Michelangelo primer in Agony and Ecstasy

Paul Babin Guest Writer

The Friends of the Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center will screen The Agony and the Ecstasy on Thursday, March 30 as part of the semester-long Art Film Series. For students who have only a superficial knowledge of Michelangelo, the film is an invaluable introduction. The opening minutes, usually reserved for a rousing orchestral score in such an epic film, are a history lesson in the artist’s extraordinary output. The rest of the movie focuses on the artist’s arduous task of painting the Sistine Chapel under the surprisingly understanding Pope Julius II (played by Rex Harrison). His generosity is only in regard to his relationship with Michelangelo, however, as he is simultaneously leading a bloody religious war to regain the Papal States throughout the entire film.

Harrison’s performance is the movie’s bright spot as his character grows more and more exasperated with his stubborn disciple. It is ultimately this disastrous, yet inspiring relationship between Michelangelo (played by Charleton Heston) and his patron that holds the film together.

Certainly the glue of the film is not the battle scenes or the stilted, uninspiring love affair between Michelangelo and the Contessina de Medici (played by Diane Cilento). Michelangelo and Pope Julius have the monumental responsibility of completing the ceiling, and this becomes an order too tall for even these heavyweights.

Director Carol Reed proved himself one of the cinema’s greatest masters with such classics as The Third Man and Oliver!, but he took on too much here without infusing his personal stamp.

If screenwriter Philip Dunne’s rendering of the original Irving Stone novel (on which the film is based) weren’t so clunky and riddled with obnoxiously overstated moral motivations, the relationship between the two leads would have proven enough to keep the film afloat. Instead Dunne makes a drearily paced, underdeveloped film. Who was Michelangelo beneath the surface? What did his peers think of him? How painful was the process of completing such a tremendous task? These are all questions that the script fails to answer.

The film’s lowest moment comes directly prior to the intermission in which Heston, alone atop a mountain of marble, looks to the skies to reveal whether or not he should complete his seemingly unfinishable task. Michelangelo discovers that he must complete his project in accordance with God’s will. Reed opts for melodrama rather than realism in this excerpt. Not all the scenes in The Agony and the Ecstasy are like this, but even the singular overstated spirituality goes a long way.

Despite its weak points, this film would be useful, and I would recommend the film to anyone in search of a story that evokes a genuine appreciation for Michelangelo’s art. The majestic marble sculptures, so brilliantly captured in the film’s introduction, are overwhelming. Viewers in search of celebration of a brilliant man will be satisfied. Viewers in search of transcendence via cinematic storytelling won’t retreat to their dorms appalled, but still in longing.