Mongol: The wrath of Khan

Mongol, the Academy Award-nominated epic about Genghis Khan, sometimes proves strangely reminiscent of “The Attila the Hun Show.” The old Monty Python sketch depicted the Hunnish warlord as a beaming family man who returned each night to his suburban home after a hard day of putting Central Europe to the sword.

The sweeping period piece doesn’t go to such a rosy extreme in its portrayal of the Mongol conqueror – it never shows Khan in gauzy slow-motion, pushing his kids on a tire swing, for instance. Mongol hinges, however, on its revisionist notion of an enlightened Temudjin, who was dubbed with the title “Genghis Khan” after his death. Throughout the film, Temudjin comes across not as a bloodthirsty superwarrior, but a reasonably sensitive guy whose military success derives from the love of a good woman and belief in the rule of law.

A Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, the Kazakhstani production works as a kind of trans-Asian melting pot, featuring a Russian director, a Japanese leading man and actors ranging from Chinese movie stars to Kazakh nonprofessionals. Director Sergei Bodrov displays impressive powers of crowd control and widescreen composition, offering a period piece with the visual sweep and panoramic battles they don’t make any more without extensive CGI enhancement. Mongol clearly oversimplifies vast swaths of Temudjin’s life story, but still provides rousing entertainment that makes Hollywood’s action blockbusters look meek by comparison.

The first film in a proposed trilogy, Mongol depicts Temudjin’s life from 1172 through 1206 and follows a childhood-revenge trajectory not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian. Even at 9 years old, Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren) challenges the status quo, foiling his father’s plans for a strategic arranged marriage by proposing to a precocious girl named Borte from a minor tribe. Temudjin’s father, Esugei (Ba Sen), a brawling, boisterous clan leader, whisks the boy off on tribal business, creating a very long engagement.

A treacherous rival clan poisons Temudjin’s father, and one of Esugei’s lieutenants, Targutai (Amadu Mamadakov) claims the family possessions. Only a Mongol rule against killing children prevents Targutai from murdering the vengeful Temudjin, and the usurper keeps track of the boy’s height to determine when his execution will be socially acceptable. Some of Mongol’s most memorable imagery comes from the childhood section. Runaway Temudjin crashes through the surface of a frozen lake in one scene and sees a mystic wolf at a hilltop shrine a little later. Both sequences fade out rather than end definitively, as if dream, myth and history are blurring together.

Adult Temudjin (Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano) finds a key ally in his blood brother Jamukha, whom Chinese actor Honglei Sun plays with earthy, scene-stealing humor. In contrast to Temudjin’s father’s advice that “A man needs a woman with strong legs to make him happy” Jamukha counters that, “A horse is more important than a woman.” Temudjin falls on the pro-woman side of this debate, and convinces Jamukha to help him rescue grown-up Borte (Khulan Chuluun) from yet another rival tribe. Like the “Unleash hell” combat sequence in Gladiator, Mongol’s vigorous battle scenes feature high-impact editing, spraying blood and flying clots of dirt.

Temudjin comes across as a strangely passive hero for much of the film. He gets captured and put into stocks as a boy; captured and put into stocks as an adult; captured, enslaved and put on display by imperious foreigners, etc. Asano gives an extremely soft-spoken, almost melancholy performance that brings dignity to Temudjin’s then-radical sensitivity, so he doesn’t come across as merely a wimp. Asano’s and Chuluun’s loving interplay suggests a grounded marriage of equals. Temudjin accepts Borte’s child from another marriage as his own and seems enlightened before his time.

Asano’s gravitas captures a patience worthy of a mountain rather than a human being, and allows Temudjin to endure crippling setbacks, such as starving in an open-air prison. Still, Temudjin must have had some additional personal magnetism to unite the warring tribes and make him one of the world’s most effective leaders, but we see little of that quality. He mostly commands loyalty through honest dealings, such as the way he equitably shares battle spoils with his followers. When he leads an astonishingly huge army at the climax, and outmaneuvers an even larger multitude arrayed against him, we just have to take it on faith that the Mongols really dig him.

Bodrov frequently drinks in the severe beauty of the rolling steppes, and the film’s costumes and rituals have the credibility of a documentary, so Mongol feels more authentic than the likes of, say, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. The film lacks the nuanced vision of history and character that you find in David Lean’s similarly sprawling Lawrence of Arabia or Kurosawa’s masterpieces on feudal Japan.

If Mongol’s filmmakers made a biopic of George Washington, you just know they’d make an early centerpiece of him owning up to cutting down the cherry tree. Mongol espouses the theory of history suggested by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Mongol is nevertheless such a robust and thrilling treatment of Temudjin’s legend that it leaves you eager to tune into another installment of “The Genghis Khan Show.”