The Last Of Robin Hood – written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Biopic. 94 minutes Color 2014.
★★
The Story: A faded movie star takes up with 15 year-old girl, abetted in the affair by her mother.
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A hollow enterprise, since it is miscast.
Everyone knows that Errol Flynn was a magnificent specimen, 6’2”, elegant, slender, athletic, beautifully proportioned, and gorgeous. Kevin Kline is none of these things and never was. But if you are to play the part of an actor whom everyone still watches in movies, you have to have some of those things, and the most important of them is probably to be 6’2”. Hugh Jackman, who comes from Flynn’s part of the world (Tasmania), is the right age and the obvious choice to play him, for the wreck of that seagoing yacht Errol Flynn needs the oomph of the remains.
Kline brings his charm to it, his fine appearance in well-tailored clothes, his way with a cigarette. We all love Kevin Kline and want him to be good – but his Flynn accent is slightly off – why is that? Flynn came from an academic background, and actually had breeding, and Kline has no trouble in convincing us he was a gentleman. But you have to get Flynn’s accent exactly right to do it. And you have to get his crocked grin, too, his sense of conning you for all you’re worth. But the script leaves him with nothing more than a journeyman-like performance to enact. We do not have scenes of Flynn’s merriment, sense of fun, playfulness, or even his love and skill with the sea. We hear about it, but we never see it.
Susan Sarandon is equally miscast as the mother of this nymphet. She is too old to play her. She skirts around the role, as she often does with parts, and does not take it head on. She has lines and scenes that tell us what the character is, but we never see from Sarandon what the character is. She is the guardian and promoter of a grande cocotte. But she herself is not grand. She has bought into being touched by the greatness of a Hollywood star as her highest moral value in life. This we never see in the actress. We hear it in the lines, but not in the actress. There is a value system at play larger than the one before us with this woman, and we need to feel it.
Finally, there is Dakota Fanning, woefully under-cast in the part of the girl. In real life, Beverly Aadland was as sexy as a young Brigitte Bardot, and couldn’t help being so, any more than Bardot could when young. Flynn was mesmerized by her. She evidently had a full natural grasp of repartee, which anyone would be drawn to once they had stopped making out. Dakota Fanning is no sexier than a pudding. It is not her fault. It is not her fault that there is no way at all that she could play this role. She has none of the natural taunt of such a girl, none of the erotic drive and certainty, none of the inherent readiness.
Unless the movie-going public is fascinated to know about the private life of these three now after so many years have gone by that no one remembers it at all any more, I think they will stay away in as large a group as I observed staying away from the seats where I witnessed this unfortunately titled dud stumbling forth from the screen. Spare your penny. See Kline in something else.