The Last Duel
As reported by Dollyforme
I liked this movie, but it bombed really hard at the theatre box office. The beautiful Jodie Comer stars in this amazing story and looks just great. The big story about Scott’s new movie The Last Duel will be its opening weekend, a $4.8 million gross against a $100 million budget. It looks like Scott is just not the box office draw he used to be. But look beyond the box office at the movie itself, and you’ll see something more fascinating than a simple flop or unsuccessful Oscar bait; it’s a veteran director’s attempt to impose some symmetry on a sprawling, uneven career. Since breaking into Hollywood at the end of the ’70s as a transplanted ad man hawking Chanel no. 5 with a hypnotic visual style, Scott has experimented with virtually every kind of high-concept blockbuster imaginable, from police procedurals to pastoral fantasies to biblical epics to serial-killer thrillers. His prolificness is the stuff of legend, and so is his efficiency, while his overall batting average is probably around .300—which, given his home runs (Blade Runner, Alien, Gladiator) is enough to make the hall of fame.
In recent years, Scott has both got weirder—i.e., The Counsellor, a 21st century cult classic boasting more gory decapitations than perhaps any movie ever made—and returned to his own primal scenes, most explicitly via Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. By executive producing Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Scott not only symbolically passed the franchise torch, but also bestowed approval on a director who in many ways seems to be his aesthetic successor. By talking shit about Noah Hawley’s proposed TV revamp of Alien, he’s refusing eviction from the hallowed grounds of his own intellectual property.
The question of whether Scott is a true artist or simply a monogrammed mercenary remains very much open. There’s a difference between a visual sense and a world-view, and Scott’s great eye doesn’t save him when he’s got brain-dead material. The Last Duel, though, is full of ideas, which could be one reason it suffered at multiplexes (especially in contrast to the lobotomized Halloween Kills). Once you pick through the clutter of its authorship—the script by costars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, with an assist by Nicole Holofcener, is adapted from a non-fiction 2004 book by Eric Jager—those ideas prove worthy of contemplation. On a purely conceptual level, this is the headiest movie Scott’s made in a long time, one which shows him exercising his atrophied muscles as a dramatist and storyteller and flexing some new ones as a social critic.
Of course, this being a Scott movie, there will be some spectacle, and one of the sharpest things about The Last Duel is how it folds issues of showmanship into its narrative. Like Gladiator, with its CGI coliseum backdrops, barely suppressed showbiz allegory, and confrontationally self-reflexive catchphrase—“Are you not entertained?”—The Last Duel takes stock of our ravenous, collective appetite for bread and circuses. The opening scene, set in 1386, is a structural fake-out, swiftly setting up the standing-room-only excitement of the scheduled contest between Sir Jean de Carrouges (Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver). The latter has been charged with rape by Carrouges’s wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer), an accusation that puts her honor at stake; if her husband loses, it’ll be taken as evidence—divine or otherwise—that she’s borne false witness against an innocent man.
The sequence has the vibe of a sporting event, all giddy big-game anticipation and atmosphere. But just as our stars lunge at each other, the script loops back to fill in the combatants’ backstories.
Actually, it does this several times: The Last Duel is an epic that keeps going to instant replay. The first third of the movie tells the story from the point of view of Carrouges, a loyal and headstrong knight of the realm who respects Le Gris as a warrior while berating his subordinate status as a squire. The latter man is a favorite of the local royal underlord, the sybaritic and thoroughly obnoxious Count Pierre d’Alençon (Affleck), and is granted land and title rights denied to Carrouges for no reason beyond the Count’s arbitrary distaste. (If Ben and Matt aren’t going to cast themselves in a romantic comedy, playing dudes who despise each other on sight and talk shit for two and a half hours is the next best thing.)
Overall, a great movie to watch on the big screen or as a rental later on. Despite it being Scott’s biggest bomb of his career, its Oscar material and maybe his best movie yet.
