Cinema: Epic Eyeful

The Agony and the Ecstasy opens with a prologue celebrating the magnificence of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s most famous sculptures: the David, Moses, the Pieta, Bacchus, the Medici tomb figures. It makes a splendid beginning. And even for the shrewdest caterers to popular taste, an act like Michelangelo’s is hard to follow. What does follow in this solemn, princely spectacle —drawn by Director Carol Reed and Scenarist Philip Dunne from Irving Stone’s low-to-middlebrow biography—shows every evidence of great effort, but the achievements are spotty.

On film, Agony limits itself to those tumultuous few years when the reluctant Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) was commissioned by the warrior Pope, Julius II (Rex Harrison), to forsake his beloved marble and paint the frescoes for the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “It was built by my uncle, Pope Sixtus. That is why it is called the Sistine,” says Harrison, surveying a replica meticulously copied by movie artists, and at the same time snappily launching Hollywood’s own capsule history of Renaissance art. Unfortunately, the dramatic clash of two iron-willed giants at odds over a ceiling seldom gets off the floor. Heston sweats, struggles up the scaffolding, and smears himself with color in a performance that merely adds another great stone profile to his gallery of semi-classical parts. Harrison, puncturing the most pontifical utterances with a tongue sharpened for wit, climbs roughshod over his talented hirelings—among them Bramante (Harry Andrews), the architect of St. Peter’s, and Raphael (Tomas Milian), who appears to be impersonating a painting, not a painter.

While heavenly choirs compete with thunderous organ, all the significant moments of Michelangelo’s ordeal are painstakingly recreated. His inspiration for the Sistine vault occurs on a mountain-top at sunrise in exquisitely detailed cumulus clouds. He rushes to a battlefield where Julius marvels at Michelangelo’s preliminary sketches while enemy cannon balls redden the earth around them. “I planned a ceiling, he plans a miracle,” declares the Holy Father, then to his troops: “What are you waiting for? Attack!” And Agony skirts the question of the artist’s homosexuality in provocative tête-à-têtes with a fervent Contessina de Medici (Diane Cilento). The noblewoman presumably deduces his impotence when he tells her that God has compelled him to substitute the love of art for the art of love. “Love,” she concludes, “is either agony or ecstasy—sometimes both at once.”

Finally, the appeal of the film is purely visual, a feast of costumes, color and cinquecento opulence as beautiful to contemplate as any masterpiece in facsimile. Though the drama up front often makes the mind boggle, Photography Director Leon Shamroy and a staff of design wizards have dwarfed it against backgrounds that fill the eye with Michelangelo’s incomparable vision.