William Tell is at once large and small. It is an ambitious adaptation of 19th century theatre, and it is a bloodthirsty action movie; it is a European independent film, but it feels like an American blockbuster. And I’m tempted to say that, despite being a bad film, William Tell has the spirit of something good. How do we understand this contradiction? Usually, it might be thought to mean a film that is fundamentally stupid, but delivered with such electricity as to elevate it into contrary heights. But in the case of William Tell, it is quite the opposite. Here is a film built of a solid, sturdy foundation, on which almost every superficial element is flimsy or broken. It is, in essence, a good idea badly executed. It is also something of an oddity: it is not unlike catching a glimpse of a thylacine while on a pleasant stroll through deepest Tasmania.
To understand it we must travel back some 20 years or more. Here we find ourselves in a Hollywood very much in love with Europe (or adjacent folklore); a Hollywood for whom large-scale, unpretentious, macho tellings of Euro-history were in the ascendency. The type can be swiftly established: look to Antonie Fuqua’s King Arthur; Mel Gibson’s Braveheart; the Robin Hoods of Kevin Reynolds and Ridley Scott, as well as the latter director’s Gladiator; Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy; Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans; Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai; or even Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. This genre of action-epic has since become extinct, replaced by somewhat more serious fare (such as Scott’s own Kingdom of Heaven, or Oliver Stone’s Alexander, both of which deconstruct the legends around which they are built) and by a swing into myth and fantasy. William Tell also marks its thylacine stripes in budget: coming in at around $45 million, this occasionally-handsome film occupies that exceedingly rare position between the high- and low-budget feature. Enough to engage in some of the legitimate scale required for a grand historical film; perhaps not enough to match the gleam of its forebears. Once again, Willaim Tell finds itself between. A simultaneous anachronism, the early 21st and early 19th centuries blended into a straightforward attempt at entertainment. Perhaps it is too early to dissect William Tell’s failure; in which case a vivisection is in order. Strange organs are to be discovered within, stitched by an uncertain hand.
What, then, is the idea of William Tell? As might be anticipated, it is a retelling of that old Swiss legend: the man who founded the Swiss confederacy in rebelling against Habsburg tyranny; the man who shot an apple off the head of his young boy; the man who inspired Rossini to write the best horse music of all time. But not merely that: Hamm is specifically adapting the Fredrich Schiller play that accounts the legend, much as Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy and L. F. Bis adapted that play for Rossini’s opera. But it is possible that Hamm keeps closer to the text than those esteemed Frenchmen, and in doing so he inherits the strong shoulders of Schiller’s drama. To make clear with comparison: Étienne and Bis shrink Schiller’s often episodic structure into a continuous stream of typically parallel dramas. The geographical, even political element of the play is replaced by a close-knit series of characters who (as might be expected in an operatic treatment) express their inner desires in extensive bouts of high emotion. The romance between Rudenz and Bertha is both simplified and given much greater presence; Tell’s character is made bolder and more straightforward; the Swiss front becomes essentially united against the Austrian foe. Hamm instead prefers the diffusion of Schiller’s play, tracing various distinct subplots as they drive toward one another, looking to establish at least some variety in personal motivation (or demotivation in the case of Tell); Hamm seems to acknowledge that beneath its obvious entertainment factor, Schiller’s play is about interpreting “liberty” as an objective and national value; and feeding this idea through the cross-section of the Forest Cantons.
The points of distinction between Schiller and Hamm are perhaps instructive. In the first place, and most crucially, he simplifies considerably the historical context. It is difficult for anyone, however brave, to look at map of the 14th century Holy Roman Empire without developing an immediate migraine, let alone understanding the arcane workings of its design. Even Schiller simplifies his schemata somewhat, by ignoring the Great Interregnum and referring to the play’s Albert I as an emperor, when he was (strictly speaking) only king of Germany. Much of his play deals with the subtle distinction between the Swiss vassalage to the empire and the Swiss resistance to the agents of the emperor: the Austrian-Habsburg emperor represented a passing evil, whereas the imperial idea could be salvaged. Schiller posits a historical ideal, by which a benign overlord might service protection and require military assistance in times of peril — and no more. Albert and his Habsburg attendants had discredited this arrangement, by sallying into the Swiss cantons and demanding taxation, if not complete capitulation. Is it possible to oppose Austria, whose duke was emperor, without then opposing the empire more holistically? Or else is it more rational to submit to Austria, and so accept the potential-mercy of integration?
This range of questioning makes for the intellectual content of the play. And if it sounds at all confusing, the decisions made by the filmmakers will not need much justification. Hamm guts the empire entirely from the plot. We are left instead with an invented “Kingdom of Austria,” which is incurring the independent, partially occupied Swiss cantons: the Swiss must submit or resist. In this reduced version, Albert I — who is a distant figure in the play, and whose betrayal of the Swiss is only made clear in the latter acts — becomes an active character, personally invested in the conquest of Switzerland. The question is therefore made direct: is it justifiable to break the persecution of occupation with the totality of war? Is it wiser to integrate into the greater (and, so they claim, more civilized) aggressing force when resistance threatens the livelihood of all? Hamm has spoken about his being influenced by the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza (in both cases, capitulation has been frequently advised by those from faraway lands); Schiller was himself clearly referring to the recent revolutions in America and France, and the still-emperored Habsburgs who, in the year of William Tell’s first performance, had created the Empire of Austria. Much as Hamm simplifies the question, then, so he simplifies the answer: a total resistance is both possible and necessary; where he seeks complexity is in the psychology of resistance.
This is represented by the second major change to Schiller’s text. While the William Tell of the play is not directly involved in the revolutionary schemes of the Switzers, he is swift to engage himself in their action when required; in Étienne and Bis’ treatment, Tell is the personification of libertarian fervor from the off; Hamm’s Tell is different. While quick to aid a fellow in need, he is reluctant to engage himself in active resistance. A key image in Schiller’s play is reconstrued in this light. In the play, Stussi informs Tell of “a knight… on his way to court, / And as he rode along a swarm of wasps / Surrounded him, and settling on his horse, / So fiercely stung the beast that it fell dead.” Tell responds, “Even the weak are furnished with a sting” — so he says, a single bolt in hand, ready to assassinate the tyrannical Gessler. In Hamm’s film, it is Tell who relates this story, with a key difference: they were not wasps, but bees. And so the many bees do kill the horse — his own horse in this version — but in the afterword all die themselves. The tyrant (o, tyrannical horse) is destroyed, but so too all those who struck him. The reluctance of the hero is made endemic to his character. Hamm weaves a flashback structure into the narrative, in which Tell is depicted as a crusader in the alleyways of Jerusalem (N.B. there is no credible timeline in which it is possible for the 14th-century Tell to have fought there). Here we encounter the now classic representation of The Crusades: a confused, savage conflict, in which the Muslim Jerusalemites are terrorized by Christian men-at-arms. We see the injured Tell is nursed by Muslim civilians; we eventually see that he bolts down a fellow crusader to save his own Muslim savior — here is born his suspicion of noble causes. Is there better than to fight for God? In casting Claes Bang, Hamm makes of Tell an older, jaded character: he elopes with the woman he saves in Jerusalem, and seeks no more of battle.
In developing this theme, it becomes another: the distinction between a vendetta and a political action. This might be a lightly ingenious attempt to adapt the otherwise unadaptable final act of Schiller’s play. In this final act — after Gessler has been dispatched, and all narrative stakes have slacked — the characters hear word of a distant action: Emperor Albert has been assassinated by his hitherto unknown nephew John, indignant that his uncle had cheated him out of an inheritance. In the penultimate scene of the play, John appears to Tell assuming he would find sympathy: both have assassinated their rivals, and both had a strong personal motivation in doing so. It is here Schiller must awkwardly place the moral dialectic: Tell’s assassination was motivated by the “direful need” of a father — the motivation is made paternal, and metaphorical of a natural urge against a tyranny that threatens not only the current generation, but the next. John’s assassination was purely “ambition’s bloody crime”; Tell has “avenged / That holy nature which [John] has profaned.” Which is to say: not all political violence is equal; there is a natural law and a desecration thereof; Schiller does not advocate for a universe of violence. Tell’s final action is therefore not one of violence (the killing of Gessler), but of mercy. He tells John he must journey to Rome and seek absolution — or punishment — from the Pope. Tell will facilitate his escape. Here, perhaps, lies also Tell’s hope of absolution — to take a life, and to spare one. While Hamm includes the assassination of Albert, he does so via a different character, with different narrative meaning and outcome. Tell’s drama must be expressed elsewhere.
The solution is this: Tell stakes out to kill Gessler without declaring himself for the rebellion; he does so to fulfill the vendetta between them. His intention is not to liberate Switzerland, but to kill the man who made him shoot at his boy — the grandiose notion of Schiller’s play is soaked in the common blood of blockbuster cinema. He makes the shot — he misses. Gessler is maimed but not killed. Tell’s intention to pursue his personal revenge while shirking his friends is a failure; Gessler (and Austria) can only be defeated if it is not an individual that opposes him, but a nation. As Fürst says in both film and play: “Revenge is barren. Of itself it makes / The dreadful food it feeds on; its delight / Is murder — its satiety despair.” Herein is Schiller’s nationalist theme (and what strange joy to see a work of Swiss propaganda written by a German and here adapted by an Irishman) beamed into a new structure: the final siege of Altdorf, in which every character must commit themselves to the joint effort — to value life (Switzerland!) over death (Gessler’s end). Hamm makes this the premise of his least convincing revisionism, in which every female character is handed a sword and thrown into the midst of battle: his intention to expand upon the female role in the Tell legend is admirable enough, but his solution is grimly predictable. And then, at last, the finale, in which Tell’s mercy to John is reconstructed: he will spare Gessler’s life at the last, and thereby redeem the butchery in his mind — his soul made free from thoughts of murder. That he has just done with massacring a whole host of Austrian footmen is, as ever, by-the-by.
But however impressive Hamm’s galleon appears, sailing there in tall majesty, it is in his most considerable fealty to Schiller that its masts vanish beneath the waves. Despite his various (and at times extensive) divergences from Schiller’s narrative, Hamm leans frequently on direct quotations of dialogue, in what appears to be the accessible translation by Theodore Martin made in the late 19th century. Schiller’s idiom is a lush, highly romantic poetry: it dances in an iambic pentameter, and therefore demands from its actors a familiarity with that theatrical mode. This is why I include Henry V in the list of this film’s ancestors: in that film Branagh successfully imports an entire film of Shakespearean dialogue into the genre of mainstream rip-roarer; and, as ever with Shakespeare, it is in game and capable performers that such high language can swivel and bend in such a way that the film does not become weirdly arch or stilted. The inverse case might be found in Jamie Lloyd’s recent big-budget stage production of The Tempest, whose Prospero — Sigourney Weaver — has received such violent reviews. It is not so much that Weaver is incapable of finding the mood appropriate for Lloyd’s approach, but rather that she has no intimacy with the language. Each line of iambic tangle is treated as though an obstacle to climb over; to survive the dialogue, rather than dwell within it, seems to be Weaver’s utmost instinct. Emphasis, wit, and emotion are therefore ripped out of all but the most obvious lines — and if Shakespeare’s language is made to be a wall, then the performer can only crash into it repeatedly.
Hamm must encounter this same problem, multiplied severalfold. Not only does he layer Schiller’s language throughout his film, but he entwines it closely with his own — a bold and at times disastrous move, in which an already archaic idiom from the early 19th century, translated in the late 19th century, must sit alongside a modern “Hollywood” version of the same. The metre of Schiller’s writing is naturally abandoned in Hamm’s; this leaves an actor between modes, attempting either to poetize Hamm’s natural, or naturalize Schiller’s poetic. This latter route is the one taken. This problem is made the worse by a host of incompetent or disinclined actors. Most dreadful is Ellie Bamber, who makes a meal of every iambic foot given her, seeming to lose not only the rhythm of the dialogue, but at times the very words. Her performance is a more wired version of Weaver’s Prospero: not a speaking of dialogue, but a battle against it (and one she cannot win). Otherwise dependable actors like Rafe Spall and Jonathan Pryce just about make account, but little more; perhaps Connor Swindells is the only performer who truly finds the groove with his Gessler, though his character might suffer the most from the blended idioms of Hamm and Schiller. Ben Kingsley, who might have been ideal in his role as Albert, seems not to care; an on-screen yawn would have surprised no one.
All eyes then are left to fall on Claes Bang, who seems the most remarkable casting decision in a gang of vaguely recognizable faces. On a conceptual level, I approve: he is capable of silent presence; his age shelters him from the “Swiss Robin Hood” allegations; he has a fundamentally interesting face, very capable in expressing a world-weary groan with a glance. But he is only competent when he is very quiet or very loud; at the middle volume opted for here, his performance somehow crumbles. This is most obvious in the obligatory Last Battle Speech — wholly Hamm’s — in which Tell produces what might be the least compelling call to action ever filmed. It isn’t necessarily a problem of writing — insofar as this same generic speech has been performed hundreds of times, and stirringly if given sufficient chutzpah — but rather an actor totally off his footing. It would have been much the wiser to pull a Moses-and-Aaron type maneuver: “Tell is a man of few words, let me [CHARISMATIC OTHER CHARACTER] rouse the troops!” Alas, this dexterity in decision-making — and in general filmmaking — seems largely beyond Hamm’s capabilities.
If the film suffers greatly, even fatally, from the prongs of confused dialogue and baffled actors, it must be given the final chop by frequently inconsistent direction. I might start with some praise, if only to prove that there is something worthy in the woods here. The location shooting is all a marvel — if A Hidden Life proved anything about Life and God, it was that the Tyrolean hills are peerless in alpine beauty. Every otherwise ordinary scene in this film is risen several levels by the predominance of snowcapped peaks, vertical fields, a great mesh of rock and awe. So much of Schiller’s play feeds off the texture of the Swiss countryside — his stage directions are long and impossibly detailed — and here Hamm succeeds in such a way as Schiller, even Rossini, could only dream. Hamm also decks his production with occasionally impressive detail: in Schiller’s play, Attinghausen is introduced as “clad in a furred pelisse, and leaning on a staff tipped with chamois horn” — this cue is followed precisely in the film; it is often surprising where efforts toward authenticity are focused.
Hamm’s staging of the final assault upon Altdorf is also impressive, and developed in a manner that often escapes far larger, more expensive productions. Consider the recent siege of Eregion, as depicted in The Rings of Power, which alone likely cost more than the sum of William Tell, and is almost equal to Tell’s total runtime. That Middle Earth-set siege, while glittering with massive set pieces, had no detectable logic — whether absent in conception or (far more likely) cut up in the edit, it is impossible to follow the rationale of the attackers or defenders in this many-layered melee. Hamm’s siege is a far smaller affair, but arranged with a certain deftness: we understand the three angles of attack (the attacking force divided into the “north” and “south,” abetted by an infiltrated “central” unit), and can follow the progress of each across the edit. One particular shot seemed to express this unity of purpose: a crane shot that begins at the “south” attack and peers up to see the “north” in the distance, positioning the defending Austrians in the center of the town (exactly where Tell’s crossbow challenge was staged). When battle is finally joined in the square, this order is lost in general fisticuffs, but the mechanical action of the siege until this point is mustered with clarity and confidence.
But elsewhere Hamm is frequently victim to weakness in staging and dramaturgy. A classic example comes early in the film: after Melchtal escapes into the woods and joins Tell’s ragtag band, he spies his father being bullied by an Austrian inquisition. He is told by Tell and the gang that they cannot intervene. They watch as Melchtal’s father is stabbed: at Melchtal’s request, Tell relents and fires a bolt at the groaning father. He is put out of his misery. Immediately following, battle commences, and every Austrian is slain without much difficulty. We wonder why an intervention wasn’t staged immediately before Melchtal’s father was stabbed; it is a shabby way to play the scene. Similar is Tell’s failed assassination of Gessler. In the play he brings only one bolt — the one promised for Gessler. In the film, he brings two bows and two quivers — he’s not planning on missing. And yet, after flunking the first shot, Tell manages to use every other bolt on inconsequential henchmen, all while Gessler himself is in pursuit! This is not an unusual scenario from which to milk an action sequence (as in the other scene); but such a scene can only play if the director contrives a reasonably good rationale for why it could go no other way — Hamm fails at this requirement frequently.
We can then refer to the film’s central scene — the apple on the head — which is a set piece of accomplished scale and length. While the shot itself is rendered reasonably well, Hamm botches the build-up. In Schiller’s play, Tell fails to bow to the Austrian cap by accident, but as a deranged punishment Gessler demands he shoots an apple from his son’s head. He is given no alternative. In Hamm’s film, Gessler apparently dreams up this scheme in order to induce Tell’s submission. Tell initially refuses to bow when given the opportunity (Rossini’s opera plays a similar way), but when apple-demand is made, the remainder of the scene is played just as in Schiller — Tell is given no opportunity to bow, and so Gessler’s improvised attempt at cowing the Swiss is suddenly abandoned. The beautiful simplicity of Gessler’s demand — the image that immortalizes William Tell in legend — is confused with needless extra detail. Why characterize Tell, who is otherwise noted for his reluctance to assist the resistance, as a man who would risk his boy on a formality? This is perhaps a consequence of Tell’s inserted crusader-backstory — a necessity for moral confusion — but even there Hamm fails to draw a close visual or dramatic parallel between the crucial crossbow-shot of Tell’s past and present (nor that of the future, Gessler-bound).
But perhaps these expectations are themselves overcooked. If this film belongs to the since-extinct genre of the Hollywood historical epic, surely it is always at risk of — or even designed to — exist in the neighborhood of schlock? This is never clearer than in the film’s ending, where the most absurd sequel tag (more absurdly quoted nearly word-for-word from Schiller, though not his ending) must remind us all of a time in which the “franchise” was not built into a Hollywood film’s nervous system, but rather chanced at just before the credits. The least artistic compromise: imagine an opera that suddenly leapt into a new, unresolved cadence in the final bars, just to tease a sequel that may or may not come to pass. That is the feeling of an old-fashioned sequel tag, not least one that will inevitably produce no sequel. But there is something endearing in it in the same way much of William Tell is endearing; for all its cleverness in structure and source, it is schlock. This is a cinema designed to be muscular, and exciting, and ridiculous. It contains a man severing limbs with an unpredictably sharp scythe; it contains Assassin’s Creed monks with wrist-bound crossbows; it has the big bad and his twink sidekick. These tropes do not necessarily sink a given film. There is something unpretentious and direct about them — the same substance that runs through Peter Jackson’s more infantile reflexes in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Jackson, too, makes a reasonably close adaptation of a literary great; perhaps no filmmaker has succeeded in blending the high and the low so closely. And in the case of Hamm, he seems convinced he can mold Schiller into a crossbow aimed at joy, and joy alone. Not a revisionist take; and for all its backstory and psychology, it is ultimately going for the exact same pulse that runs through the overture of Rossini’s William Tell. Galloping, whistling, at speed. But that kind of cinema requires either extreme competence in direction, or extreme charisma in performance. If both are achieved, it is schlock for the gods. If neither, William Tell.
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