Like the legend of King Arthur, with which it became entwined (and which it echoes in its focus on tragic adultery), the story of Tristan and Isolde first achieved written form in the mid- to late-1100s. Such chivalric romances were based on older Celtic tales, by then maybe half a century old, that probably originated in the region of Wales and Cornwall. A gravestone has been found and dated to the sixth century AD that bears Tristan’s name — a name given variously, in the stories, as Drystan, Tristram and so on. The name of his beloved could also be Iseult, Ysonde, Isotta or the like. Such is the way with legends that got reworked many times.
Richard Wagner, of course, took the chivalric tale and whipped it up into a grand Romantic opera in the 1850s. He sensibly ignored complications in the old story (such as Tristram’s later wife, also confusingly called Isolde), homing in on the grand but doomed passion of the two lovers. That passion is destined to climax, at the end of the opera, in the famous Liebestod — the “love-death” that is the fate of their forbidden love. Musically, Wagner makes of it an extraordinarily attenuated tone-poem that stretches the chromatic scale to breaking point.
But Wagner retains a key part of the tale that simply wouldn’t make sense to present-day viewers of Kevin Reynolds’s film of Tristan and Isolde. In the old stories and in Wagner’s version, it is a love-potion that causes them to fall in love and leads ultimately to tragedy. Tristram, one of Lord Marke of Cornwall’s leading knights, is sent to Ireland to fetch Marke’s bride-to-be, the beautiful Isolde. On the boat on the way back to Cornwall, though, thanks (so most stories have it) to Isolde’s maid, they are fed the love-potion that makes them go all googly-eyed for each other and eventually betray Lord Marke. So hard to get reliable domestic help in the Dark Ages.
But Reynolds is practiced at updating old stories for today’s moviegoers, having tarted up the Robin Hood legend for Kevin Costner (of all people) in Prince of Thieves, and having given us a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo. For Tristan and Isolde, he and scriptwriter Dean Georgaris do two things: they take the tale back to its likely origins in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, thus giving it a little historical cred, and they dispense with oddities such as the love-potion, making Tristan and Isolde’s entanglement the product of plain ordinary mutual passion. Nowadays we understand that; we don’t need love potions. Georgaris, whose previous credits include the second Lara Croft movie and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, at least has a track record of retooling well-worn narratives.
In general, the backdating of the movie works, giving it an appealing texture: the mossy-green hills of Ireland and Cornwall, the mossy-green homespun outfits the characters tend to wear. It feels right, mostly, but Reynolds can’t resist a few anachronistic touches, and one of them, early in the movie, provides what I like to call a “bull-shit moment” — a moment that threatens to unravel the carefully woven texture of verisimilitude.
In it, a hastily convened council of British leaders are contemplating what to do about the Irish king who looks likely to conquer them all. First, they are gravely informed, they must all stand together for the sake of the “unity” of Britain — “unity” being an idea that would not have occurred to a warlord of the time, or at least not in this way. Overlordship, fealty and tribute, maybe; “unity”, no.
Second, and here’s the real bull-shit moment, the person giving the keynote address then dramatically unfurls a map of Britain, in the form of a hanging tapestry, with the various regions marked out and some special threads waiting to be yanked out to demonstrate how the borders could be erased. Did they have such maps in the Dark Ages, when large parts of the world were terra incognita? And even if they did, the gesture makes one laugh. Has Reynolds been so dazzled by all those Pentagon and White House briefings on Afghanistan and Iraq that he simply couldn’t resist?
Luckily, though, such moments are few in Tristan and Isolde. Generally, it succeeds as a refurbishment of the old story, though (good as the fights are) it’s not quite as swashbuckling as I’d have expected from Reynolds. The child Tristan is rescued from an Irish attack by Lord Marke (Rufus Sewell) and taken to Cornwall, where he develops into the manly form of James Franco, seen not so long ago boxing his way through the United States Navy in Annapolis. Here he has a mop of hair that is meant to place him in the appropriate period, but mostly makes him look like a Sixties pop star such as Donavan.
After a battle against the nefarious Irish, Tristan is thought dead and sent off to sea in a burning boat. The fire does not consume him, however, and he washes up on an Irish beach, where he is miraculously discovered by Isolde, daughter of the Irish king. She has been betrothed to a big ugly Irish warrior, but she’s not very happy about that and goes to work with various potions and unguents to restore hunky Tristan to life. And so begins their falling in love, which will give rise to all sorts of mis-understandings and complications when, later, in another piece of Irish chicanery, the unfortunate Isolde is passed on to Lord Marke to be his lady.
Sophia Myles makes a winning Isolde, and Franco does a decent, if stolid, job of being Tristan. They both lack the intensity of Sewell as Lord Marke; he basically steals the picture, but that doesn’t entirely unbalance it. Tristan and Isolde proceeds engagingly enough, without reaching any dizzy heights. One can’t help feeling, though, that if Georgaris and Reynolds were going to update the story as they have, they could have gone all the way and given the lovers a somewhat happier end. Nowadays, we find a Liebestod a bit of a downer.