When Roland Joffé’s name gets mentioned by a film studio it always comes immediately before or after his best film, The Killing Fields.
But there are two sides to Joffé: the director that made The Killing Fields, a marvelous picture about the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the director who made Super Mario Bros. and the more recent torture-porn Captivity.
His new film seems to have introduced yet another Joffé, one that falls right between the others. In There Be Dragons, he maintains the superb visual style of his best work but with the scatterbrained mediocrity of his worst. The film seems to have so much potential, but it never takes off because it languishes in boring backstory, overlapping narration and flashbacks within flashbacks, no doubt an unintended Inception homage.
Dragons begins with a reporter, his ailing father and a trip to Spain, where flashbacks and narration guide us as we meet the father’s long-buried demons — “There be dragons … in my past,” he tells the son. The father is Manolo, a turncoat in the Spanish revolution. He plays both sides against each other — occasionally over a woman — while periodically encountering a childhood friend, Father Josemaría Escrivá, who has since been sainted for his works, which include the creation of Opus Dei, the Catholic institution.
The film flip-flops between the two contrasting characters as it meanders through the Spanish Civil War, a brutal conflict that turned brother against brother, and everyone against Spain’s many faithful priests. Manolo, who is the film’s catalyst and ultimate villain, is also the main character even though his eternal redemption seems to confound everyone including the priest he so begrudgingly hates. Manolo is played by Wes Bentley, the weed dealer from American Beauty, an actor who seems torn between the Manolo’s despicable and contemplative sides. Escrivá is played warmly by Charlie Cox, though in too much of the film he’s got this babe-in-the-woods “awe shucks” gaze.
Costars include Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko and Rodrigo Santoro, who aren’t given nearly as many bad lines or as much obnoxious brooding as the Manolo character. Dougray Scott has a minor role as the reporter son and he’s given some heavy-handed dialogue that smacks like overwritten trite: “And that is how I went searching for a saint and found my father instead,” or “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” It never quite surpasses the film’s first spoken line, though: “I was a war baby.”
Some of the scenes are quite good, including one where Escrivá is hiding within an apartment’s walls and the soldiers come knocking. In another a man must execute a woman who was framed for espionage. He fires a gun, but not at the person you expect. This all takes place amid some truly wonderful photography. Cinematographer Gabriel Beristain outdoes himself in every scene.
The acting is sub-par and boring, which only makes the long plot so much longer. Occasionally it loses its focus, which I think is Escrivá, though you can’t quite tell when Manolo’s sneering face dominates every shot. Overall, the film is epic in scope, but never in delivery.
