The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Mackenzie · a film · 2018 · about 121 minutes · written by Bathsheba Doran, David Mackenzie and James MacInnes, with others · the cut released by Netflix
Mode
Historical war film in a naturalist manner; the outlaw’s war told as the founding of a kingship
Mythos
The outlaw king who loses everything, hides in his own country, gathers a band and wins it back from the land; the relic that makes a nation; the old king and the bad son, carried
Phase
From the Scottish nobles’ submission to Edward I in 1304 to the Battle of Loudoun Hill in May 1307, closed by cards that point to Bannockburn and to Elizabeth’s later release
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 121 minutes, in English; released by Netflix on 9 November 2018 with a limited run in cinemas; Barry Ackroyd’s handheld photography on Scottish locations, Jake Roberts’s editing
Register
Cold, wet and sober; a ceremony of power at the opening, dread by night, a heap of men in mud at the close; the private scenes kept level
Scale
Two kings and an heir, a marriage and a family, a band of outlaws, the clans of the isles, and a country fought for ground by ground
Governing Proposition
Robert the Bruce kneels to Edward I, kills his rival before an altar, has himself crowned, is routed by night at Methven and hunted through the west and the isles, and wins a small battle in a bog at Loudoun Hill. The wager of the film is that a crown is made by an act that forfeits the right to it, that the kingship must be won back from the land by the means honour forbids, and that a sober, handheld manner can show this as cold, mud and ground rather than as legend.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens in Edward I’s camp before Stirling in a single unbroken take. The camera walks through a whole political order: the Scottish nobles making their submission, Bruce and the Prince of Wales sparring, and at the end the great trebuchet loosing its stone in a slow arc against the castle. Nothing is cut away from, and so nothing is outside Edward’s hand; the kneeling lords, the heir and the siege engine are one continuous fact before the film names any of them. Bruce bends the knee inside it. It is the first height the film reaches, and the first of the two places where its form is the instrument of what it knows.
The film is David Mackenzie’s, written by Bathsheba Doran, Mackenzie and James MacInnes with others, photographed by Barry Ackroyd and edited by Jake Roberts, a Netflix production made with Sigma Films, Mackenzie’s Glasgow company. It opened the Toronto International Film Festival on 6 September 2018 in a cut of about 137 minutes, and after mixed notices about twenty minutes were removed; the cut Netflix released worldwide on 9 November 2018, with a limited run in cinemas the same week, runs about 121 minutes, and it is the one judged here. Chris Pine plays Bruce, Stephen Dillane Edward I, Billy Howle the Prince, Aaron Taylor-Johnson James Douglas and Florence Pugh Elizabeth de Burgh.
The take also sets the film’s law. Power in it is held by those who command the ground, and the stone that strikes Stirling is that command made visible. Everything after, the rising, the rout, the hiding and the last battle, is the same question asked from the other side: what the ground of Scotland will do for a man who fights on it on its own terms. The opening is ceremony, cool and in view; the close will be mud, where order is gone. The film is built so that the one answers the other, the trebuchet and the trench the same idea seen twice, and its coherence is the strongest thing about it.
Movement II
Bruce is married by arrangement to Elizabeth de Burgh; then the quartered remains of William Wallace are displayed as a warning, a crowd riots, and Bruce turns. The relic does what the warning was meant to prevent: a vassal becomes a rebel, and a limb becomes the token of a nation. At Greyfriars in Dumfries, Bruce kills John Comyn before the altar, and in the same season is crowned at Scone. The killing makes him an outlaw twice, to England and to the Church, and the film plays it as the founding crime it was, not as a misfortune on the way to a throne.
This is what the film brings into the open, and it holds to it: a crown is made by an act that forfeits the right to it, and the kingship has to be won back by means honour forbids. The meaning is not laid on the action; it is the shape of the action, from the altar to the last battle, and a viewer can state it. Its limit is in the man who carries it. Pine plays restraint, and the film rarely shows what the murder, or later the deaths of his brothers, cost inside him. The truth stays political and general, a truth about kingship, not about this king.
The inheritance is the historical war epic, and above all Braveheart, whose story ends where this one begins and which shaped the popular picture of these years. Against it, the film plays the founding killing straight and trades colour and speeches for handheld naturalism, wet light and mud. Those departures are real, and they turn within the genre, not out of it. The stake was a studio’s: a large historical film with a star, made by a streaming company to show it could make one. A sober accent placed on a proven path is what the film’s swerve amounts to, and it is one of the three axes that hold the film in Tier III.
Movement III
At Methven, Aymer de Valence agrees to give battle the next day and attacks the Scots camp by night. Fires in the dark, men cut down half dressed: it is dread well built, and it is the lesson the outlaw learns. The chivalric code is shown as a weapon the stronger side may set aside, and the rest of the war is the Scots learning to fight as they were fought, by night, from ambush, without the courtesies of the field. The broken agreement is the hinge on which the film turns from a rising to an outlaw’s war, and it could not be removed without the last battle losing its reason.
Then the flight, through the west and the isles. The women are captured, Bruce’s brothers are executed, Elizabeth is imprisoned, and the king is hunted through bog and island and fed by fishermen. This is the oldest shape the film carries: the crowned man who loses everything, hides in his own country, gathers a band and returns to win it back from the land. The film builds that shape in its middle and builds it plainly. It carries the pattern as given material more than it makes it new, and the particular, the ropes, the cold rations, the low cloud over the loch, stays particular.
The middle is also where the film is thinnest. The flight is a run of episodes whose order could change without loss, and the released cut lets characters arrive and depart without the scenes that would seat them: Douglas, Elizabeth, the brothers. Elizabeth is required by the plot, a wife to lose, and given too few scenes to be required by the meaning, so that the women’s suffering is shown as consequence rather than understood. The form here is the genre’s container, a montage of flight and a crosscut execution, and another competent grammar would carry the same knowledge. That is what holds the film’s form a tenth under the Coherence Floor.
Movement IV
James Douglas retakes his own castle by killing its garrison in church. It is the second sacrilege the war requires, and it obeys the film’s law exactly: the ground goes to whoever will fight on it on its terms, and the terms of this ground are those honour forbids. Small raids follow, and Angus Macdonald’s galleys come from the isles. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Douglas, the dispossessed heir turned butcher in his own chapel, arrives in fragments, but the act at the centre of his arc is clear, and it repeats Greyfriars at a lower rank.
Ackroyd’s photography keeps the camera among the men, handheld, in weak northern light, and gives cold and wet a texture few films of the kind manage. The production design, costumes and locations make a convincing poor and violent country. Dillane is exact as the old king. The making has its costs: Howle’s Prince is played toward a broad villainy the rest of the film refuses, the dialogue is serviceable and seldom more, and Pine’s Bruce is controlled to the point of blankness. It is a making that bears weight in its photography and its staging and stops short in its people.
Edward I dies, and the Prince marches north. The two figures are a pattern the film carries: the old king and the bad son, a Prince eager to prove himself and given leave to be cruel, mirroring the father Bruce has lost. The film holds a good deal through the one war: the state and its succession, the Church profaned and the excommunication after, a family arranged and broken, levies and galleys and a band to feed, the fishermen and the clans, Wallace behind the story and Bannockburn ahead. The marriage is a hostage, the church a battlefield, the land a weapon. Consciousness stays mostly exterior, and the common people are scenery more than an order.
Movement V
Loudoun Hill, May 1307: a narrow ground prepared with dug trenches across it and a bog, horses foundering under rain, a mêlée that becomes a heap of men in mud. The ground decides. The camera stays low with the men, and the outlaw’s war becomes the land’s war; the stone that struck Stirling in the opening is answered by a trench. This is the film’s summit and the second place where its form is its knowledge. Into it the film sets a single combat between Bruce and the Prince, who is let go, a convention of the epic that the battle’s own logic did not need. It is lower than the battle it crowns, and the one place the film’s law gives way to the genre’s.
The film ends there, at a small battle, and not at Bannockburn. Cards point to 1314 and to Elizabeth’s later release, and the war is finished off screen: the triumph the genre expects is refused. Eight years on, the film survives whole in the cut it released, held by the service that streams it, and that is the shape of its presence: a title on one catalogue, at that catalogue’s discretion, with attention that fell away after its first season. Its reach is an opening night at Toronto, a place among the first large prestige features of the streaming studios, and an argument about cutting a film after its premiere. No later historical film shows its mark.
Those are the axes that hold it below Tier IV: Pressure on Tradition at 5.8, The Bottomless Well at 6.3, The Swerve at 6.5, where a finished manner reorganised nothing and the return is to its staging. The nearest posted films in kind, Dunkirk at 8.2 and A Hidden Life at 8.0, are films whose form is their knowledge throughout; this one’s form knows in its opening take and its last battle. What it holds between them is sound and serious: a meaning that can be stated, a law that runs from ceremony to mud, and a country made by its weather. A crown taken at an altar is won back in a bog, and the film shows the price without counting it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the 121-minute cut. The spine is clear and its main parts are required: the opening submission is what the rising breaks; the display of Wallace’s remains is the turn; the killing at the altar makes the king an outlaw twice, to England and to the Church; Methven’s broken agreement teaches the outlaw’s war that Loudoun Hill wins. Each hinge holds the next, and none could go. What the subtractive test finds is thin rather than idle. Elizabeth is required by the plot and given too few scenes to be required by the meaning; Douglas’s arc arrives in fragments; the flight through the west is a run of episodes that could be reordered; and the single combat at Loudoun Hill is a convention the battle’s own logic did not need.
Score: 7.2 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated, and it is the film’s structure, not a mood laid over it: a crown is made by an act that forfeits the right to it, and the kingship has to be won back from the land by the means honour forbids. Bruce kills Comyn at the altar and is crowned in the same season; Methven shows the chivalric code as a weapon the stronger side may set aside; and the Scots learn to fight as they were fought, by night, from ambush, in a church. The film holds to that disclosure from first to last, and the image discloses with it: the mud and cold say what war in this country was. What holds the figure: Bruce is closed, so the truth stays political rather than inward, and the women’s suffering is shown as consequence rather than understood.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Elevation comes chiefly of one kind, the grim grandeur of weather, stone and mass, and it comes often. The opening take is the first height: the camera walks through a whole political order and ends in the slow arc and crash of the trebuchet’s stone against Stirling, the power Bruce kneels to made visible. The night attack at Methven, fires in the dark and men cut down half dressed, is dread well built. Ackroyd’s landscapes, the loch and the island crossing under low cloud, give the flight scale. Loudoun Hill is the summit: horses foundering in a bog under rain, a mêlée that becomes a heap of men in mud. What holds the figure: the film seldom rises through feeling, the private scenes are level, and the single combat is lower than the battle it crowns.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The patterns are present and some bear weight. The outlaw king is old: the crowned man who loses everything, hides in his own country, gathers a band and returns to win it back from the land. The film builds that shape in its middle, with the king hunted through bog and island and fed by fishermen. The relic is there: Wallace’s quartered remains, displayed as a warning, become the token that makes a nation. The old king and the bad son, Edward I and a Prince eager to prove himself and given leave to be cruel, mirror the father Bruce has lost. What holds the figure: these are carried as given material more than made new, and the particular, mud, ropes and cold rations, stays particular.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The inheritance is the historical war epic, and above all Braveheart (1995), whose story ends where this one begins and which shaped the popular picture of these years. The departures are real. The film ends at Loudoun Hill, a small battle, not at Bannockburn, and so refuses the triumph its genre expects; it plays the killing of Comyn as the founding crime it was; and it trades the epic’s colour and speeches for handheld naturalism, wet light and mud. What holds the figure: these turn within the genre, not out of it, and the stake was a studio’s, a large historical film from a streaming company, not an artist’s; the cut made after the premiere drew the film further toward the genre’s pace.
Score: 6.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses something in two places. The opening take is the instrument of a knowledge: an unbroken space in which Edward holds every element, the kneeling lords, the sparring heir and the siege engine, so that the order Bruce will break is felt as one continuous fact before it is named. And the climax is built so that the ground decides: the trenches and the bog take the English cavalry, and the camera, staying low in the mud with the men, makes the outlaw’s war the land’s war. What holds the figure: between those two the form is largely the genre’s container, shot and countershot in councils, a montage of flight, a crosscut execution, and another competent grammar would carry the same knowledge.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Eight years of evidence, and a modest return. The questions the film raises are real: whether Bruce’s crime is redeemed by his war or buried under it, which the film honestly declines to decide; whether the Prince’s release at Loudoun Hill is mercy or policy; how far the film answers Braveheart. On return, the opening take and the Loudoun Hill sequence repay study as staging. What holds the figure: the questions do not stay open long, the private scenes yield nothing new, and the literature beyond first notices is chiefly historians’ commentary on the film’s liberties, among them the Prince’s presence at Loudoun Hill and the timing of Edward I’s death, and argument over the cut made after the premiere.
Score: 6.3 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is slight: a finished, sober manner of historical war film, in a line with Ackroyd’s earlier work and a decade of grimed, handheld medieval pictures, turned on a Scottish subject; nothing in it reorganises what the medium or the genre can do, and the opening take is a virtuoso passage of a kind the decade had many of. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the opening-night slot at Toronto, wide availability on Netflix in its first year, a place among the streaming studio’s first large prestige features, a public argument about cutting a film after its premiere, and some interest in Scottish locations. What holds it lowest of the twelve: no later historical film shows its mark, and its reach is largely the reach of a distributor’s strategy.
Score: 5.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eight years, a span at which the survival step gives a little more to a film of usual presence. Form: the film as released survives whole, held by its distributor in the master it streamed. The longer premiere cut, never released, is a variant not taken from the work, and is noted and not charged. Presence is the charge. The film exists to the public chiefly as a title on one streaming service, available at that service’s discretion, so that its circulation depends on a single catalogue, and attention after its first season fell away quickly. The surface, a streaming star vehicle of 2018, is fixed to its moment in a way the history it tells is not.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Ackroyd’s photography keeps the camera among the men, handheld, in weak northern light, and gives cold and wet a texture few films of the kind manage. The opening take is a feat of staging, blocking a council, a sparring match and a siege through one moving camera without losing the political sense. The production design, costumes and locations make a convincing poor and violent country, and Loudoun Hill’s mud is directed as terrain, not decoration. Stephen Dillane is exact as the old king. The costs are weighed: Douglas, Elizabeth and the brothers arrive and depart without the scenes that would seat them; Billy Howle’s Prince is played toward a broad villainy the rest refuses; the dialogue is serviceable; Chris Pine’s Bruce is controlled to the point of blankness.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the opening take, a cool ceremony of power in which everything is in order and in view, and the mud at Loudoun Hill, where order is gone and men drown in a bog. One law governs both: power is held by those who can command the ground, and the ground of Scotland belongs to whoever will fight on it on its terms. The trebuchet and the trench are the same idea seen from two sides. Methven, the killing in Douglas’s church and the guerrilla raids obey it. The law lapses in two places, both at the edge of the spine: the Prince is drawn by the genre’s physics, and his duel with Bruce obeys the epic’s law rather than the film’s; and the marriage, played as tender romance, sits slightly apart.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what a historical film of about two hours holds. The state and its succession, in two kings, a crown claimed by murder and an English heir; the Church, as the altar profaned and the excommunication that follows; the family, in a father’s death, a marriage arranged and grown into love, a daughter, sisters and brothers lost; war and its economy, in levies, galleys, raids and the feeding of a band; the land and its people, the fishermen and the clans of the isles; history, in Wallace’s death behind the story and Bannockburn ahead of it. They are integrated through the one war: the marriage is a hostage, the church a battlefield, the land a weapon. What holds the figure: consciousness is mostly exterior, the common people are scenery more than an order, and the women’s world is seen only when it is broken.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Inner Law at 8.2, then The Made at 7.9 and The Unconcealment at 7.8. One law, that power belongs to whoever commands the ground, running from the opening take’s ceremony before Stirling to the mud of Loudoun Hill, the trebuchet and the trench the same idea; a making in which handheld photography in northern light and an opening take staged through one moving camera bear weight; and a meaning that is the film’s structure, a crown made by an act that forfeits it and won back by means honour forbids.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 5.8: a finished, sober manner of the historical war film that reorganised nothing, with a reach largely its distributor’s and no later film that shows its mark. Above it, The Bottomless Well at 6.3, a return to the staging and little else, and The Swerve at 6.5, departures that turn within the genre on a studio’s stake.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.2 falls three tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor is unmet: The Made at 7.9 and The Inner Law at 8.2 clear it, but The Living Form at 6.9 falls a tenth below 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 7.8, The Imperishable at 7.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.1, The Swerve at 6.5 and Pressure on Tradition at 5.8 fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.2, The Archetypal Deep, 7.1, The Swerve, 6.5, The Living Form, 6.9, The Bottomless Well, 6.3, Pressure on Tradition, 5.8, and The Imperishable, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Sublime meets it exactly at 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. One of the five summit conditions is met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: the twelve sum to 85.8, an average of 7.15 that rounds to 7.2, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Outlaw King as released by Netflix on 9 November 2018, with a limited run in cinemas the same week, about 121 minutes, in colour and in English, from the opening take before Stirling to the closing cards: directed by David Mackenzie, written by Bathsheba Doran, David Mackenzie and James MacInnes with further credited writers, photographed by Barry Ackroyd and edited by Jake Roberts, a Netflix production made with Sigma Films, shot on location in Scotland. The longer cut of about 137 minutes shown at the opening of the Toronto International Film Festival on 6 September 2018 has not been released and is not the work; it is neither charged nor credited, and the gaps judged here are gaps in the released cut. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. No line of dialogue is quoted, and the plot is given in outline, in the order the reading holds it. The film’s departures from the historical record are named as matters of commentary and are not scored as faults. Details that could not be verified, among them the further writing credits, the makers of the score, the full list of locations, the exact length of the opening take, the budget, the manner of some deaths and imprisonments, the name given to Douglas’s retaking of his castle, a legend left out of the hiding, the bishops at Scone, a physical release and the film’s awards, are not given.