Producers: Piers Tempest, Marie-Christine Jaeger-Firmenich and Nick Hamm Director: Nick Hamm Screenplay: Nick Hamm Cast: Claes Bang, Connor Swindells, Golshifteh Farahani, Jonah Hauer-King, Ellie Bamber, Rafe Spall, Amar Chadha-Patel, Sam Keeley, Jake Dunn, Tobias Jowett, Solly McLeod, Emily Beecham, Éanna Hardwicke, Jess Douglas-Welsh, David Moorst, Neva Leoni, Theo Hamm, Colin Bennett, Billy Postlethwaite, Diarmaid Murtagh, Jonathan Pryce and Ben Kingsley Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Grade: C
Nick Hamm’s adventure movie about the legendary medieval Swiss hero starts off with the obvious hook: Tell (Claes Bang) raises his bow and aims an arrow at the apple propped on his son’s head a good distance away. But it won’t be for another hour, halfway into “William Tell,” that we’ll see the actual shot. Could anyone have thought this would generate suspense?
In the meantime Hamm gives us a revved-up version of the 1804 play by the influential German philosopher and author Friedrich Schiller, perhaps best remembered today for penning the poem that Beethoven set as the “Ode to Joy” in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony. Hamm makes changes, of course—often in the interest of contemporary resonance—and adds a coda that will invite a sequel if box office receipts warrant one. He also offers large-scale battle sequences that could never have been attempted on the nineteenth-century stage but are obligatory in this sort of twenty-first century fare.
In fundamental terms, though, the film is surprisingly true to its source: it’s a tale of the struggle for liberty against tyranny, a theme that’s as topical today as it was then, intended to rouse us to righteous anger against the oppressor and idolize the rebellious hero. Unfortunately, in this rather Hamm-fisted form, Tell’s legend comes across as rather a slog.
Mixing historical background with legend, the story is set in motion in 1307, when the Austrian king Albert I of Habsburg (Ben Kingsley), aka “the One-Eyed,” is extracting taxes from the disunited Swiss cantons. In the folk tradition, he exercises control through a ruthless bailiff, Albrecht Gessler (Connor Swindells). Tell, a farmer reluctant to get involved in the resistance movement as a result of the horrors he witnessed as a crusader, has nonetheless assisted a man being pursued by the king’s soldiers at the insistence of his wife Suna (Golshifteh Farahani) and son Walter (Tobias Jowett), and though still resistant to the idea of becoming a leader of the opposition, falls afoul of Gessler by neglecting to pay proper respect to Albert’s authority. It’s Gessler who orders the renowned bowman to shoot the apple off Walter’s head as a public punishment and then jails him; the arrest prompts the squabbling canton leaders to coalesce in open rebellion.
Tell’s emergence as a rebel icon is contrasted with the decision of Rudenz (Jonah Hauer-King), heir-apparent to the esteemed Swiss House of Attinghausen headed by his aged uncle (Jonathan Pryce), to give his loyalty to Albert, not merely out of political calculation but because of his love for Berta (Ellie Bamber), Albert’s niece, whose hand he hopes to win—though Gessler is also interested in her. After seeing Gessler’s cruelty, Rudenz goes over to the rebels, and feisty Berta supports them as well. In fact, she frees Tell, who now joins the rebel movement and becomes one of its leaders.
There follow serious reverses, like an assault on a fortress held by Gessler that’s betrayed and fails with severe losses. But Tell rallies his followers to undertake another assault, which succeeds. Gessler responds by seizing Walter and threatening to kill him, intending to hold the boy until relief forces arrive, but they turn back after learning that Berta has killed Albert. Walter succeeds in freeing himself from Gessler’s grasp but urges Tell to allow the fuming Gessler to live rather than sink to his level. Victory seems to be won, but Berta reports that Albert’s daughter Agnes (Jess Douglas-Welsh) has sworn to take vengeance on the Swiss for her father’s death. Another war looms as the film ends.
It’s not hard to discern similarities between the Tell legend and that of Robin Hood, but the contrast between Hamm’s dour effort and Michael Curtiz’s classic 1938 take on the latter couldn’t be more striking, the one grimly serious and the other jaunty fun. While Bang has all the charisma of Jason Statham on a bad day, Errol Flynn lights up the screen with derring-do; though Swindells sneers mightily, he can’t match the peerless villainy of Basil Rathbone; and while Kingsley merely snarls and growls, the incomparable Claude Rains turns Prince John into a deliciously slippery baddie. Even Beecham’s spunk—her role increased, obviously to enhance her feminist credentials, by making her the assassin of Albert, a task assigned by Schiller to Duke John (here reduced to inconsequentiality as played by Theo Hamm)—pales beside the luminosity of Olivia de Havilland’s Maid Marian.
Of course there are no Merry Men here—merriment has been banished in Hamm’s gloomy world, and all the Swiss rebels are a somber lot, the prevailing mood accentuated by Jamie D. Ramsay’s gray, muddy cinematography, a production design by Tonino Zera that emphasizes mud and muck, editing by Yan Miles that’s staid except when it becomes energetically chaotic in the fight sequences, and a score by Steven Price that’s as instantly forgettable as Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s for Curtiz was memorable.
But in a nod to diversity, Tell’s wife Suna is a woman he met during his unhappy service as a crusader in the Holy Land, and Walter is thus of mixed blood. This fact allows Gessler to characterize the boy as a “mongrel,” making him even more hissable. But like the feminist-inspired expansion of Berta’s part in the rebellion (to the loss of Rudenz, who in Hauer-King’s performance emerges as a handsome dullard) the choice just feels like a cheap contrivance designed to draw attention to modern forms of oppression.
Recent French versions of old Dumas potboilers—“The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”—have proven that these warhorses can be dusted off and made to live again for modern audiences. By contrast Nick Hamm’s “William Tell” bungles a classic legend. Listen to Rossini’s overture instead.