Advance movie screening helps relieve worried minds

In these uneasy times, you’d think a Hollywood epic about the Crusades would spark a major revival of hard feelings over the medieval religious wars in the Middle East.

Yet Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” is hitting theaters in comparative quiet, without the sort of uproar provoked by President Bush’s post-Sept. 11 “crusade” gaffe or Mel Gibson’s crucifixion saga “The Passion of the Christ.”

There were uneasy rumblings among Arab groups that obtained an early treatment of the script a year or so ago. They found the film potentially fraught with stereotypes about 12th century Muslims fighting Christians for control of Jerusalem – negative images that might have inflamed anti-Muslim sentiment.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee was among those worried groups, but half a dozen members came away greatly relieved after a screening arranged for them by Scott.

“It’s one of the better representations of Muslims we’ve seen out of Hollywood,” said Laila Al-Qatami, a spokeswoman for the Washington D.C.-based group. “We thought that he did a good job tackling a potentially volatile subject and avoided doing a simplified, stereotyped story of Muslim vs. Christian.”

The Crusades ebbed and flowed over a 200-year period starting in the 11th century as European knights traveled to the Mideast, proclaiming they were doing God’s work in trying to reassert Christian rule in the Holy Land.

Behind the supposed religious compulsions were more pragmatic motives. Land, wealth and personal glory all drove the Crusades. Europe’s leaders also sought to give knights squabbling among each other a common enemy to fight. Muslims were easy targets.

Scott said he deliberately chose a time of anxious truce between the Second and Third Crusades, a period when Christians controlled Jerusalem under dying leper King Baldwin IV, who ruled it as an open city for those of all faiths.

Muslims were rallied behind the wise general Saladin, whose restraint and diplomatic savvy maintained the relative tranquility between Arabs and Christians.

“I was always attracted to the idea of the knight and the notion of the man walking around dressed in steel and fighting for right, whatever that was,” Scott said. “But I didn’t just want to do any Crusades story. This period was interesting because it was a time of peace that was dominated by these two incredibly extraordinary characters.”

The film centers on an educated young French blacksmith, Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), questioning his faith amid grief over his wife’s death. The father he never knew, a Crusader knight (Liam Neeson), recruits Balian to accompany him back to Jerusalem and take up the family trade.

Called on to lead the defense of Jerusalem against a Muslim siege, Balian earns the respect of friend and foe alike and comes to realize the fallacy driving the Crusades, Scott said – the “perception of taking back what is ours, when in fact, as we say in the film, it isn’t actually ours. It’s everyone’s.”

“Kingdom of Heaven” ends with a bit of text recapping the centuries of strife in the Middle East following the Crusades.

“It’s so relevant today,” Bloom said. “The last caption of the movie is, a thousand years later, we’re still doing the same thing, still fighting one another over the same religious divides, and Jerusalem is still in conflict. It’s like: When are we going to learn?”

Still, the mere notion of a Crusades film in a post-Sept. 11 world seemed as though it would be asking for trouble.

In September 2001, Bush stoked resentment among Muslims when he described his campaign against terrorism as a “crusade.” The president said later through a spokesman that he regretted using the word, which invokes images of religious wars against Muslims.

After the demise of the Soviet Union deprived Hollywood of a ready source of communist bad guys, Arab terrorists became an easy substitute as the heavies in action films.

But “Kingdom of Heaven” could help change that perception. Revered as a unifying figure among Muslims, Saladin presents a stately, upstanding portrait for audiences accustomed to movie stereotypes of Arab villains.

“I think Muslims will be extremely proud and happy, because they’re seen as noble, chivalrous characters,” said actress Eva Green, who appears in the film. “Especially in this Crusade, the Arab people behaved in a more noble way than the Christian people.

“Saladin was such a great character. He was the hero of his time.”