1492: The Conquest of Paradise

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1992 by Richard Alleva

Perhaps it was inevitable. Making a movie about Columbus for this year of all years was bound to unnerve any filmmaker. Yet it's impossible to forgive what Ridley Scott has delivered. 1492: The Conquest of Paradise exudes desperation, panic, and the sort of hysterical rhetoric that is born of desperation and panic.

The soundtrack by Vangelis epitomizes the giddiness of the movie while greatly adding to it. The composer is not without ideas but brings no taste or economy to their execution. He aims to make of the musical idiom of the American natives (or at least the composer's imagining of that idiom) an aural world that first lulls the European intruders, then traps them in a nightmare. But putting a synthesizer into Vangelis's hands is like introducing Al Capone to the Tommy gun. In both cases, the sheer volume of attack leads to terrorization. No actor in 1492 is allowed to speak without competing with a swelling sea of sound. No patch of nature can be observed by the audience in silence. Given any visual cue whatsoever (a raised eyebrow, a sip of wine, a witty epigram, the fall of Granada), the Greek maestro lets loose a sonic attack - a billion bees stinging each other to death - that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse might find difficult to live up to. Nobody either in the movie or in the movie house is ever allowed a moment of silence or even a chance to breathe at a normal rate.

But, though Vangelis is the virtual star of 1492, he is not its chief villain, only a hired gun brought in to distract us from the confusion of his collaborators. He had his work cut out for him, because his fellow workers were evidently mighty confused indeed.

Scriptwriter Roselyne Bosch may have researched Columbus and his times in depth but apparently didn't arrive at a unifying vision of the man and his achievement. In this film, Columbus is, by turns, the Renaissance man hungering for knowledge ("I want to find out for myself!" he declares when warned about the unknown dangers on the other side of the ocean), the true son of the Catholic church, a gold-hungry conquistador, and a multiculturalist who wants to protect the lives and civilization of the Tainos tribe that has welcomed him to America.

Now I realize that Columbus was certainly a complex fellow and his actions may not have always squared, but there is a great difference between juxtaposing contradictory actions in a dramatically illuminating way and simply bouncing from one view of Columbus to another with no regard at all for dramatic logic. To portray the explorer as a humanist rebel, Bosch shows him running amok in a monastery's copying room as if all those abysmally medieval, vilely obscurantist theological manuscripts (or are some of them treatises on navigation?) were responsible for frustrating his petitions to Isabella. But once Columbus has founded a colony, his fervent construction of a cathedral is filmed so elaborately (with Vangelis pounding away, of course) that the scene becomes practically the centerpiece of the movie. Yet we never receive a real insight into Columbus's religious feelings and how his spirituality may have enhanced or mitigated or confused his questing spirit.

Worse still, Bosch wants to present the atrocities perpetrated on the natives but also wants to exonerate Columbus. So she invents a villain, based on the historical character, Francisco Roldan (a man never proven to have acted more criminally than Columbus), on whom she loads all the crimes often imputed, rightly or wrongly, to Columbus himself. She has him lopping off hands, working slaves to death, and violating native women while Columbus only ... well, what is Columbus doing while rape and rapine are destroying paradise? As far as I could tell, he seemed to be making the rounds of his colony without being able to understand exactly what was going on as Indians fell dead at his feet. I know that Columbus was as bad at administration as he was great at navigation, but was it necessary to make him a simpleton in order to exculpate his possible guilt? Or perhaps Bosch considers us simpletons? For when Columbus finally does perceive that all is not well and disposes of the villain, are we then to assume that all chattel slavery ceased in the colony? That all torture, rape, and mutilation were stopped? Is Bosch relying on the well-known fact that Americans don't read history?

Scott's direction is as confused as Bosch's writing. The crowd scenes at court bring out an unexpected clumsiness in a director who is usually visually acute even when working on lame scripts. He doesn't seem to know how to place bodies and camera so that we know exactly where to look amid the swirl and sumptuousness in the palace. Everything is clotted and confused. Scott fails with the voyage, too, treating it so eliptically that we don't feel the strain and fear of the crew as the fleet sails an unprecedented distance. Therefore, we don't truly feel the exultation of the men when they reach land.

Scott's desperation shows both in talky, informational scenes and in those of sheer physical sensation. Example of the former: when Counsellor Sanchez is hearing his secretary read a list of Columbus's demands, Scott has Sanchez putting a horse through its paces, so that the scene seems to be about equitation instead of Columbus's troubled relations with the Spanish court. Actually, the scene is about Ridley Scott worrying about his audience being bored when there's no sex or violence on screen. Yet the director is no better, in this movie, with action than with dialogue. When the new colony's cathedral is struck by lightning during a hurricane, a sign of God's anger at the colony's injustice, Scott stages the moment as if a gigantic ray gun had hit the church, so that 1492 momentarily turns into Blade Runner, an earlier and better Scott opus.