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‘1492: Conquest of Paradise’
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
October 09, 1992
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Ridley Scott's sumptuous but vacuous account of the Genoese mariner who didn't discover America, "1492: Conquest of Paradise," stars Gerard Depardieu, who as pretty much everyone knows is French. And not just sorta French, either. He's French right down to the thickest of all possible French accents. Which means that, aside from looking like the Skipper on "Gilligan's Island," every time he opens his mouth some vaguely comprehensible howler springs out like a toad."Asia can be found to the west," he bellows, "and I will probe it." Excuse me? Do you mean "prove" it? You can see how we might have problems stifling our fun at the movie's expense when a goodly supply of such priceless badness is put on display. Aside from the chutzpah of having a Frenchman and a notoriously lazy actor play an Italian in the court of a Spanish queen, the other actors -- primarily Sigourney Weaver, Armand Assante, Tcheky Karyo and Fernando Rey -- pose and shift their weight carefully in Charles Knode's ravishing costumes, certain that their clothes and not themselves are the real stars. Whatever real issues may be addressed -- such as the mistreatment of Indians -- take a back seat to empty pageantry. The costumes share the bill with the art direction, the set designs and the awe-inspiring period decorations. Not least, though, is the work of cinematographer Adrian Biddle ("Thelma & Louise" and "Aliens"), who creates the illusion that the court of Queen Isabel (Weaver) was perpetually washed in golden light. Nothing wrong with that, except that the ships during their long, arduous voyage have this fabulous light too -- and this was far from a cruise on the Love Boat. Historically, the movie's point of view is that Columbus was the equivalent of the NASA astronauts: Like John Glenn or Neil Armstrong, he forged a path to a New World. Columbus may not have been the first man to speculate that the Earth was not flat, with its borders guarded by demons, but he was the first to have the drive and the passion to get funding for his experiment. And the way he did it was to, well, lie. He had no way of knowing, of course, just how far the Indies were from Spain, but when asked he fudged an answer, misleading his crew, the queen and her treasurer (Assante), and the shipbuilder Pinzon (Karyo). These are small sins, though, when you consider that he was seen as a heretic and his aim was to change all of his contemporaries' assumptions about the world. That he also turns out to be rather a bad manager once he gets to the New World only slightly tarnishes his heroic aura. To director Scott and screenwriter Roselyne Bosch, the atrocities against the natives came about not as a product of evil but through Columbus's ineptitude as a political leader. Still, this failure -- and his frustration over never actually reaching mainland America -- renders him a tragic figure. Though he was the dreamer and pioneer who first set foot in the New World and brought treasures and territory to Spain, he died all but forgotten. The movie, alas, for all its wondrous beauty, is destined to suffer a similar fate.
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