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Hollywood Version

The Third Crusade was never like this.

May 16, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 33 • By JOHN PODHORETZ
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Kingdom of Heaven may be the single most anachronistic motion picture ever made. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan would have you believe that there was once a utopian moment when the city of Jerusalem was a multicultural and multiethnic paradise, run by wise men deeply suspicious of religious fanaticism. Try to catch your breath from the laughing jag you just enjoyed, because I haven't yet told you the capper, which is that this moment of wondrous comity supposedly came smack dab in the middle of the Crusades--the series of five wars between Christians and Muslims that altogether comprised the most vicious religious conflict in all of human history.

Kingdom of Heaven attributes to its heroic Christian and Muslim characters a cosmopolitan skepticism about faith, and a healthy tolerance for other cultures, that would have been literally unthinkable in the 12th century--an era in which there was absolutely no frame of intellectual, historical, hermeneutical, or philosophical reference for cultural relativism or agnosticism. God was an almost literal presence in the lives of the real people we see fictionalized on screen here. But rather than acting as though their duty in life is to do God's work, or to subjugate themselves to God's will, the good folk of Kingdom of Heaven tell each other that all they need do is keep an open mind and follow their hearts.

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