Julian Schnabel’s Middle Eastern-themed “Mirai.” That leaves us with an interesting but relatively low-wattage lineup full of world-cinema veterans and relative unknowns, with a special focus on Asia. The age range alone is extraordinary: Canada’s Xavier Dolan is barely into his 20s, while Portuguese-French legend Manoel de Oliveira is now 101. Compared to him, 74-year-old Woody Allen and 79-year-old Jean-Luc Godard are in early-mid career. (I don’t really talk about Godard’s new film below. It’s called “Socialism,” which is all you need to know to estimate its potential audience. I’ll save other commentary for when I’ve actually seen it.)

Here’s my traditional (and largely arbitrary) breakdown of Cannes films, starting with the biggest events and moving toward the obscurities.

The Sound and the Fury

After the red-carpet gala for “Robin Hood,” which will proceed with Crowe and Blanchett but without director Ridley Scott (who is laid up at home with an injury), the profound Cannes hunger for paparazzi-worthy glamour spectacles will devolve almost entirely onto “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” without question this festival’s biggest event. (As I write this I haven’t seen “Robin Hood” yet, but the opening-night film at Cannes is mocked by the cognoscenti no matter what it is.) “Wall Street” won’t open Stateside until fall, and possibly isn’t in final form, so this should be exciting. 

You can also bet that “Fair Game,” Doug Liman’s drama about the Bush administration scandal surrounding CIA couple Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts) and Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn), will attract considerable attention. Penn may be a bigger star in France than he is at home, but the specifics of the story will be largely inscrutable to Europeans (except for the fact that GWB plays the bad guy). “Fair Game” splits the difference between this starfucking category and the next, more ahh-tistic one, as does Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” another of the Woodman’s late-career globetrotting divertissements. Brolin and Watts — is this their year or what? — which is a great start. I know nothing else about it, except that Allen would clearly love to replicate the 2008 Cannes success of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” which became a worldwide hit.

The Devil’s Candy

I use this term to describe the often unattainable marriage of art and commerce, found in films that win awards, cause critical swooning and, somewhere along the way, attract a paying audience too. These are precisely the movies Cannes was built to enable; think “Inglourious Basterds” and “No Country for Old Men,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

Once you get past the above-mentioned Doug Liman and Woody Allen movies, contenders for Satan’s sweetmeats are thin on the ground in Cannes this year, which is precisely what makes this festival feel buzz-deficient. Arguably, one of 2010′s most anticipated premieres is for a documentary, “Inside Job,” in which policy insider turned filmmaker Charles Ferguson tries to attack the global financial crisis with the same muckraking zeal he applied to the Iraq war in his devastating “No End in Sight.”

We’ve already discussed Mike Leigh, who returns to the Croisette with “Another Year,” another of his semi-improvised social-realist comedies — but despite glowing reviews for his last film, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Leigh no longer has a high international profile. You could say the same about French director Bertrand Tavernier, a respected veteran of global cinema going the costume-drama route with “The Princess of Montpensier.” (I don’t think Tavernier has had a film released in the United States since 1999, and he’s best known for “Round Midnight” in 1986.) Three years after “Babel,” his overstuffed, star-studded ensemble drama, Mexico’s Alejandro González Iñárritu gets back to basics with “Biutiful,” a Spanish-language thriller starring Javier Bardem. There’s one I’m definitely curious about.

“Diving Bell” star Mathieu Amalric makes his feature directing debut with “On Tour,” in which he also stars as a Parisian professional burnout who starts over as an American burlesque entrepreneur. Advance word is strong, and at some point Amalric’s got English-language stardom in his future. But is the retro-burlesque craze a big enough trend to support a movie?

In an extremely light year for American films, there’s one indie at Cannes with the potential for some degree of breakout success — but it’s a tough sell, at least in theory. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a working-class couple whose marriage hits the rocks in “Blue Valentine,” a spectacular narrative-feature debut from director Derek Cianfrance that explores a level of American life hardly ever seen in the movies. Lusciously photographed, with riveting star performances, it’s the only dramatic film to premiere at Sundance this year and move on to Cannes. If and when you finally get to see it, you’ll understand why.

High Art With Low Expectations

This category captures that large subset of festival films made by directors with impeccable artistic credentials, films that are likely to set a tiny coterie of journalists, bloggers, festival programmers and cinephiles abuzz while receiving virtually no attention from the rest of the world. Should those of us who are excited about seeing the new Pablo Trapero and Hong Sang-soo movies even care about the rest of the world? That’s a much bigger question than I can handle in my jetlagged condition. Let’s just say it does no good to climb atop a soapbox and preach at people about movies they A) almost certainly can’t find, and B) very likely would not enjoy.

Having thus admonished myself, I’ll keep the sermon short. Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami is at Cannes with his first “global” film (i.e.., since leaving the land of the mullahs), “Certified Copy,” with French superstar Juliette Binoche. Arab-French director Rachid Bouchareb’s “Outside the Law,” a drama set against the Algerian war for independence, is a very big deal in France. Argentina’s Trapero, who’s been here before with a wry family comedy (“Rolling Family”) and a wrenching prison drama (“Lion’s Den”), seems to have become a regular. Beloved French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Summer Hours,” “Irma Vep”) offers an only-in-Cannes experience, perhaps literally: A five-and-a-half-hour film about ’70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal. I do want to see it, kind of. (OK, it’s actually a TV series crammed into a single afternoon.)

A pair of critic’s-darling directors, Romania’s Cristi Puiu (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”) and China’s Jia Zhangke (“Still Life,” “The World”) return with eagerly awaited new dramas. I personally found Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s “I Killed My Mother” (made when he was not yet 20) insufferable, but his admirers will no doubt queue up enthusiastically for “Heartbeats.”

Cannes programmers have been slow to recognize the new wave of art-house cinema from Asia, but this year it sounds as if they’ve finally listened to the annual chorus of complaints. In fact this is a tremendous year for Asian films on the Croisette, almost certainly the best ever. Along with new work from Jia and aforementioned Korean slacker-cinema titan Hong Sang-soo, there’s “Outrage,” a violent new yakuza drama from Japanese actor-artist-director and all-around Renaissance man Takeshi Kitano. Korea’s Lee Chang-dong, who had a smash here three years ago with the female-centric drama “Secret Sunshine,” is back with “Poetry,” and I hear strong advance word on a film called “Chongqing Blues,” from Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai.

All that is trumped, for devotees of drifty, dreamy Asian weirdness, by the new film from Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Syndromes and a Century”). As if his name weren’t enough — Weerasethakul has occasionally invited Western journalists to address him as “Joe,” in recognition of our total tongue-tied defeat — it’s called “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” I really don’t expect anybody to care, but I can’t wait.

Into the Unknown

Not obscure enough for you? We’re not done! Here’s where I embarrass myself by pimping out a few movies based on nothing, or almost nothing: some rumors, a half-translated review, reports from a friend of a friend of a friend. But this is what film festivals are all about, really — getting a totally unexpected look into a world you know nothing about. Two years ago, I wandered into a screening of the Chilean film “Tony Manero” mostly because Jim Jarmusch was receiving an award before it started. I hadn’t heard of the movie or its young director, Pablo Larraín. Yet that utterly demented disco-era serial-killer psychodrama remains one of the most intense moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had.

There’s bound to be something like that lurking amid the catfish at the bottom of this year’s Cannes pond as well — maybe the pseudo-documentary “My Joy” by Russian collage-artist Sergei Loznitsa, or ultra-indie New York filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan’s new “Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs).” Moving in totally different directions, here are two films I’ve promised myself to see: “Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project,” by Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, who people keep telling me is indescribably weird and original, and the latest in a recent wave of German-language neo-noir thrillers, Christoph Hochhäusler’s “The City Below.” Mind you, if I break that promise to myself, it’s not like anybody’s really going to notice.

Here’s how it works: Give yourself one point if you’ve heard of the director, two points if you can correctly name a film he or she has directed (I had to dig deep to find a woman for this list, let us note in passing) and three points if you’ve actually seen one of his or her films. In fact, let’s add a bonus category: Five points if you’ve watched more than one of the director’s films all the way through, projected on a big screen. (Just for fun, give yourself an extra point if you know who the oldest and youngest filmmakers on the list are. If you’re already that kind of person, it’ll be easy-peasey.)

Just to keep things consistent, no compound scoring: For example, if you’ve seen a film by Christoph Hochhäusler, I’m very impressed — but you only get three points for that, not an extra two for knowing the film’s name and then another point for also having heard of him. Stay away from Google and IMDB until you’re finished, please; our secret reverse-Webcam Film Salon Magic Mirror can see you if you’re cheating!

Xavier Beauvois

Xavier Dolan

Rachid Bouchareb

Hong Sang-soo

Lee Chang-dong

Sergei Loznitsa

Ivan Fund

Manoel de Oliveira

Otar Iosseliani

Ágnes Kocsis

Ridley Scott

Oliver Stone

Derek Cianfrance

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Abbas Kiarostami

Wait, I didn’t actually put Christoph Hochhäusler on the list, did I? Darn it. (Any excuse for getting to type that name again.) I think I’m assuming a global zero for that guy — I may or may not change my personal score by watching his film “Unter dir die Stadt” on the Croisette next month.

By the way, I’ll share my score — eventually — if you’ll tell me yours. First, let’s discuss.

Yes, there are a couple of ringers on the list, designed to ensure that none of you comes up absolutely empty, but in fact they’re sort of the point. As indieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez wrote in a recent post, the world’s biggest and glitziest film fest serves two distinct castes of movie buffs and two non-overlapping media audiences. “I don’t know any of the people in competition,” one non-industry friend of Hernandez’s told him. On the other hand, indieWIRE’s readers, who tend to be industry insiders or hardcore cinephiles, have voted Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film (whose delightful if provisional English translation is “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”) as the Cannes film they’re anticipating most eagerly.

I’m sure that one’s on the top of your list for this year. Along with the new film from Jean-Luc Godard, 80ish legend of the French New Wave, also eagerly awaited by the cognoscenti. It’s called “Film socialisme.” No, seriously, it is.

As Hernandez puts it, this year’s Cannes lineup reinforces “an almost blue state v. red state divide that separates more mainstream moviegoers from fans of contemporary international cinema.” Cannes programmer Thierry Frémaux is practicing a weird double game that verges on false advertising. He’s grabbing global headlines with the opening-night premiere of Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood,” with Russell Crowe in the title role (described by Hernandez as “an uninteresting Hollywood studio reboot”) and then loading up the festival with Iosselianis, Loznitsas and Lee Chang-dongs — films and directors that the vast majority of moviegoers around the world (not merely in the United States) have never heard of and will never see.

Admittedly, I don’t know anyone who’s super-excited about the Scott-Crowe “Robin Hood.” I kind of wonder whether anyone is. (Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street 2,” let me say, is quite another matter.) And there’s nothing new about the Cannes combination of mass-market Hollywood whoring and art-house esoterica so nichey it makes your gums bleed from the love of pure cinema. I’ll be back on the Côte d’Azur this year, bringing you all the news on men in tights, Gordon Gekko’s big comeback and directors whose first name is Xavier. It’ll be fun. But, honestly, will you pay more attention to Ágnes Kocsis’ and Ivan Fund’s films because they share a venue with Oliver Stone, Ridley Scott and (rumored as a possible late addition) Sylvester Stallone? Is that a sustainable ecosystem?

The judging system will take some refinement, but here’s a first stab. If your score was below six points, then you opened this story by accident. We’re a bunch of weirdos in here, aren’t we? If you wound up between, say, 8 and about 20, you’re a normal, healthy person with reasonable cultural appetites. On the other hand, if you scored anywhere north of 50, or even 40, you’ve got to ask yourself some serious questions about the way you’ve spent your life. That said, I may well know you already. Buy me a drink at Robinson’s after the screening of the Sergei Loznitsa film, and all is forgiven.

Hand in your work, please. Class is dismissed.