There Be Dragons: Misses the Mark

Given our current political climate and the ease with which pundits throw around terms like fascism, communism, and socialism to describe the ideology of those on the other side of the aisle, the time is ripe for a cinematic allegory of our differences using the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s as the backdrop. And that’s just what acclaimed director Roland Joffé attempts to do with his historical epic There Be Dragons. Unfortunately, it fails on nearly every single level, notably the poor acting and the heavy-handed script.

The first half of the 20^th century was rather incredible when you look back on it. Europe bore the brunt of two world wars as global powers tested out totalitarian states against the Western democracies, while in between those two quagmires appeared the right-wing coup of the left-wing government in Spain. Flip on the History Channel and you’ll get every possible angle and story about WW2 you could ever want for as long as you pay Time Warner/Comcast/Cox Cable. Not so much for the Spanish Civil War that pitted fascist generals in Madrid against the communist civilians. Naturally, it’s much more nuanced and complex than all that – as Joffé’s script sets out to reveal through the telling of a few different stories that all center on forgiveness, father issues, and politics. But as both writer and director, Joffé makes critical mistakes on both fronts that sink There Be Dragons: one, using the wrong framing device around his main storyline; two, casting Wes Bentley; three, not showing a single dragon during the two-hour runtime!

Okay, so, just the first two are worthy of discussion. Let’s start with the script. It’s not that having a period piece set inside a period piece is explicitly wrong – the “present day” is 1982, while the bulk of the movie is actually set in 1932 – it’s that Joffé doesn’t capitalize on the story as the frame, rendering it rather pointless and distracting. The movie starts off when writer Robert Torres (Dougray Scott) heads to Madrid to get information from his estranged father, Manolo (Wes Bentley), for the book that he’s writing about Father Josemaria Escriva’s (Charlie Cox) life. It turns out that Manolo grew up with Josemaria, so while Robert has no real interest in reconnecting with his dad, he must for the sake of his book: a solid set-up for a framing story.

But instead of showing this drama unfold both in 1982 and in 1932 with these concurrent storylines, Joffé decides to hold off putting Robert and Manolo in the same room until the end of the film, instead having Manolo recant his tale voluntarily into an ancient tape recorder for Robert to listen to. This takes all the wind out of the 1982 story’s sails since there are no stakes. The whole point of having the framing device would be to add some level of conflict there, which is set up but never followed through. We don’t see those juicy scenes of Robert and old Manolo going toe-to-toe as they wrestle with their father-son issues via the telling of Josemaria’s story. If that’s not going to be there, instead filled with random scenes of Robert with his wife – who is an absolutely pointless filler character that should’ve ended up being abandoned in an earlier draft – then why even bother with this whole construct?

Now, that’s not the only issue with the framing device, either. The true crime here is that the wrong character was chosen to narrate. Cutting through all the layers, the heart of this movie is the story of Josemaria Escriva as a young, idealistic priest who risks his life by staying in Madrid to look after his flock after war breaks out. And, once Joffé strings together several scenes in a row of Josemaria and his Opus Dei group of fellow men of the cloth as they tried to hide in plain sight from the revolutionaries who were setting out to kill priests, the movie picked up steam – even if nuance and subtlety remain outside of Joffé’s toolbox. Forced to stick to his construct of the framing story of Robert dealing with his demons and to an old Manolo on his deathbed or, even worse, to his voiceover, the film loses its way.

Worst of all, Joffé’s decision to have Manolo be the storyteller simply makes no narrative sense. Manolo wasn’t physically there for hardly any of what we see take place with Josemaria, so how could he possibly be able to give us all this detail? How would he know any of what we’re seeing? Just because Manolo and Josemaria grew up together as kids and joined the seminary at the same time only to have a falling out as Manolo went to work for his rich dad and sided with the generals during the war doesn’t mean that he was going to be able to illuminate everyone on Josemaria’s life after they split ways. During the course of the movie, we follow young Manolo as he enters the communist warfront as a spy and occasionally comes close to crossing with Josemaria’s but, again, not enough for him to be the authority on his life. There’s one throwaway line where old Manolo in voiceover mentions that Josemaria wrote him a letter every year despite Manolo never writing him back. Hardly enough of a plot thread to explain how Manolo could possibly know as much as he did about Josemaria. While the story has elements of being intriguing and captivating – the complex forces brewing in such a tumultuous time as a civil war – the narrative choices Joffé made in the script phase cannot be overcome even with glossy, nicely crafted, on-location action scenes full of craning boom shots and strong composition.

Leaving out the whole lack of flying, fire-breathing reptiles, that brings us to Wes Bentley. He was one of those young actors to look for after his breakout role in American Beauty. And look hard you must to find him in much of anything between now and then. Sometimes things just don’t work out, but after seeing him here in There Be Dragons, I wouldn’t even blink upon finding out that much of his lack of film production throughout the 2000s has less to do with bad luck and much more to do with having shockingly subpar acting chops. To be fair, Joffé has asked Bentley to do way too much in this movie by making the misguided decision to have him portray Manolo both as a twentysomething in 1930s Spain and also as a dying old man in 1982. The makeup is actually quite good, but it can’t help make the dreadful performance any more believable; the T-800 in Terminator 2 showed more true feeling in one smirk than Bentley could emote in nearly two hours of run time. Much of this lies in the fact that Bentley uses only one look for everything — be it happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, or love — and it’s a facial contortion of murderous rage mixed with total confusion. Combine that with a ludicrously bad Spanish(?) accent and it’s the sort of thing that can’t just not work well, it can only work or fail. Sadly, this was of the latter variety.

Not to say that any of the other accents are any good aside from Rodrigo Santoro who plays a charismatic rebellion leader, which makes sense since he’s actually the one actor of Latin descent in the flick. Runner-up for worst accent since Kevin Costner as Robin Hood goes to Dougray Scott who can’t quite shake his native Scottish tongue. It’s yet another failed choice that Joffé made to have the actors attempt Spanish accents rather than, perhaps the more common choice of an English delivery, or even just going anachronistic and have everyone speak in American accents. I appreciate the decision but when the voice of the film – the actor providing most of the narration that is integral to understanding the story – cannot utter a single believable word as a Spaniard, you might need to rethink your approach.

The one shining spot in the acting department, however, is Charlie Cox. He manages to escape relatively unscathed out of this debacle — as the true star of the film, Cox does a solid job as Josemaria, giving him as much dimension as possible given the saint-like portrayal that Joffé put onto the page. The tagline for the film – “Every saint has a past” – comes from a line in the film (where the narration quotes another writer) and implies that even righteous, good people are human and make mistakes along the way. An intriguing and honest look at the world, where too many of us are too quick to label people either A or B instead of looking at the vast gray area in which we all reside. But, again, Joffé misses his own point, drops the ball that he himself put into motion, by writing Josemaria as a total saint throughout. Cox is likeable and, through his performance, offers a hint of conflict behind Josemaria’s eyes, elevating the script closer to where Joffé, I’m sure, intended it to be.

There Be Dragons is a noble misfire about an event that doesn’t get nearly as much coverage as other similar conflicts in world history, and one that’s potentially more relevant now than ever, that unfortunately completely misses the mark.