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Is There Intelligent Life in Robin Hood?
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19589 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1991 |
2,163 Words |
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Richard Grenier
Richard Grenier's latest book is Capturing the Culture. |
There's life in Robin Hood yet. Such, at least, was the opinion of Kevin Costner, fresh from his triumph with last season's Dances with Wolves. And the box office returns from the first two weeks of his Robin Hood's release in the early summer of 1991 seemed to bear him out. But is there intelligent life in Robin Hood? Above all, is there counterculture life? For a "statement" that Kevin Costner plainly wanted to make in his Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves--having already demonstrated in Wolves the loathsome inferiority of "white society" to the culture of the nineteenth-century American Plains Indian--was that in the Middle Ages European civilization (in this case English) was also loathsome and inferior. But inferior to what?
From Costner's point of view the difficulty was that through all the myriad reworkings of the Robin Hood legend during the some eight hundred years since it first appeared, Robin Hood, Little John, Friar Tuck, and Robin's growing band of lovable outlaws in Sherwood Forest have all been Englishmen. The Sheriff of Nottingham was doubtless a morally inferior person, and Robin Hood and his band were surely fine fellows by comparison, but Robin Hood and his outlaws, after all, were still English. Who was there for them to be inferior to? This was the screenwriters' Gordian Knot as they approached the Robin Hood legend under the fearless leadership of Kevin Costner.
'Physical Torments'
They cut this Gordian Knot, for the first time in centuries of Robin Hood rewrites, by sending our hero to the Crusades. There Robin Hood, taken prisoner, endures the physical torments Mr. Costner feels obliged in movie after movie to inflict on the characters he plays. Remember the near-mortal wound he receives in Wolves before offering himself as an antiwar martyr, riding with arms spread Christ-like between the two warring sides in the American Civil War. But why does Mr. Costner inflict physical torments on Robin Hood in the Holy Land? Why have him go to the Crusades in the first place? In order, of course, for him to encounter the desired superior culture, the Arab-Islamic civilization.
Robin Hood not only meets in the Holy Land a marvelous Arab, Azeem (played with rare dignity in this shoddy and maudlin film by black actor Morgan Freeman), he brings him back to England and to Sherwood Forest, where Azeem raises the cultural level greatly. Azeem can count--"arabic" figures. (Actually the zero and the place system were invented in India.) Robin Hood, the ignoramus, can't count. Azeem brings with him from the Arab world a
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