Many haven’t seen Werner Herzog’s 2015 film “Queen of the Desert,” which is a strange phenomenon, given the talented filmmakers involved. “Queen of the Desert” stars Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell, the real-life archaeologist who spent her career in the 1910s mapping the Middle East. The movie follows Bell from a boring life attending fancy-dress balls to Tehran, where she joins her uncle for a more exciting life exploring the Near East. She falls in love with an embassy guy named Henry, played by James Franco, but the romance goes very poorly. Bell’s hoity-toity family forbids the romance, and Henry takes his own life.
The film is full of celebrities who play other famous British historical figures. Jenny Agutter plays Bell’s stepmother, Florence. Damian Lewis plays Charles Doughty-Wylie, who fought in World War I and had an emotional affair with Gertrude Bell. Christopher Fulford played a young Winston Churchill (Churchill and Bell sketched out the borders of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan). It was likely very easy to attract talented actors to “Queen of the Desert,” as many likely wanted to work with the venerable Werner Herzog. It was his first movie since “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” in 2009.
Most surprising is the appearance of Robert Pattinson as T.E. Lawrence, better known to film fans as Lawrence of Arabia. T.E. Lawrence, of course, was a British soldier who, thanks to the 1962 movie based on his life, is best known for his actions during the Great Arab Revolt of 1916 and the largely concurrent Sinai and Palestine Campaign. David Lean’s movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” as many might know, won seven Academy Awards.
Lawrence is only a supporting player in “Queen of the Desert,” but film fans will like linking Herzog’s movie to Lean’s.
Wait, Nicole Kidman and Robert Pattinson were in a Werner Herzog movie?
IFC FilmsHow did something like “Queen of the Desert” slip by unnoticed? This seems like an awards-bait historical epic writ large, easy to see being released during the busy Oscar season of November. Instead, the 2015 film — which debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival — was shelved for two years, not released in theaters until April of 2017. It barely registered, and the $36 million movie only made $2 million at the box office. That’s not as bad as the more recent desert-based flop “Desert Warrior” — “Desert Warrior” is, without hyperbole, one of the biggest flops of all time — but that’s still pretty bad.
Not that Werner Herzog makes huge hits. His films tend to be tipsy, insane, and pointedly nihilistic. Even some of his better-known movies were hardly bowl-’em-over blockbusters. 2009’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans” (which Herzog considers essential) made $10 million on a $25 million budget. His 2006 film “Rescue Dawn” only made $7.2 million on a $10 million budget. His mid-2000s documentaries “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World” (the source of the nihilist penguin meme) only made $4.1 million and $1.2 million, respectively. It was unlikely that a downbeat director like Werner Herzog would suddenly break through with a major money-maker in 2015. Even if huge stars like Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson, and James Franco were involved.
It should be noted that “Queen of the Desert” was released a few years before Franco was ousted as an alleged sexual abuser, so his presence in the movie wasn’t yet enough to keep more wary audiences away. It might have been rejected because, at least according to critics, it wasn’t a very good movie.
Critics weren’t fond of Queen of the Desert
IFC FilmsBased on 80 reviews, “Queen of the Desert” only has an 18% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Most of the critics note that the movie is quite boring. Scott Marks’ review in the San Diego Reader wondered how the unhinged insanity of Herzog’s early work (like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”) could saunter over into a film that merely stares at bland landscapes. “On paper, impassioned archaeologist Herzog and an eloquent wanderer like Bell make for cinematic soulmates,” Marks wrote, “But instead of drawing more attention to her accomplishments, Herzog moves in the direction of David Lean pictorialism.”
Angelica Jade Bastién, writing for RogerEbert.com, gave the film only one star (out of four), saying that it “ends up being an emotionally empty, thematically ill-defined, and listless affair. It is never able to communicate the complexity of the woman at its center.” She also noted that the filmmakers took a very strange tack in focusing on Gertrude Bell’s romances rather than her cartography and exploration. And, even at that, the romances sucked. There was, Bastién wrote, “no blistering chemistry, no charm, no intensity in the romantic storylines [which] makes matters worse.”
Chuck Brown of Slant Magazine went so far as to give “Queen” zero stars, writing that “it’s inexplicable and regrettable that Herzog elevates [the Franco character] to the status of ‘the one,’ rendering Bell as a spurned traditional woman with delusions of progressive grandeur by implication, which doesn’t scan with her life as a traveler and aesthete.”
So you might not have heard of this one, but if critics are to be trusted, then maybe it’s better that we didn’t. If you’re curious, though, it’s on Fubo.
