Queen of the Desert movie review (2017)
It’s clear Herzog is trying to craft “Queen of the Desert” within the lineage of the traditional star vehicle. From the epic “Gone with the Wind” to the intense “The Little Foxes,” classic Hollywood was able to create films that operated as lush, at times bombastic spectacles in order to showcase the strengths of their leading ladies. But instead of heightening Kidman’s qualities—her luminescence, chilliness, and finely wrought emotional intelligence—“Queen of the Desert” flattens these traits. It takes more than a sweeping score, beautiful cinematography, and drawn out narrative to make an engaging star vehicle. More than anything they require a strong personality and point of view from both director and star, which is regrettably in short supply here.
"Queen of the Desert" is so focused on Bell's romantic life that it fails to develop anything else about her. What pulls this woman to explore these different cultures and face-off with far more powerful men keen on underestimating her? At one point Bell says in voiceover, “For the first time in my life I know who I am.” By the end of the film I still didn’t. Instead I was left with questions. Why was Bell so drawn to her line of work? How did she reckon with being so blindingly ambitious in a time in which the exact opposite was encouraged in women of her stature? What drew her to specifically travel this part of the world? While the people around her cringingly toast to the British Empire with little care to the colonization that makes their wealth possible, Bell genuinely cares for the people she crosses in her travels through the Middle East. She garners their respect and admiration in turn for reasons the film never seeks to explore with much depth. The decision to focus on Bell’s romantic life as the core of the story could be more worthwhile if any characters had a psychological richness to them.
One of the biggest mistakes of “Queen of the Desert” is in not interrogating the nature of Bell’s ambition. Currently, women’s ambition is at a premium. It’s seen in the marketing of brands, the recently erected bronze “Fearless Girl” statue in Wall Street, and explored in recent works like "Big Little Lies." This gives Bell’s struggle between her own desires and social constraints a timely quality. Ambition, particularly for women, is a tricky attribute. It’s a trait shaped by class, race, and access. It can be both destructive and admirable. For Bell it comes across as both, given what’s sacrificed at the altar of her pursuit of intellectual and professional desires. It’s a worthwhile subject matter to explore. Unfortunately, it’s given only cursory interest in various one-liners about Bell’s independence or in the simplistically rendered showdowns she has with powerful men, as if that is enough.
“Queen of the Desert” demonstrates how staid a biopic can become when it forgets the icons at its center were also once human beings teeming with dreams, sins yearnings and contradictions. People are drawn to these kinds of stories not to see beautiful recreations of facts they can look up on Wikipedia but to take an intimate view on the human beings that made history.
