`Mask' Offers Cliched Tale of Vacationing Cast

It must be hard being a teen idol. This must have been the thought on Leonardo DiCaprio's agent's mind when he or she urged DiCaprio to take the starring roles in what must be the billionth (the Internet Movie Database lists six previous versions) adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask (L'homme au masque du fer), the sequel to the even more well-known The Three Musketeers. "Leo, baby," one can almost hear the agent saying, "you need a break after Titanic. Why don't you take this film? You'll hardly have to act--it has an all-star cast--I mean, it's almost like a paid vacation!"

The Man in the Iron Mask is a puff piece, good for one of those weekends when there's nothing else to do and the quality of the movie is not too much of an issue. DiCaprio plays both the young King Louis XIV, a philandering and utterly obnoxious young man, and his secret twin brother Phillipe. Phillipe has been locked up in a dungeon for the last six years with an iron mask on his face to conceal his identity. When Louis sends ex-Musketeer Athos' (John Malkovich) son Raoul (Peter Sarsgaard) back to war so that he can pursue his betrothed Christine (Judith Godreche) and he is killed, Athos calls on his old comrades Aramis (Jeremy Irons), now a priest; Porthos (Gerard Depardieu) and D'Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne) to help him in getting revenge against the King. While Aramis, feeling guilty about his role in keeping Phillipe's existence a secret, and Porthos, always ready to be where the action is, rapidly agree to help Athos, D'Artagnan--who still serves the King and feels loyalty towards him--refuses. The three Musketeers, under Aramis' direction and with the approval of the twins' mother, Queen Anne (Anne Parillaud), then proceed to kidnap Phillipe from his dungeon and train him in courtly manners in preparation for his replacing the king during a masked ball. To proceed further in the plot would be to destroy the only compelling reason for seeing the movie, unless you enjoy spending $5-8 per ticket to see seventeenth-century dress as rendered by Hollywood.

The Tower of Babel that is the casting means that the French King Louis and his brother both sound like mall rats from Anywheresville, U.S.A. D'Artagnan has an Irish brogue, and Aramis sounds prissily British. The language barrier is handled by giving the French actors either underwritten (Christine, Queen Anne) or buffoonish parts (Porthos). Depardieu does well enough with his one-dimensional role, chasing after the ladies and attempting to hang himself while naked in one of the funniest scenes in the movie. Parillaud, as Queen Anne, does passably well. Godreche, however, seems to have decided that she could just relax during the movie, which results in amazingly bad acting at certain points. In bed with Louis, for example, Christine is feeling guilty because she has just received a letter from Raoul, her late fiance. Reproaching herself for having become the mistress of a man she does not love, Godreche attempts to rant melodramatically about her "sins," but does not have enough energy to even do that convincingly, looking away from DiCaprio as if that would distract her from spitting out her lines as rapidly as possible.

As for the other supporting actors, Irons' function as Aramis is mainly to be the brains of the group and a prim foil to the buffoon Porthos. A summary of his character is provided in his answer to a vexed Athos, who exclaims, "Are you so much holier than the rest of us?" He replies calmly, "Yes, I am." While Depardieu and Irons provide the comic relief, John Malkovich plays the father unhinged by grief who finds a surrogate son in Phillipe, and not always convincingly. His voice seems to express only one consistent emotion: suppressed rage. Whatever he says, he says so deliberately that it seems that he is attempting to keep himself from having, at the very least, a violent tantrum. The fact that his facial expressions often seem to suggest the psychotic killer rather than the mourning father does not help, nor does the fact that he appears to be in the same "vacation mode" as everybody else in the cast.

The star of the show manages to be quite convincing as the two brothers. Louis is appropriately annoying, if perhaps a bit childish even for a bratty young King. But Phillipe is his utter opposite, sweetly grateful for the fatherly treatment that he gets from Athos and so kindly that everybody is immediately suspicious when he replaces the real king. A small moment serves to differentiate the two brothers, and it is a moment of surprising subtlety in a movie not notable for such instances. The ersatz King, at the masked ball, sees a lady stumble. Kneeling from the platform where he is sitting, he offers to help. The court is stunned, for Louis would never have bothered to help the woman.

Some minor details: the "music" for the movie really does not deserve the name, and makes no pretense at all towards sounding like anything that anyone in the seventeenth century would have heard--it seems as if all the instruments were replaced by a synthesizer. The costumes are more convincing; though not overwhelmingly beautiful, there are no noticeable anachronisms.

The Man in the Iron Mask is a grand pageant that supposedly addresses great questions, the most important being, "What qualifies a person to be a leader (in this case, a king)--birthright or character?" But the production is so full of holes that one forgets all those things and just follows the plot, knowing that the movie will be forgotten as soon as the credits roll. In the particular showing that this reviewer attended, somebody clapped at the end of the movie. He or she was almost instantly succeeded by the laughter of others in the audience, as if they were saying, "It was good, but it wasn't that good!"