Randall Wallace’s Dumas is handsome, sincere and clumsy, with Gabriel Byrne and Jeremy Irons doing quiet, good work while DiCaprio sulks in a wig and the script says everything twice. A Sunday afternoon film, and no more than that.
Randall Wallace writes, produces and directs his own version of the Alexandre Dumas novel, and what he wants is plain enough: an old-fashioned swashbuckler with a conscience, in which four retired Musketeers decide that a bad king can be replaced by a good one. It runs 132 minutes and believes every word of itself. It says “honour” a great deal. That sincerity is the best and the worst thing about it, because Wallace never trusts a moment to speak for itself when a speech is available.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays the king and the prisoner, and the two halves do not weigh the same. His Louis is a petulant boy in a wig who wants what he sees and has never been told no, and DiCaprio plays him as exactly that, which is honest but not interesting; we did not for a moment believe that an army or a court would follow him. Philippe, the man in the mask, suits him better. Gentleness asks less of an actor than menace does, and the scenes in which he blinks at daylight and is taught how to eat like a king have a softness the rest of the film lacks. But the two never feel like the same face on two different men. They feel like a scowl and a smile.
The older actors carry the picture. Gabriel Byrne is the best thing in it, a D’Artagnan torn between his oath and his disgust, and he plays it small, mostly in the way he looks at Louis when Louis is not looking back. Jeremy Irons is dry and watchful and seems to be enjoying a private joke about being paid to wear a cassock. John Malkovich’s Athos is a grieving father, and Malkovich grieves the way he does everything, with a whisper that keeps turning into a shout; it is either moving or absurd depending on the line, and Wallace has written both kinds. Gérard Depardieu is asked to be the comic relief, which means drink, a bare backside and a suicide attempt played for laughs. We winced at the Porthos business, not because it is coarse but because it puts a fine actor in a place where nothing he does can land.
The film looks expensive and mostly earns it. Peter Suschitzky lights the interiors in candle-gold and brown so that the court seems to be sitting inside a jewellery box, and Anthony Pratt’s palace is all mirrors, gilt and long tables covered in food while the city outside eats rot. James Acheson dresses Louis in white and gold and the Musketeers in leather that has plainly been slept in, and the mask itself is a proper ugly thing of riveted iron. Nick Glennie-Smith’s score is the loudest voice here, brass and choir under every declaration, telling us what to feel about two seconds before the actors get the chance. William Hoy cuts the swordfights cleanly, but there are fewer of them than the poster promises and none last long.
The writing is the trouble. People in this film do not talk; they announce. Christine and Raoul (Judith Godrèche and Peter Sarsgaard) are given a love story of three scenes and asked to make us weep over it. Hugh Laurie and David Lowe stand about as the king’s advisors and are handed nothing. Anne Parillaud, as the Queen Mother, gets one scene with Byrne that has real adult feeling in it, and it stands out because nothing around it does.
And yet. We will not describe the last twenty minutes, but there is a moment late on when the four old men stand together and say the words everyone has been waiting two hours for them to say, and we were moved, having laughed at the film ten minutes earlier. It works because Wallace finally slows down, lets Suschitzky hold on four faces, and for once does not give anyone a speech. It is the only time the film shows rather than tells, and it shows what the whole thing might have been.
Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, from 1973, had wit and mud and men who fought badly because they were tired. This one has neither wit nor mud, and everyone fights well. Most critics found it too silly to forgive, and we are a few points kinder, because the cast are good company and the sets are worth looking at. Watch it at home on a wet afternoon, with someone who will not mind you talking over Depardieu.
