The Agony and the Ecstasy
Charlton Heston, Rex Harrison, Diane Cilento
Director: Carol Reed
When I was a child, my parents had a hefty coffee table book purporting to contain all the world's artistic masterpieces. I would pore over it for hours, drinking in the visceral horrors of Bruegel the Elder, the chiaroscuro canvases of Rembrandt, the luminous Renaissance art of Titian, Raphael and Tintoretto, and the unequalled imagination of Leonardo da Vinci. But time and again I was drawn back to the stunning fold-outs of the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Although he considered himself a sculptor not a painter, Michelangelo's frescoes on the soaring vaulted arches of the Pope's private chapel stand alone as perhaps the greatest single creative masterpiece the world has ever seen. What at first looks like a confusion of writhing flesh reveals itself to be a peerless tableau of human emotion, from the unsullied innocence of creation to the eternal agonies of the fall from grace. Watched by a profusion of prophets and sibyls and biblical notables, the central frescoes depict in Michelangelo's inimitable style the travails of Noah, God dividing the light and dark, the heavens and the waters, the sun and the planets, and of course the most iconic image of all: God creating Adam, fingers outstretched, at once impassive and impassioned, white beard swirling like storm clouds, somehow seeing all the pain ahead for his beloved creation.
A far more flawed creation is Carol Reed's The Agony and the Ecstasy, a sprawling epic starring Charlton Heston at his craggiest and grumpiest as a Michelangelo beset by dark nights of the soul and a rocky relationship with the bellicose Pope Julius II.
Reed attempts to lay bare the creative process of a genius, and partly succeeds.
Heston's tetchiness might partly be ascribed to the inch-long chunk of metal he reportedly wedged up his nose in an attempt to ape the Florentine's famously twisted hooter, broken by a jealous childhood rival. As many critics have noted, the film is as generous with the agony as it is mean with the ecstasy.