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The Order
review by Gregory
Avery, 12 September 2003
You could practically hear
people in the audience scratching their heads as the end credits for
The Order came up: Huh? wot was THAT all about? And you
absolutely couldn't blame them. Brian Helgeland's new movie, which
he wrote and directed, bolts from the gate at the get-go and happily
gallops off into the land of confusion, never to return.
Heath Ledger, wearing fashionably
unshaven patches of beard about his face, and muttering most of his
dialogue in a way which puts Harold Pinter's "posh
mumblers" to shame, plays Father Alex, a Catholic priest
belonging to an obscure order, the "Carolinians," who are
both scholars and charged with dealing with "ghosts, demons,
and all manner of the undead." He also still says Mass in
Latin, because, he says, it was the way he was taught (despite the
fact that Vatican II did away with all that in the 1960s). He and
another "Carolinian," Thomas (Mark Addy), hie themselves
to Rome when a third member of their order turns up dead, and their
thrilling adventures include running into Peter Weller, playing a
cardinal who smokes cigarettes he takes out of a black cigarette
case trimmed with red; two children, a boy and a girl, whom Alex
describes as, "Orphans. Of what, I don't know."; some sort
of subterranean anti-Vatican which looks like the Kit Kat Klub in
Sam Mendes' production of Cabaret (you half-expect Alan
Cumming to come whirling in at any minute), and where the
door-person is a bald man wearing a silver lame evening gown; and a
gentleman named William Eden (Benno Fürmann), whom Alex spends a
lot of time palling around with despite the fact that, if his
brother is supposed to have helped Michelangelo construct the
Vatican, he would have to be around 500 years old.
Mr. Eden is a professional
"sin eater," able to alleviate people of their sins before
dying if for some reason they are not able to make a final
confession. He and Father Alex engage in a conversation in
conundrums about beauty and truth, and fly around on Eden's private
jet, but Alex never seems to notice that this all looks an awful lot
like the Temptation in the Desert from the Gospels (so much for
being a scholar). There's also Mara, played by Shannyn Sossamon with
short black hair and the look of an undernourished fashion model --
she tags along with Alex despite the fact that she once tried to
kill him. (Police Officer (to Alex, referring to his notes):
"She tried to shoot you at an 'exercise class'?" Alex:
"No, at an 'ex-or-cism'.") She introduces herself by
saying, "The nightingales are gone.," then states to Alex
that "it's you and me until the wheels fall off." After
they, inevitably, make love (so much for being a priest), he gives
her a bouquet of sunflowers, a bloom Mara describes as being God's
"brilliant mistake." All you can do is stare at this movie
in disbelief. One would say that the characters, in order to get
themselves into some of the fixes they get into in this movie, must
be dumber than dirt, except that you'd have to be able to tell just
what it is they are doing in the first place. This is a film where
people say, in all seriousness, "I am the conductor of the
night train." Peter Weller, with his close-close cropped hair,
looks somewhat like a bowling pin. And, at one point, a knife fight
breaks out in the middle of a cavernous, ornate basilica.
The reason given for the movie
being held-up from its original January release date was because the
visual effects for the "sin-eating" episodes looked like
"calamari." They no longer look like calamari, but the
rest of the film is in need of repairs.
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