Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Unorthodox
Mongol
(The Mongol, 7/14/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
There
ought to be more movies about Genghis Khan. Minor figures like William
Wallace and George Custer have had their moments onscreen, and Caesar,
Alexander, and Napoleon have been depicted almost ad nauseam.
But let's face it—compared to the great Mongol chieftain, whose
horse armies conquered an area four times bigger than the Roman Empire,
these other guys are pretty small fry.
How to portray Genghis—a.k.a.
Temudjin—is of course another question. Throughout much of Asia
the predations of the Mongols are still recalled with disgust: their
obliteration of medieval Baghdad, one of the world's great political
and cultural centers, was nothing short of cataclysmic. Estimates of
the death toll there are nuclear-age in their magnitude, ranging in
the hundreds of thousands. The hordes likewise managed to turn the city
of Kiev from a prosperous metropolis into a bone-strewn graveyard. By
some accounts the agricultural production of Mesopotamia has still not
recovered from the Mongol sack of the 13th century.
Sergei Bodrov's Mongol sidesteps
these uncomfortable matters by concentrating on the early career of
Temudjin. Indeed, Bodrov's epic is best described as Braveheart
On The Steppes—the outcast hero (Tadanobu Asano) grows up dispossessed
of his chieftainship, suffers the theft of his beloved (Khulan Chuluun),
yet by his wits and valor rises to become the savior of his fractious
people. Bodrov (who co-wrote the script) is vague about Temudjin's later
conquests, noting only that the Tangut Kingdom (which once had the temerity
to take him prisoner) was "erased from the earth." What folks
in China, Russia, Persia, Korea et al. did to offend Temudjin is not
so clear.
Historical omissions aside, Mongol
has its compensations. Bodrov's filmmaking is brawny, romping, rollicking,
always visually fresh without resorting much to CGI tricks. The action
isn't just in your face—it's down your chin and in your lap. As
the swords clang and the blood spurts freely, we aren't patronized by
over-cutting in the action sequences (as in Gladiator) or by
martial arts BS. Asano (who is Japanese) plays Temudjin with a wildman's
ferocity, yet with a charismatic stolidity reminiscent of Toshiro Mifune
(Seven Samurai, Rashomon). Chuluun is also appealing as his loyal
wife Borte, who manages to look like a bystander but always seems to
get what she wants.
Mongol is not the definitive
movie about its subject. It's ironic, for instance, that Bodrov depicts
Temudjin as broad-minded enough to raise other men's children by his
kidnapped wife, when in fact we know from modern genetic studies that
something like 35% of all living Mongolian males are his descendants.
Indeed, the script by Bodrov and Arif Aliyev is personal to a fault:
unlike the politically astute Wallace in Braveheart, it's never
clear what Genghis Khan wants to save his people from—except
maybe their own taste for perfidy and theft.
Temudjin is a maverick, tricking
his own father to get his preferred bride and going to war over a woman
(a no-no on the steppes). Bodrov wants to suggest that great men don't
need rules, but great nations do. What he ends up hinting, though, is
that making an orderly society is a zero-sum game—the Mongols could
only begin to govern themselves by subjugating others. On that score,
Genghis is a depressing sort of hero.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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