Feel the farce
Mark Steyn
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith 12A, selected cinemas Vengeance is mine, saith the Sith, whith thoundth like Violet Elizabeth Bott. No such luck. Instead, it’s George Lucas, with what he insists is the final film in the Star Wars sextet. My guess is the first film in the new Star Wars septet will be opening circa 2008. Anyway, Revenge of the Sith is, so Lucas assures us, a ‘tragedy’. It might have been wise to have stationed an announcer at every movie house to announce this fact over the PA system since it eluded the audience I saw it with last weekend. When the Sith hits the fan, the fan bursts out laughing. Oh, to be sure, they were diverted by the opening dogfight and Obi-Wan Kenobi riding a wild fourlegged space beast to hunt down General Grievous. But they were howling with laughter through all the so-called ‘tragic’ elements. When Senator-Queen Padmé (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant, her secret husband Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) reacts with an eerie glassy-eyed expression as if he’s hypnotised himself trying to remember the next line. Eventually, Lucas prompts him and he utters the words, ‘I’ll have the club sandwich.’ No, wait. That’s just what it sounds like. He actually says: ‘You’re so ... beautiful.’ ‘It’s only because I’m so in love,’ says Padmé tonelessly, like a spy giving the reply password.
‘No,’ says Anakin. ‘I’m so in love. With you,’ he adds helpfully, just in case Padmé figures it’s the hot-looking Wookie strolling by in the background.
At this, my fellow theatergoers exploded with guffaws of derision. May the farce be with you! The final descent of Ian McDiarmid’s Chancellor Palpatine into Darth Hammitup brought on more laffs, as did the moment when Anakin attempts to talk Padmé into joining him over on the Dark Side: ‘Together you and I can rule the galaxy,’ he snarls. Well, tries to snarl.
‘Obi-Wan was right. You’ve changed,’ says Princess Padmé. ‘I don’t know you any more.’ He used to look like Princess Di flashing those big eyes from under his hair. But suddenly he looks like Princess Di with too much kohl and in a peevish mood. What can this mean?
It means the young Jedi knight is en route to his rebirth as the evil über-Sith Darth Vader. Lucas has had three decades to plan this moment. One must respect a hit — Star Wars has been doing boffo biz for 28 years, which is two-fifths of the entire history of talking pictures. But the heart of its mythic pretensions is the transformation of Anakin, boy hero of the three ‘prequels’, into Vader, black-hatted villain of the first three movies. For Lucas, the revelation of this degeneration was supposed to bring the Star Wars story full circle and explain the primal forces driving the original film. And what does Lucas come up with? Well, Anakin’s worried that his beloved Padmé might die in childbirth.
Padmé promises him she won’t die in childbirth. ‘I promise you I won’t die in childbirth,’ she says. I wrote a couple of Star Wars back that Lucas characters always have to spell out what they’re thinking and feeling because he’s incapable of showing it. You can’t make the core of the story the absolute overpowering love of boy for girl when the two of them have all the sexual chemistry of their Burger King merchandising tie-in action figures. Lucas is truly one of the all-time worst directors of actors, and I include the teacher who put together the school production of Fiddler on the Roof I saw last week and got a more touching love scene out of a couple of 11-year-olds as the middle-aged Tevye and Golde than anything Christensen and Portman manage here. Presumably actors say yes to Lucas because they figure Star Wars will do for them what it did for Harrison Ford. Instead, Lucas turns everyone he touches into Mark Hamill.
So even though his hand-me-down Faustian bargain-basement plot motivation has been a surefire firecracker down the ages, it’s a damp squib here. The scene where Darth Sidious (McDiarmid) talks Anakin into signing on with the Dark Side takes for ever yet still seems perfunctory. And Anakin’s attempt to butch up his voice sounds like a boy soprano trying to growl ‘Ol’ Man River’. ‘I have brought peace, freedom, justice, security to my new empire,’ he cackles, trying to sound like one pithed Sith. ‘If you’re not with me, you are my enemy.’ Uh-oh. Anakin seems to be transmogrifying into Darth W. Bush.
‘Only a Sith deals in absolutes,’ scoffs Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Oh, put a lightsabre in it, will you? The allegedly anti-Bush ‘subtext’ has won Lucas the unlikely approval of the Cannes Film Festival crowd, but honestly: how desperate do you have to be to applaud mockery of Bush for seeing everything in black and white from a guy who’s spent 28 years peddling a fairytale so basic the good guys and the bad guys are called the Good Side and the Dark Side.
Other enduring pop-culture yarns get going because some fellow comes up with an idea, rattles it off, no big deal — and, if it takes off and hangs around for a few decades, what began as necessary functional plot mechanisms gradually deepen and darken: hence, all those gloomy Batman ‘reinventions’ in which the ‘dark knight’ sits hunched in his cape on a Gotham City rooftop brooding over the death of his parents, his inability to form lasting relationships, etc. Many of us think the conversion of great junk into selfconscious art is not altogether a blessing, but nonetheless it reflects a basic truth: that simply by sticking around long enough, a twodimensional comic-book character becomes real. With Star Wars, the opposite’s happened: after 28 years, Lucas’s characters are more cardboard than ever. All his energy goes into ever more elaborate computerised backdrops, while up front Obi and Anakin fade to ever more witless felt-tip outlines. In 1977, the original movie said only that Darth Vader had been ‘seduced by the Dark Side of the Force’. There’s no seduction here: he’s played for a sap and suckered by Sidious. He’s Dork Vader, all-time fall guy for the machinations of another. Even for a paintby-numbers space opera, that doesn’t pass muster.
Oh, well. After Padmé dies giving birth to Luke and Leia — and no, I’m not giving any plot twists away; you can see it coming towards you from three sequels back Senator Organa says, ‘My wife and I will take the girl. We’ve always dreamed of adopting a baby girl.’ It’s virtually the last line in the movie, and it had my fellow customers weeping with laughter. How can Lucas have such a tin ear? It’s like he’s been walled up in the Vader helmet, the young Hollywood knight transformed into Darth Plonker.
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