This is a beautifully written, well-directed film - with great performances and a story worth telling. After 9/11, it had looked like we'd be up to our gills in fascist cinema - all a series of ruminations on the joys of revenge and shadow fights with Al Caeda - including all three Lord of the Rings films, set in the days of "Middle Earth" when "humanity" had to be saved from a race of evil scumbags out to destroy it. Most of the revenge flicks have been predictable fare, but the shadow fights with Al Caeda have all been Trojan horses. Pre-sold through right-wing trailers, the resulting films have reflected a great deal of "leftist" hand-wringing about what really goes on when war is sold to the masses like bars of deodorant.

Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven" looked like the latest in pre-sold fascist cinema. If Lord of the Rings gave us the Middle Ages without the history, a movie set smack dab in the Crusades (no connections to our current situation, right?) promised (or threatened) to be that vicarious battle between good (the Judeo-Christian West) and evil (the Islamic Middle East). But like Troy (a story about political machinations, not east-versus-west), Kingdom of Heaven is about little people caught up in something so much bigger than themselves. Nobody has the ability to "fix" the geopolitical mess they inherit. The best each man can do is to live the code of chivalry: live right, protect the helpless and try to make the world a better place than what was handed you.

Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a blacksmith, eeking out an existence in the midst of an 12th century "downturn" of unparalleled misery. At the film's beginning, his wife is being buried after taking her own life, a sin condemning her to eternal damnation. Her barely veiled face reflects her youth and beauty, but hopelessness is a mighty trump card - and the gravediggers are ordered to cut off her head as a message to others.

Balian's situation takes a dramatic turn through two events. First, he gets a visit from a curious stranger who identifies himself as Godfrey (Lliam Neeson), an earnest, blunt, and guileless man - who provides a revelation and an offer. Jerusalem, he is told, is a land much like that glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Everything imaginable - wealth, power, adventure, even forgiveness - awaits him in the Holy Land. The second twist is an act of passion that puts Balian in bad sorts with the locals - clinching his choice to "go south until they speak Italian, then keep going till they speak something else."

This is the first produced script for William Monahan, an up-and-coming scribe who is rising faster than Lord Vader on a bad-Jedi day. The former editor of Spy magazine has already inked deals with Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park IV), Martin Scorsese (The Departed), and Ridley Scott for another highly-anticipated epic (Tripoli). When that many top-shelf directors want you to write something besides a music video, you rank high on the "Kilpatrick is jealous" measure of personal worth.

Monahan's script does the impossible - almost. It takes what is beginning to be a worn-out genre (the sword and sandal epic) and breathes new life into it, particularly because his script has something to say. Orlando Bloom, who played the wimpy, pathetic Paris in Troy, gets to pump up as a sub-Diesel everyman with the earnestness to rise to the challenge. After seeing him in this film and Troy, I'm beginning to like Bloom, whom I would otherwise have dismissed as yet another pretty boy sent from below to bore us to death. Like George Clooney, who also made it off my "pretty boy" list, Bloom wins points for going beyond the perfunctory actor/model/actor job of preening and pouting for the camera.

Monahan and Scott do something else with Kingdom of Heaven that is almost unheard of. This film could have been yet another football game fought in blood, between the shirts (Western Europe) and the skins (the Middle East). It's the kind of blockbuster stuff that generally produces mindless battle footage that simply never ends. But like the Mel Gibson actioner, We Were Soldiers Once, this film doesn't get suspended in mindless Michael-Bay pyrotechnics (thrilling us for ten minutes, then boring us for twenty). Instead, the action is part of the story, rather than a detour away from it.

When Balian goes out to Jerusalem, he encounters a very different place from Northwestern Europe. He discovers a thriving metropolis, with foods and merchandise from all parts of the known world. He discovers a world where religion is temporarily subordinated to the practical realities of life - so that Christians, Muslims and Jews are able to live together in virtual harmony because each respects the right of the other to worship God in his own way. Each understands that a man's actions are every bit as important as his words.

But all is not well in Jerusalem. Monahan's script puts us somewhere between the First and Second Crusades. Christian Europe, which took over the Holy Land after the Seljuk Turks excluded Christians and Jewish pilgrims from the Holy City of three faiths. The Christian European armies that hold it now have reestablished a balance of sorts that had existed when the city was in Muslim hands (before the extremist Turks had taken over): respect, tolerance and pragmatism toward all peoples of the book. For many, this has created a kind of Camelot, satisfying many cravings - religious, political, romantic, whatever. But it also inspires extremists with visions of "purging" the land of its infidels.

As Balian enters the scene, there are rumblings that spell doom and destruction for the fragile peace. The Templars, an ideologically extremist group from Europe, has taken to killing Muslims with the idea that killing infidels is no crime, but a pathway to heaven. On the other side of the coin, there are Muslim extremists interested in slaughtering Christian and Jewish "infidels" for polluting what they see as a "Holy Land" - fit only for Muslims. Sworn to uphold the code of the knights, Balian quickly finds himself tempted by the opportunity to kill a powerful foe, if only to bed and wed his beautiful wife, Sibylla (Eva Green). That opportunity comes from the mouth of King Baldwin (Edward Norton in a thankless but amazing performance as a pragmatic, tolerant king whose leprosy forces him to live behind a metallic mask).

Balian, whose desire for the "bling" of life seems to have been burned away by a kind of existentialist epiphany -born from sorrow - has but one real goal, and that is to live up to his status as a knight of Jerusalem. In that role, he eats, sleeps and breathes one concern: the safety of Jerusalem and the Christians and Jews within it. In this respect, Bloom is channeling a spirit somewhere between the idealism of Luke Skywalker (or Lawrence of Arabia) and the cynicism of Bogey in Casablanca or Clint Eastwood in all those spaghetti westerns. It's precisely because he doesn't try to be Vin Diesel, or another cardboard Bruce Willis from Tears in the Sun, that Bloom hits just the right note. He's a little man, flush with the desire to do something with his life, who senses the risks such a desire might put him to, and who rolls the dice, anyway. May we always have our share of such little men.

The battle scenes in Kingdom of Heaven are much like the performances - a wonderful integration of character revelation and plot development. Unlike Troy, the dramatic interactions that punctuate this spectacle are not long, logy, high-school productions with big-named stars standing around saying, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." The dialogue is mostly crisp, to the point, dramatic and tasty. So are the battle scenes. Until now, We Were Soldiers remained perhaps the only big-budget film involving war that didn't treat the battles as a kind of music-video with a soundtrack of violence. Every shot is part of a story that not only documents the step-by-step cat-and-mouse struggle between opposing sides, but one which reveals the characters of those involved.

Besides Liam Neeson and Orlando Bloom, three characters really stood as something more than window dressing. The first is Edward Norton's King Baldwin, who gives a better performance behind his mask than Tobey Maguire did behind his in Spider-Man. Baldwin is a thoughtful, practical ruler who sees the vision of what Jerusalem should be, but isn't above using the methods of the man in the gutter to achieve such ends. He's at odds with extremists on both sides, and is a constant reminder of how rare, and fragile, the role of the tolerant man must be.

Another great character is Saladin (Sala ha din), the Muslim General Patton (Ghassan Massoud). This is a man who wins battles precisely because he doesn't begin and end his planning with simplistic ideas that God favors the righteous. A true reflection of Sun Tzu's ideal general, he knows himself and his enemy. He sees both, not in terms of ideology, but in terms of a conflict involving two professional soldiers, each having to use the means available to improve his own chances of victory. Monahan and Scott could have portrayed him as an arch-villain, another Osama bin Laden, but history wouldn't yield on the point, and they had bigger fish to fry. Instead, they show the admirable cunning of a worthy opponent, as well as Balian's heroism in finding ways to respond.

A third character who struck my eye (how could she not?) was Sibylla (Eva Green). She's the Helen of Troy who could inspire all things - love, passion, murder, betrayal, you name it. This is not an easy role for any woman with brains. She is the beautiful princess in a traditional story where men vie for the honor of her hand. Neither history nor tradition give her the luxury of being J.I. Jane, Erin Brockavich, or even Minnie Vautrin. In lesser hands, she'd be another Princess Isabelle (the buxom beauty from Braveheart, a reactive pawn in a game between men). Instead, Monahan and Scott give space to Eva Green to be as much in the role as credibility will allow. Yes, she's beautiful. Yes, she cares, but she's also an arm ornament, to be handed from ruler to ruler. The script allows her to wear two faces - a kind of Queen Amidala by day and a Katherine Hepburn by night - and it's in this character revelation that she becomes something more than just another pretty face.

Watching Kingdom of Heaven, I knew this would not be an easy film to sell. Yes, the trailers promise us spectacular visuals - and the movie delivers. But this is not a blockbuster film with a simple happy ending where the home team mops up the field with the visitors. In this film, we westerners ARE the visitors - in more respects than one. In the years since 9/11, many great directors - including Oliver Stone - have sought their own "Holy Land" or Fountain of Youth in which to hit the jackpot. Almost every such effort has been a boxoffice disappointment. What happens with Kingdom of Heaven will be anyone's guess, but it's frankly refreshing to see something smarter onscreen than a soap opera or a dial-a-prayer installment. True action fans may feel cheated by the lack of extended action sequences (just as true voyeurs will feel cheated that the film's bit of lovemaking is so short, it almost inspires an Enzyte ad). Those looking for pat, faith-promoting drivel (ala Mel Gibson's The Patriot) need not apply. This is a film that explores a complicated situation (by now, I think even George W. Bush sees that). I really enjoyed its earnest attempts to explore the material with honesty and integrity.

P.S. Brendan Gleeson has a small, but powerful, part. It's a role that resembles his work in Troy, but with one amazing difference. Here, he's almost amusing as an agent of mischief, an ideological demon only too gleefull to let loose the dogs of war. The part is probably too small to get him an Oscar nod or a Golden Globe, but it's a tribute to what you can do just shy of becoming an extra.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older