Honor pricks me on
If I may risk dipping my toes into The Discourse, I would like to offer a thought. It is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that smartphones and social media have absolutely turned the brains of everyone under the age of 45 into mashed bananas, and left us a society unable to actually produce or engage with cultural objects of any artistic value, which is why commercially successful American movies are all basically just expensively mediocre TV now. Second, that has nothing to with why The Last Duel, a 2.5-hour movie about rape, failed to appeal to a broad audience. Apologies to Sir Ridley Scott, who tried to use the former notion to argue for the second, but sometimes a movie that looks from afar like an insufferably long dirge full of dismal people doing horrible things to each other has in fact been advertised very honestly, and the people who figured that it might be more pleasant not to watch it were probably right.
That is, to be fair, being more reductive than The Last Duel deserves. I mean, it is an insufferably long dirge full of dismal people doing horrible things to each other, so in a sense it's not reductive at all, but the thing is, the film has set out to be what it is, and it's largely a well-executed version of the thing that it is, and for a reasonably long stretch of its unreasonably long running time, it's pretty much an objectively successful attempt to use the material of a 14th Century costume drama to do social commentary about the modern world.
The film, adapted from the nonfiction book by Eric Jager, tells the story of one of the most famous legal events in Western European history, one whose particulars remain well-studied nearly 640 years later: Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer) wife of the financially washed-out Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), accused Jean's onetime close friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) of raping her. The litigious Jean challenged Jacques to a duel to the death, one of the very last ever permitted by the French government to stand in place of a court trial.
The Last Duel sort of functions as that trial, in that it is structured as the testimony of the three principles: first Jean, then Jacques, then Marguerite, each written by one of the film's three screenwriters, Ben Affleck & Damon & Nicole Holofcener (Holofcenter wrote Marguerite's third; I'm not sure how Affleck & Damon split duties). It's your basic Rashomon-style narrative, showing us the same events from the perspective of each individual, calibrated to make them come out the best. It also makes it unambiguously clear that Marguerite's version of events is the factually correct one, which raises the question: can you actually do a Rashomon if there's not ambiguity? There's probably something to contrasting Marguerite's story with Jacques's as a way of revealing how his arrogance and confidence in his sexual desirability blind him to the destructive realities of his behavior (there's a key scene in the film where he insists that he's innocent and it seems very clear from that moment that he believes this to be true), but that's not really what The Last Duel wants to be, and even if it was, that still wouldn't explain why the first third of the film benefits from being told through Jean's perspective.
This is doubly so since, by opening on Jean, we open on Damon, and Damon's performance is just wildly bad. The film has a very uncertain relationship with the whole matter of costume dramas; on the one hand, it obviously wants to subvert them and challenge the way that they history into dead spectacle, but it also is a big-budget prestige production that's been lovingly fussed over by some A+ craftspeople, many of them Scott regulars: cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, costume designer Janty Yates, production designer Arthur Max. So the whole film is built on a somewhat unproductive tension between how much of this is a fable of the modern world, and how much is old-fashioned showmanship. And this tension extends to the acting, often with different performers falling into different spots along the modern/old-time spectrum depending on whose version of the story we're in. This isn't a case where one approach is bad and another is good: the two best performances in the film come from Affleck, who plays Count Pierre d'Alençon as a hyper-modern snobby dickhead, and Comer, whose restrained, haunted work is the closest the film comes to conventional costume drama acting. But it's anyways the case that Damon's performance is both very modern and very bad, the kind of heavily misguided work that comes when a talented actor is given too much rope by a director who isn't really all that deft with actors to begin with. But in this case, Scott in this case seems perfectly disinterested in lining up the actors together at all: besides the three I've mentioned, Driver is basically just playing the stock Driver character, with slightly more ugly egotism, and Harriet Walter's work as Jean's crone of a mother is pure camp, almost as disorienting as Damon. Five very different modes, none of them matching, and the three scripts conceive of Jean in such different ways - as a put-upon middle-aged man of dignity, as a grump loser, as a distant and cruel husband who views his wife as barely more than livestock - that Damon is basically giving three different performances altogether. All of which are very "the Boston part of medieval France" in generally unsatisfying ways.
Setting aside the acting, which is somewhat beyond help (again, I don't think Scott cares much about directing actors: if the actors themselves bring great ideas, terrific! you have Thelma & Louise. If they don't, oops! you have The Counselor), there's definitely something in here that works and is worthy of saving from the general sludginess of the whole. And sludgy it most certainly is, at 152 minutes, most of it dedicated to telling the same story three times. There are some keen, nasty insights into male psychology, for example; the film shows without telling us that Jean and Jacques's duel over Marguerite's body is much more about Jean's irritable mortification at having generally fucked up his economic prospects and becoming an object of ridicule as a result. It's a sharp, smart depiction of 14th Century life as a place where actual humans, mostly like you and me, lived and plotted and hated each other and suffered for that hate: both the physical tactility of the production and the curt, pragmatic dialogue that marks all three writers' work gives it a very real, living, present quality. The last duel itself, which picks up when all three stories have been told and takes up the last quarter hour or so of the movie, is a superb action scene: the director of Gladiator shows up in a big way here, reveling in the chaos of mud and blood and hideously painful wounds that can fuck you up wretchedly without killing you outright, if you happen to be engaged in brutal medieval combat. Indeed, so powerfully-made is the duel that it even kind of casts a shade of doubt over the rest of the film; yes, it might appear that this was all an extended metaphor for the #MeToo era and toxic masculinity, but it does really seem that the director is most awake and excited when he turns it into an ultra-violent action movie. I'm not angel: that's when I was the most awake and excited, too. But it does feel like a different movie.
Mind you, The Last Duel wouldn't suffer from being a different movie. The one we got is way too long and way too slow, and all of its best character work is backloaded to the Marguerite third (with the exception of Affleck's smug, self-satisfied count, who is equally good throughout, though he's never a main character), which makes that slowness so much easier to notice. It is, in many ways, an admirable film; it is, in most ways, a very handsome and well-made film, perhaps the most persuasively-designed and lived-in of all Scott's period pieces. But in almost no ways at all is it a watchable film, and that does ultimately matter a decent amount.
That is, to be fair, being more reductive than The Last Duel deserves. I mean, it is an insufferably long dirge full of dismal people doing horrible things to each other, so in a sense it's not reductive at all, but the thing is, the film has set out to be what it is, and it's largely a well-executed version of the thing that it is, and for a reasonably long stretch of its unreasonably long running time, it's pretty much an objectively successful attempt to use the material of a 14th Century costume drama to do social commentary about the modern world.
The film, adapted from the nonfiction book by Eric Jager, tells the story of one of the most famous legal events in Western European history, one whose particulars remain well-studied nearly 640 years later: Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer) wife of the financially washed-out Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), accused Jean's onetime close friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) of raping her. The litigious Jean challenged Jacques to a duel to the death, one of the very last ever permitted by the French government to stand in place of a court trial.
The Last Duel sort of functions as that trial, in that it is structured as the testimony of the three principles: first Jean, then Jacques, then Marguerite, each written by one of the film's three screenwriters, Ben Affleck & Damon & Nicole Holofcener (Holofcenter wrote Marguerite's third; I'm not sure how Affleck & Damon split duties). It's your basic Rashomon-style narrative, showing us the same events from the perspective of each individual, calibrated to make them come out the best. It also makes it unambiguously clear that Marguerite's version of events is the factually correct one, which raises the question: can you actually do a Rashomon if there's not ambiguity? There's probably something to contrasting Marguerite's story with Jacques's as a way of revealing how his arrogance and confidence in his sexual desirability blind him to the destructive realities of his behavior (there's a key scene in the film where he insists that he's innocent and it seems very clear from that moment that he believes this to be true), but that's not really what The Last Duel wants to be, and even if it was, that still wouldn't explain why the first third of the film benefits from being told through Jean's perspective.
This is doubly so since, by opening on Jean, we open on Damon, and Damon's performance is just wildly bad. The film has a very uncertain relationship with the whole matter of costume dramas; on the one hand, it obviously wants to subvert them and challenge the way that they history into dead spectacle, but it also is a big-budget prestige production that's been lovingly fussed over by some A+ craftspeople, many of them Scott regulars: cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, costume designer Janty Yates, production designer Arthur Max. So the whole film is built on a somewhat unproductive tension between how much of this is a fable of the modern world, and how much is old-fashioned showmanship. And this tension extends to the acting, often with different performers falling into different spots along the modern/old-time spectrum depending on whose version of the story we're in. This isn't a case where one approach is bad and another is good: the two best performances in the film come from Affleck, who plays Count Pierre d'Alençon as a hyper-modern snobby dickhead, and Comer, whose restrained, haunted work is the closest the film comes to conventional costume drama acting. But it's anyways the case that Damon's performance is both very modern and very bad, the kind of heavily misguided work that comes when a talented actor is given too much rope by a director who isn't really all that deft with actors to begin with. But in this case, Scott in this case seems perfectly disinterested in lining up the actors together at all: besides the three I've mentioned, Driver is basically just playing the stock Driver character, with slightly more ugly egotism, and Harriet Walter's work as Jean's crone of a mother is pure camp, almost as disorienting as Damon. Five very different modes, none of them matching, and the three scripts conceive of Jean in such different ways - as a put-upon middle-aged man of dignity, as a grump loser, as a distant and cruel husband who views his wife as barely more than livestock - that Damon is basically giving three different performances altogether. All of which are very "the Boston part of medieval France" in generally unsatisfying ways.
Setting aside the acting, which is somewhat beyond help (again, I don't think Scott cares much about directing actors: if the actors themselves bring great ideas, terrific! you have Thelma & Louise. If they don't, oops! you have The Counselor), there's definitely something in here that works and is worthy of saving from the general sludginess of the whole. And sludgy it most certainly is, at 152 minutes, most of it dedicated to telling the same story three times. There are some keen, nasty insights into male psychology, for example; the film shows without telling us that Jean and Jacques's duel over Marguerite's body is much more about Jean's irritable mortification at having generally fucked up his economic prospects and becoming an object of ridicule as a result. It's a sharp, smart depiction of 14th Century life as a place where actual humans, mostly like you and me, lived and plotted and hated each other and suffered for that hate: both the physical tactility of the production and the curt, pragmatic dialogue that marks all three writers' work gives it a very real, living, present quality. The last duel itself, which picks up when all three stories have been told and takes up the last quarter hour or so of the movie, is a superb action scene: the director of Gladiator shows up in a big way here, reveling in the chaos of mud and blood and hideously painful wounds that can fuck you up wretchedly without killing you outright, if you happen to be engaged in brutal medieval combat. Indeed, so powerfully-made is the duel that it even kind of casts a shade of doubt over the rest of the film; yes, it might appear that this was all an extended metaphor for the #MeToo era and toxic masculinity, but it does really seem that the director is most awake and excited when he turns it into an ultra-violent action movie. I'm not angel: that's when I was the most awake and excited, too. But it does feel like a different movie.
Mind you, The Last Duel wouldn't suffer from being a different movie. The one we got is way too long and way too slow, and all of its best character work is backloaded to the Marguerite third (with the exception of Affleck's smug, self-satisfied count, who is equally good throughout, though he's never a main character), which makes that slowness so much easier to notice. It is, in many ways, an admirable film; it is, in most ways, a very handsome and well-made film, perhaps the most persuasively-designed and lived-in of all Scott's period pieces. But in almost no ways at all is it a watchable film, and that does ultimately matter a decent amount.
