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'Messenger' delivers muddled message

Luc Besson must really love Milla Jovovich.

Sure she might have been his wife, but this kind of love goes beyond marriage. Consider their first feature together, "The Fifth Element." Here, she plays the perfect being sent from above to save the world from evil. And now, she plays a near-perfect Joan of Arc sent from above to save France from England in "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc." This must be a form of idol worship, although it is a shame that Besson could not have given Milla a better film than "Messenger."

Not as if that keeps Besson from inundating his film with Milla's presence. Granted, she is the main character, but Besson concentrates far too much on Joan's internal struggles, which thus diminishes the impact of the far more interesting external obstacles facing this brave woman.

The film's first two-thirds establish and develop these external obstacles rather poignantly. Joan begins as a young girl, who, after experiencing her first vision from God, witnesses the brutal rape and murder of her sister at the hands of English soldiers.

Then because God has told her to, she becomes driven to save France, but first she must convince a suspicious Charles VII (John Malkovich) - who cannot be crowned king until the English are defeated - to give her an army. She overcomes his doubts and then she overcomes the doubts of her fellow soldiers in her ability to wage a war. She proves herself to all and the audience cheers her on at every turn and then. . .

She turns on herself. The validity of Joan's visions, up to this point, have been doubted but never discredited, always proving to be truthful. The film's opening titles even label her a "miracle." But then Besson takes this heroine's entire struggle and slaughters it like an English soldier on the battlefield.

Joan's conscience, in the form of a hooded Dustin Hoffman, visits her in a prison cell as she undergoes a witch trial, questions the validity of her visions and of her quest. No one in the theater, however, has any idea that Hoffman is her conscience unless one reads the closing credits. Before then, he seems to be a devil figure which would have made sense: the external embodiment of evil comes to torment a saint.

Rather he is Joan's own self-doubt, the inclusion of which undermines Besson's entire film up to this point. It is a modern trend in biopics to humanize the subject, to give a more well-rounded representation of the person, faults and all, but to make Joan doubt herself only confuses the film's portrayal of the character. For the first two-thirds, she is a saint forced to go up against enormous obstacles, but then, for the last, awkardly-paced third, she becomes only a peasant girl who may or may not be suffering from hallucinations.

Does God really talk to her? Is her quest only revenge for her sister's murder? Doubt is piled on doubt until by the film's end the audience cannot feel the tragedy of martyrdom.

There are so many good aspects about the first part of the movie before the witch trial: the sweeping battle scenes, Joan's sytlized visions, even the soundtrack is befitting the epic story. Yet once Besson refocuses the story on Joan's internal world, "Messenger" loses any sense of what its message really is.