‘William Tell’ Review: Claes Bang Anchors an Old Fashioned Epic With a Modern Sensibility

You probably remember one thing about the Swiss folk hero William Tell: He used a bow and arrow to shoot an apple off the head of his son. But did you know that he did so on the orders of a cruel Austrian leader who wanted to quell any resistance to that country’s onerous occupation of Switzerland? Or that he became a leader of the Swiss resistance?

If you don’t remember the backstory to the bow, the boy and the apple, Irish director Nick Hamm’s “William Tell” is here to remind you, and to add a few of its own embellishments to the centuries-old folk tale. The film is big, brutal and beautiful — over the top at times and stirring at others. It finds modern resonance in a 14th century European legend, and for better and worse it also turns that legend into a slam-bang bit of muscular Hollywood-style entertainment.

The story opens on flashes of Tell lining up the shot for which he’s known, then backs up three days to supply just enough context. It’s the year 1307, and Tell (Claes Bang) is hunting with his son when a group of Austrian soldiers and tax collectors invade a local town in the Swiss mountains. When the leader, Gov. Wolfshot, rapes and kills a local woman, the dead woman’s husband returns to the town and kills the Austrian, then flees as the militia burns the village to the ground. Tell, who is nothing if not a man of honor, helps the villager, Baumgarten, get away.

Meanwhile, the Austrian King Albrecht, played by a malice-dripping Ben Kingsley, makes plans to dominate the Swiss from within. He’s also looking to find a politically advantageous match for his niece, Princess Bertha (Ellie Bamber), preferably to a particularly vicious Austrian governor, Gessler (an even more malice-dripping Connor Swindells). For her part, Bertha prefers a Swiss prince who is temporarily casting his lot with the invaders.

Gessler’s also in charge of the hunt for Baumgarter, and for the local leader and legendary archer who helped him escape. He eventually finds Tell and arrests him for failing to bow before an Austrian helmet placed on a pole in the middle of a Swiss town to elicit fealty. Gessler promises not to execute Tell if he can shoot an apple on his son’s head, which Tell reluctantly does – but before he makes the shot, Tell places two crossbow bolts in his belt. When asked the purpose of the second bolt, Tell says that if he’d hit his son with the first shot, he would have killed Gessler with the second. Infuriated but bound by his promise not to kill Tell, Gessler immediately orders him imprisoned for life.

Up to this point, “William Tell” the movie more or less follows William Tell the legend and “William Tell” the 1804 Friedrich Schiller play on which the film says it’s based. (The film’s depiction of the Austrian royalty doesn’t match, but that part of the story never quite lined up with historical fact anyway.)

The language is purposely stilted – “load thy bow”  and the like – but the visual language is pure 21st century action epic. Everything is writ large: Tell’s nobility, Gessler’s savagery and the sheer scale of this revenge tale set amidst craggy mountains and stormy lakes. Technically, the film is stunning, from Jamie D. Ramsay’s monumental cinematography to Tonino Zera’s production design and Francesca Sartori’s costumes to the score from Steven Price, who showed with Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity” that scale is no problem for a composer who began work in indie films.

That scale could be distracting if it weren’t anchored in recognizable human emotion, which is why Bang is so essential to “William Tell.” The Danish actor may be best known for roles like the museum curator in Ruben Ostlund’s “The Square” and the manipulative and abusive husband in the Irish TV series “Bad Sisters,” but he cuts a commanding figure and is adept at conveying authority while saying little.

“William Tell” needs Bang the way last year’s historical epic “The Promised Land” needed his countryman Mads Mikkelsen.  This version of Tell gives him a new backstory: He’s a pacifist who swore off violence after fighting in the Crusades and seeing unthinkable violence in the name of religion. “I’m stained in blood,” he says. “It haunts me now.”

But Tell returned from the battles for Jerusalem with more than just a change of heart; he also returned with a Middle Eastern wife, played by the gifted Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (“The Patience Stone,” “Paterson”). Those are two of the many tweaks made to the original story to give it contemporary resonance through parallels to the present day.

The female characters play a much more assertive role in this telling of the story, to the point of turning into action heroes of their own; bad guys make a point of praying and invoking religion; and the inevitable Tell/Gessler showdown is drawn out and upended from what happens in the legend, in a way clearly designed to appeal to a certain kind of modern sensibility.

This version of “William Tell” is enormously impressive and also more than a little odd: There are times when it goes over the top and becomes a typically loud Hollywood action flick (with a final scene that totally sets up a sequel), and times when it upends expectations to take the story in new directions.

You could say it’s a bit schizophrenic, a big old fashioned epic with a pronounced streak of modern awareness running through it. But it’s so handsomely mounted that it generally gets away with its excess, thanks in large measure to Bang and to a story that became legendary because it can reach to us across the centuries.

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