director
Andy Tennant
screenwriters
Steve Meerson
Peter Krikes
producers
Lawrence Bender
Ed Elbert
cinematographer
Caleb Deschanel
music
George Fenton
editors
Roger Bondelli
Tracey Wadmore-Smith
cast
Jodie Foster (Anna Leonowens)
ChowYun-Fat (King Mongkut)
Ling Bai (Tuptim)
Tom Felton (Louis)
Syed Alwi (Prime Minister)
Randall Duk Kim (General Alak)
Kay Siu Lim (Prince Chowfa)
Melissa Campbell (Princess Fa-Ying)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 148m
u.s.
release: 12/17/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other anny
tennant films
reviewed on this website:
- sweet home alabama
|
Halfway
through Being John Malkovich,
when Catherine Keener looked into the eyes of John Malkovich
and saw the soul of the woman she loved, she raised the curtain
on a new, funky kind of screen romance. It's hard to regress
from that to the conventional repressed romance of Anna and
the King, one more women's weepie in which we're supposed
to sigh and honor the restraint of the two romantic leads as
they spend two hours or more denying their feelings. The best
example of this sort of film in the '90s was The Remains of
the Day; the many Hollywood variations since -- The Bridges
of Madison County, The Horse Whisperer,
and so on -- have done little to improve on it.
Three questions answered right away: Yes, Jodie Foster fakes
a serviceable accent as Anna Leonowens, the widowed British schoolteacher
who journeys to Siam with her young son. Yes, Chow Yun-Fat is
quietly charismatic as King Mongkut, the monarch who hires Anna
to teach his dozens of children. And yes, the film is an elegant
bit of eye candy (cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who shot The
Black Stallion, is a whiz at picture-postcard images). The
movie is handsome and well-appointed, with lonely good moments
scattered across its two hours and 28 minutes, but it's still
one of the most boring films in recent memory. I was reminded
of the far superior Kundun,
which had no plot but exerted a strong hold on our visual imagination.
Anna and the King has too much plot tripping up its enchantment.
Anna and King Mongkut forge an amiably combative bond the minute
they lay eyes on each other. The King, it seems, is tired of
women (and men) grovelling on the floor before him all the time;
he's excited by a free-thinker like Anna, who dares to remain
standing in his presence. Anna, for her part, is attracted to
the King because ... well, he's played by Chow Yun-Fat; the script
(credited to Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes) provides little
other reason.
The British schoolmarm and the Asian god spend many, many scenes
enlightening each other; the movie at its worst is like a lecture
on comparative culture. I experienced more than a little deja
vu, having recently caught up with director Andy Tennant's previous
movie, the likable Ever After, in which a proto-feminist
Cinderella (Drew Barrymore) challenged and debated the Prince
until he had no choice but to fall in love with her. Apparently,
all these monarchs need is a gutsy woman to set them straight
and tell them when they're being jerks. Tennant has a solid eye
for visuals; he also has an eye on the women in the audience
who like being flattered with the notion that they, too, could
sway a king with their ideas.
A subplot involving some of the King's rebellious men -- who
want to go to war with the Burmese against the King's will --
sucks most of the life out of the movie and distracts from the
already dubious magic of the romance. The only redeeming virtue
of the scenes of palace intrigue is the impressive actor Randall
Duk Kim, as the brutal General Alak; his saturnine features and
weary delivery of stock evil dialogue reminded me of John Hurt.
But this story thread just leads to an intelligence-insulting
climax involving an exploding bridge. Do all movies have
to end like Lethal Weapon these days?
Foster and Chow Yun-Fat occasionally get a pleasant rhythm going
together, and their best moment comes when tragedy strikes: the
King's anguish barely held in check by the stoicism required
of a monarch; Anna's grief-stricken expression as she struggles
not to weep openly (Foster is lighted so that her eyes seem ripped
open by fishhooks). Chow Yun-Fat acquits himself well in his
first major Hollywood role without gunplay. Though he's sometimes
a bit hard to understand (to be fair, I wonder how intelligible
Foster's lines of Chinese dialogue are to Chinese listeners),
he gives the movie whatever dignity it has, and he steals the
film right out from under Foster, who often seems preoccupied
with maintaining her accent. Anna and the King ends on
an elegant note, but it's not enough to wipe out our memory of
that idiotically explosive climax; the movie has already lost
face, and our interest with it. |