Books, Arts & Manners: Reshufflings of Things Past

IF inadvertent farce is your bag, The Man in the Iron Mask should provide you three bags full. It claims to be “based upon the novel by Alexandre Dumas,” but never trust a “based upon”; the truth, when it exists in Hollywood, is always “based on.” The movie was written and directed by Randall Wallace, who previously merely wrote Braveheart, but all this writing and directing and basing upon was too much for him. The resulting concoction has less to do with Dumas than with a shambles.

What to make of a movie in which “d’Artagnan” is pronounced four different ways? Correctly in the French manner, and also “dart onyon,” “darTANNyan,” and, as if it were Armenian, “dartainian”? Accents pullulate: Gérard Depardieu’s Porthos sounds like Inspector Clouseau; Jeremy Irons’s Aramis is pure British; John Malkovich’s Athos (also variously pronounced), Midwestern; Gabriel Byrne’s d’Artagnan, Americanized Irish; Leonardo DiCaprio’s man in the iron mask and Louis XIV are carefully learned stage-and-screen American.

JS

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John Simon

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IF inadvertent farce is your bag, The Man in the Iron Mask should provide you three bags full. It claims to be “based upon the novel by Alexandre Dumas,” but never trust a “based upon”; the truth, when it exists in Hollywood, is always “based on.” The movie was written and directed by Randall Wallace, who previously merely wrote Braveheart, but all this writing and directing and basing upon was too much for him. The resulting concoction has less to do with Dumas than with a shambles.

What to make of a movie in which “d’Artagnan” is pronounced four different ways? Correctly in the French manner, and also “dart onyon,” “darTANNyan,” and, as if it were Armenian, “dartainian”? Accents pullulate: Gérard Depardieu’s Porthos sounds like Inspector Clouseau; Jeremy Irons’s Aramis is pure British; John Malkovich’s Athos (also variously pronounced), Midwestern; Gabriel Byrne’s d’Artagnan, Americanized Irish; Leonardo DiCaprio’s man in the iron mask and Louis XIV are carefully learned stage-and-screen American.