The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc: historical epic.  Starring Milla Jovovich, John Malkovich, Faye Dunaway and Dustin Hoffman.  Written by Andrew Birkin and Luc Besson.  Directed by Luc Besson.  Rated R.  Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

POSTHOC RATING:  *1/2

By most stretches of the imagination The Messenger, the latest film biography of one of strangest, most remarkable figures in European history, is a bad movie.  This is at least the sixth time at the stake for the peasant waif who led French armies against the English invaders back in the 15^th century (and twice in the same year, counting the recent mini-series).  And it’s not even as fun as The 13^th Warrior. 

The Messengeris bad in a bad way: that’s to say irritating and boring.  The film is directed with surprising clumsiness by Luc Besson, who put a sleek and glossy patina on such films as La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element.  Here, in this feminist Braveheart,  Besson, a Frenchman, seems quite out of his element altogether.

The lumpy, sprawling screenplay, by Besson and Andrew Birkin, takes a naturalistic skeptical look at Joan of Arc. It sees her as part deluded madwoman, part saint, with a dash of proto-feminist thrown in.  It posits that she acted not on God’s command, but out of a childish and self-serving sense of delusion and the desire to avenge her sister’s murder and rape (that’s not a mistake. It happens in that order). In other words, it strips her of her sense of Holy Mission. 

The film is filled with modernistic dialogue.  Most of the cast delivers their lines in an anachronistically natural fashion as though acting David Mamet. (I kept expecting the actors to say “ain’t” and start dropping their ‘g’ endings). While it’s a good idea to shed the pompous loftiness of previous film versions of Joan’s life and death, all they do here is turn everything to banal lead, so that we never get a feel for why an entire nation would mobilize behind such an unlikely field general.

Oh, there’s much huffing and puffing about it in the dialogue, but Besson’s frantic crowbar direction can’t ignite the spirit of Joan of Arc. A lot of the humor is straight of WW II Hollywood propaganda films.  There’s a lot of huffing and puffing on the battlefield too, but with both English and Americans playing Frenchmen and English, it’s hard to tell who’s chopping whom and no reason to care. As with so many modern action sequences, the battles are pasted together with gory, quick-cut close-ups and loud thuds, crunches and screams.  The idea is “to put us in the middle of the action”, but the effect is numbing, like having your head put in a barrel while the cast whacks at it with swords and hammers for two hours.   You’re only stunned and confused and you don’t want it to happen again. There’s no thrill in Joan’s victory. Instead you root for the cast to annihilate each other.

Milla Jovovich is bad as Joan, and sad to say, works real hard at it.  In fairness a miraculous, fantastical figure such as Joan of Arc is a huge burden for any actor to put her shoulder to and the younger the actor, the bigger the burden. (Some think there hasn’t been a good portrayal of Joan since Renee Falconetti in the 1927 silent version). Jovovich is right to want to avoid beatific stuffiness that can turn this character in a quaint piece of musty Gallic furniture.  But all she does is reduce Joan to a collection of twitchy, actorish mannerisms, which actually made me think of Robin Williams on too much caffeine.  Except she isn’t funny. She’s earnest and beautiful but never convinces us she could ever gain the confidence of the troops to lead them anywhere.  Especially into battle. In her mouth, Joan’s simple faith becomes nervous sputtering platitudes. When you start cheering for the Inquisitors to get it over with, you know you’re in the wrong movie. 

Besson accompanies Joan’s jumpy hysterics with mostly lame visuals of portentous clouds, enveloping vines and hallucinations of a brooding bearded stranger who looks like Jesus, but later turns out to be a black cowled Dustin Hoffman, whose role is listed in the credits as “The Conscience.” (though I prefer the idea of him as Jesus played by a 5’ 7” 20^th Century Jewish New Yorker).  The movie improves slightly at this point thanks to him, though their scenes together, as Joan awaits trial and execution, are preposterous.  “The Conscience” is a screenwriter’s contrivance to get us inside Joan’s head so we can understand her and her inner conflicts and her own complicity in her downfall.  Hoffman is like Death playing chess with the knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.  Unfortunately, he’s not acting opposite Max Von Sydow. The effect is crude, ham-handed and doesn’t work.  It’s up to Milla Jovovich to bring us inside Joan of Arc, not Hoffman.  That he doesn’t cause explosions of laughter and still hangs on to his dignity is the only miracle here. 

Things also pick up when Faye Dunaway appears as King Charles VII’s (John Malkovich) imperious scheming mother.  She’s like an ancient rattlesnake under a spectacular Medusan hairdo that gives her the forehead of an alien intelligence.  She brings a brittle anxiety and sinister glamour to her role.  She and Hoffman take the screen and hold it like the pros they are, with that special stillness that great stars have. They don’t have to twitch.  It’s too bad Ms. Jovovich didn’t study them both a little closely. They blow everyone else off the castle ramparts.

As for John Malkovich as Charles, Joan’s initial protector and final betrayer, I’ve been a fan of his for quite some time, but here his Malkovich-isms feel like overly familiar tics, though his gaunt features makes him perfect casting.  Like the Count in Dangerous Liasons he plays Charles as a decadent fop, dependent on his mother and his violently protective coterie of bodyguards and advisers. Charles is incapable of making a decision on his own.  He’s an empty vessel able and willing to swallow any idea that comes to him, so long as it helps get that crown on his head.  He’s willing to give France away with the same shrug of indifference that the Vichy Government turned the nation over to the Nazis in 1941. It’s an interesting performance, but carries the weight of too many other similar characters he’s played before.