Cast: Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, Robert Pattinson, Jay Abdo, Jenny Agutter, David Calder, Christopher Fulford, Nick Waring, Holly Earle, Mark Lewis Jones, Beth Goddard. Screenplay: Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Ulrich Bergfelder. Film editing: Joe Bini. Music: Klaus Bedelt.
Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert is a tepid and conventional biopic from a director who isn't known for being either tepid or conventional. It's ostensibly the story of the pioneering explorer Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman), but it subsumes her discoveries and adventures in the Middle East in an account of her love life. A miscast James Franco plays British diplomat Henry Cadogan, who supposedly won her heart but was prevented from marrying her by Bell's parents. After his death, she fell in love with a British army officer, Richard Wylie (Damian Lewis), but he was married and died at Gallipoli in 1915. The film also hints at a flirtation with T.E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson), who was probably either asexual or gay. So the film suggests that these failures in love caused Bell to transfer her affections to the desert and its people, embodied in the film by her guide, Fattuh (Jay Abdo). Falsifications abound, as they do in most biopics, and some of them are glaring: A scene set in 1914 is followed by a flashback that a title card says took place 20 years earlier, which would place it in 1902, but it contains references to Queen Victoria, who died in 1901. If the film is redeemed at all, it's by Peter Zeitlinger's cinematography and Kidman's performance. But Bell deserves much better treatment.
