The 500th anniversary of Columbus` beachhead in the Americas seems as good a time as any to examine the navigational feats of the explorer, but not, perhaps, on film, if ”Christopher Columbus,” the first movie released on the subject this year, is any indication.
Mario ”Godfather” Puzo has fashioned a paint-by-numbers story that doggedly lists each tack in Columbus` lifelong voyage, which obliged him first to persuade a monied head of state to sponsor him, then to actually cross the ocean.
The script gets from A to Z via a route so tedious it mocks the very quest it sets out to celebrate. John Glen, who started his film career editing classics such as ”The Third Man,” only to become a director of formulaic James Bond films, fashions this material into something reminiscent of insipidly romantic period films of the `50s.
Glen is helped a lot in this silly business by lines like ”The day may come when you will smile at fate and She will not smile back” and by scenes such as the one in which Columbus, interrupted in lovemaking by a call to present himself at the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, dashes off on horseback, whereupon his ladylove rises and calls as the galloping hooves recede: ”Wait! There is something I have to tell you! I am carrying your child.” (Even in the 15th Century, it seems, those guys on the fast track were hard to pin down.)
Tom Selleck and Rachel Ward struggle to bring color to the earnestly bland roles of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Mathieu Carriere delivers the requisite iciness to the bit part of Portugal`s King John. And George Corraface musters the supreme confidence of Columbus at his most charming, if not the despair of the explorer`s frustrations and the arrogance of his success.
But their better efforts, and those of designers and photographers, cannot propel a movie so becalmed by lack of style.
Only Marlon Brando, that shark among actors, finds meat in the cameo role of Torquemada, Queen Isabella`s cruel Inquisitor. With a leer here and a naturalized reading there, his bloated face and white shock of hair emerging eerily from a black cape, Brando gives the movie brief jolts of life which, unfortunately for the filmmakers, merely serve to suggest how deadly the rest of it is.
Native Americans offended by their stereotyped portrayal in the film as innocent savages and bare-breasted, promiscuous women can take perhaps a little comfort in the fact that their ancestors are not the only ones plasticized here. MPAA rating: PG-13; (STAR)
