BEFORE: Nicole Kidman carries over again, and I'm going from a film set on the ocean to a film set in the desert, the irony is not lost on me. But there used to be that old song from America that had they lyrics "the desert is an ocean with its life underground", or something like that. "A Horse With No Name", that's the song. But there's a lot about that song that didn't make any sense, like, why couldn't the narrator just give the horse a name? That seemed like a very fixable problem, he could have just called it "horse" and that would be fine, right? Why wasn't that possible? And why did the lyrics have to use a double negative like "There ain't no one for to give you no pain..."
Another line from that song is "It felt good to be out of the rain" and I find I must agree. It rained a lot this morning, of course just during the time when I was walking to the polls to go and vote, so even with an umbrella I got pretty soaked. But the upside was that fewer people chose to go out and vote while it was raining, so I didn't have to wait long to sign the form and cast my vote. The whole thing took about 5 minutes. But even if there's a record turnout and a long line, we should all get out and vote, because it's one of the few guaranteed freedoms we have left, and we don't want this one or any of the others to be taken away. And if you're in a place where your vote is suppressed, please fight for your right.
With everything that's gone on in the last two years, it's come to feel like our democracy is edging toward a dictatorship, given all the party politics, executive orders, lies, fake claims of "fake news", not to mention gerrymandering and voter suppression. When people now say, "Get out and vote", it feels like there's an implied follow-up of "Get out and vote...if you agree with my politics. If not, please stay home." And we can't let that happen, either through malice or our own inactivity. I didn't vote in the 2016 election and I regretted it, but the good news is that they let me vote twice today to make up for it.
(I'm kidding, don't freak out or accuse me of voter fraud.)
THE PLOT: A chronicle of the life of Gertrude Bell, a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer and political attaché for the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.
AFTER: It could have been a nice tie-in that this film is about Middle East politics in the early 20th Century, that had the potential to be somewhat interesting. But on the whole, I just found the political aspect of this film very confusing, much like Middle East politics today. From what I was able to understand, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling for some reason (I'll have to look this up...) and the territory it once occupied was set to be divided between the U.K., Greece, France and Italy, with only a small section of the old empire to remain, and I presume that eventually this became the country of Turkey.
For that matter, her influence and advice led to the creation of the countries we now know as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Armenia. But God, so many bad things have happened in these countries in the last 100 years that I honestly don't know if Gertrude Bell should be considered a hero or a villain. I mean, didn't people learn anything from the U.K.'s colonization of India, which worked for a while, but over time just became a terrible situation for that country's natives? What gave these white European allies the right to dictate how things should work in another part of the world? These countries were and are mostly desert, there's nothing there, except maybe oil, but how ego-centric do you have to be to look at another country's stuff and say, "Oh, yeah, we want that, so therefore it should be ours." NO, you've got your stuff in your country, and they've got their stuff, so if you want their stuff too, you have to trade for it, that's how international business and politics works.
But I'm sorry, I don't really get the point of this film - so Gertrude Bell felt a little bit out of place in British society, because she'd gone to Oxford and got a history degree, but couldn't handle all the dumb suitors she encountered at social functions? So her answer to that was to go to work in Tehran and then tour the Middle East? Right, because they're SO much more enlightened about the role of women in society in Middle Eastern countries... Isn't reality the exact opposite of that? I mean, if she couldn't find her place as an educated woman in the U.K., why then spend time in countries where, even today, women are automatically treated as second-class citizens? And this effect must have been even more pronounced in the former Ottoman Empire, predominantly Muslim countries. So I really don't understand her lifestyle choice at all, at least the way it's presented in this film.
It might have made more sense if she were some kind of political operative and spy, but according to this film, she wasn't. So by removing those reasons for traveling to Persia, learning Farsi, meeting various sheiks, and replacing them with essentially nothing but her whim to travel and see the world, I'm left with a giant plothole here, there's no WHY to explain what she did. Why go to a dangerous part of the world, just to take a couple photos and cross the desert on a camel - just to say you did it? I get the desire to travel, but this all seems a bit extreme, like it was a lot of work for a very small payoff. And then to make her guides fill up her canvas bathtub with water, which is no doubt the single most important resource in a DESERT, just so she could wash her hair and rinse the sand off of her body every once in a while? This does not portray her in the best light, because it makes her seem very spoiled and snooty. God forbid if she didn't look picture-perfect as she was traveling through a sandstorm on a smelly camel.
The only motivation we get for her spending so much time in the desert, traveling from one sheikdom to the next, is the loss of her love, Henry, the man she fell for while they were working in the British Embassy in Tehran. Her parents disapproved of this marriage (this was back when parents could do that) so he jumped off a cliff. Or, another interpretation is that he committed suicide so he WOULDN'T have to marry her, I think that's just as valid. Years later, she finally opens her heart again to a married military man, Richard Wylie, and he chooses to re-enlist and head into battle. So I think I've spotted the pattern here, men just couldn't stand to be around her, and her lovers all took the coward's way out. She's also shown sort of flirting with T.E. Lawrence (aka "Lawrence of Arabia") and look what happened to him...
All in all, this character reminds me of the guy who tried to launch himself into space a few months ago, in a homemade rocket, just to try to prove that the Earth is flat. How do we know that Gertrude Bell's "good intentions" in visiting these sheikdoms didn't result in making the Middle East the messed-up region that it is today? Like sailing, you can add MidEast politics to the list of things that I know very little about, and this film didn't really do anything to change that, in the end.
Also starring James Franco (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Damian Lewis (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "Maps to the Stars"), Christopher Fulford (last seen in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"), Mark Lewis Jones (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Jenny Agutter (last seen in "Equus"), Holly Earl, Beth Goddard (last seen in "Edge of Tomorrow"), Michael Jenn (last seen in "Cinderella"), Assaad Bouab, Jay Abdo, David Calder (last seen in "Rush"), Nick Waring, Sam Kanater, Sophie Linfield, William Ellis, John Wark, Younes Bouab, Fehd Benchemsi, Anas Chrifi.
RATING: 4 out of 10 overloaded suitcases (Really? Isn't this a stereotype about women when they travel that should go the way of the dinosaur?)
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