"The Reckoning": a muddled morality play

IN ITS PROMOTIONAL materials, "The Reckoning" is described as a story of redemption. Therefore, I expected at least one of the following to take place: 1) the guilty party would confess his crime before his accusers, 2) he would express his penitence to them, 3) he would ask forgiveness of them, 4) he would attempt to make whatever restitution was possible, or 5) he would submit to justice for his wrongdoing.

Sorry, folks, this is a more "cosmic" tale of redemption -- you know, the kind where an act of goodness counterbalances an earlier act of evil. This is a movie that still believes God is going to weigh the sum total of our actions, good and bad, against each other.

The story is about a priest (Paul Bettany) who is on the run from the law (for what crime exactly is unclear until the end ... or I should say is not spoken until the end, because it's pretty clear) in medieval England. He falls in with a group of traveling actors (led by Willem Dafoe) who arrive at a new a town in time to see the sentencing of a young woman for the charge of murder. The troupe decides to put on a morality play about the case, and in doing so discovers that the woman is innocent. A murder mystery ensues.

Everything about this movie screams 21st century. The camerawork and editing, for starters, are flashy and unreal, breaking the feel that you're at all in medieval times. The principle characters are all level-headed, rational thinkers while only the peasants are superstitutious and unscientific. The acting troupe, which has always performed as its plays scenes from the Bible, breaks with convention to put on this new morality play. "I have a feeling someday in the future all plays will be like this," says Dafoe's character, and I couldn't help but chuckle. The priest, who at the beginning is shown preaching an old-school sermon about how God inflicts suffering on us so that we are not tempted to enjoy this earthly life, is somehow transformed by his crime into a nice-guy spiritualist. (I understand the wish that a haughty and prideful person might be brought down to a place of contrition and compassion by a moral stumble -- but at the same time it's hard to swallow the idea that the path to greater openness of the heart is to commit criminal acts.)

There's a lot of interesting fodder in the movie, including the role of art in our society: to make us question, to illuminate, to awaken the conscience. There's plenty of moral wrestling about whether or not to abandon the innocent for the sake of one's own neck. It raises the question of whether people in positions of power in the church, the military, and politics should be held to -- or can be held to -- a higher standard of behavior. But in the end it doesn't amount to much. Any movie where inciting mob justice is condoned doesn't have much of a leg to stand on.