The Lion In Winter - "Nobody's Perfect"

The Lion In Winter (1968)

H: This movie is based on a play. The biggest thing that struck me was that all the main action takes place in the castle. All the main players are there - the wife, the sons, the king of France, the concubine, the king. All of these things that happen off stage, you never see, like Richard proclaiming that he has two thousand men at the ready. It's a series of bluffs and arrangements, threats, warnings, but nothing actually happens.

K: You don't see any big battle scenes.

H: The only thing that happens is that a minor character, a knight, is killed near the end of the movie. That's really the only consequence you see in the movie. The movie ends where it started - the heir to the throne hasn't been decided and the queen's going back to her prison.

K: As the film progresses, the rooms where things take place get smaller and smaller. There are these big scenes, like the conference with the king of France, where everyone's in a small room. They're hiding in small places. Then there's the big conversation between the king and queen in the king's room with a bed, which is very minimal. At the end they're all in the cellar, but they inhabit a huge castle!

H: There are those parts where there is a big room - where the king bluffs that he'll allow his son Richard to marry his concubine. Or there's the feast, which takes place in a large room. Nothing of real consequence happens in the large, public rooms. The important scenes are in small, private settings.

K: The feast hall is really interesting. As the movie progresses, the hall gets more desolate looking. When you first see it, everyone's partying it up and the king is laughing. It gets more and more sad looking. There's no one there after a while, the king walks alone through it.

H: The castle feels emptier and emptier. You're right, the movie goes from free and open in the beginning to the end where everyone's confined in the wine cellar. So set is really important.

K: Segway into direction, the castle was used in a really obvious way. He's on a turret and he's curled up and the camera zooms out and out and out. I get it, he's small in a large world. That's something I don't like in a film. It's one thing to slowly pan out, it's another to zoom out in time with the music.

H: Yeah, it's when the camera makes it obvious that a camera is being used. It takes you out of the moment. That's something a play can never do, because a play doesn't use a camera. When you're making a movie based on a play, the best thing you can do with a camera is make it seem like there's not a camera being used. That's true about movies in general - you want to feel like a movie is happening, not as though it's being observed.

K: You compared this movie to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Do you think that movie is any different in this respect?

H: Yeah, I think the camera in that movie feels a lot less in the way. You need to examine why a particular play should be made into a movie, because not all plays should be. You need to figure out what the play has to gain or how else can we get at this play by filming it and by using a camera to frame what you see. Because, in a play, the only framing you can do is who's on stage at the time and what's setting. The stage doesn't change size throughout the play and the players are for the most part the same distance from your eye, so they appear the same size. They don't change scale. That's why you use dialogue, blocking, and setting to do what the camera would do, to frame.

There were parts of this movie that benefited from having a camera in play because things felt more confined. You have the ability to make things feel more confined with a camera than on stage.

K: The mirror scene isa great example of that. The scene where the queen is talking by herself into the mirror works really well with the camera showing her reflection versus you just watching her on stage look into a mirror. The mirror was kind of twisted.

H: The mirror is a literal frame. When I looked at the TV during the mirror scene I mistook the mirror for a television. Any time you have mirror scenes in movies, especially in this case, it's pointing out that you're seeing a movie through at least two filters - the director's filter and then your own filter, how you frame it. It points out the camera. You don't see the camera, but it lets you know that framing is going on. When you're filming a play and you have a mirror, it's the self-obvious thing where it's saying "By the way, isn't it interesting that we're making a movie about a play."

Plus all of the things a mirror represents - a twisted reality and all that stuff.

H: This movie reminded me of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in the oneupmanship between the king and queen that's reminiscent of the host and hostess in that movie (also a play first). Even though they're not doing physical things to each other, the mental and spiritual stakes keep increasing.

K: You can still play dirty whether you're fighting for land or you're just fighting for power in a relationship.

H: They weren't even fighting for land in this movie in a physical sense. It was such a verbal war. Everyting they did to each other took place in the realm of words.

K: The tactics both couples used were similar. They reveal dirtier and dirtier secrets. They both know when to give information if they feel like they're losing. The queen reveals a possible sexual relationship with the king's father, just like Elizabeth Taylor's character reveals the husband's failed attempts at being a writer or his childhood in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", which is really a good playwright's way of adding tension and revealing backstory.

Because these two plays take place in a certain timeframe, like Christmas Eve or the dinner party night, they don't have the luxury of showing the backstory. So, they have characters tell the backstory, but it adds so much more tension-wise.

In this movie, the stakes were higher because the actions royalty take affect people outside the castle. In "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", it's constantly between those two characters.

H: It's not just those two characters, they have influence over the younger couple. In that reality, they don't have the power of English kings, but it's a microcosm. It's on a different scale because of who's involved. If "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" took place between the president and the first lady, it would be more like this movie.

K: But this movie has cooler offspring than past presidents. I wouldn't want to watch the Bush twins argue as the sons do in this movie. My favorite was Geoffrey because he was so sneaky and smart and willing to be chancellor (not king) because he knew he would have as much power as chancellor and that "king" is kind of a status symbol, especially if John were king.

H: So you would have picked Geoffrey?

K: I sure as hell wouldn't have picked Alais.

H: I would have picked Richard. I guess I'm more of a tradionalist - after all, he's the oldest and seems the most fit to rule. Then again, he's really violent and he may have raped the French king when he was younger and the king was a lot younger.

K: Well nobody's perfect...



H: Maybe Henry should just keep being king - that seemed to be his decision at the end. If we look at history, my horse wins.