Okay, the 1386 setting of Ridley Scott's The Last Duel is 636 years ago, not a thousand, but I was still only too quick to put it on Saturday night once I found it was streaming on Disney+ -- casually disregarding the advanced mental preparation one usually makes before embarking on a two hour and 35-minute time commitment.
You may remember (though why would you) that this was my #4 film of 2021. It was not nearly that sort of slam dunk for others. Critics generally supported it, some passionately, but audiences famously did not go see it, though I'm sure some of them ended up loving it as much as I did when they caught up with it on video. Some of them hated it.
I'd say The Last Duel took a sort of typical second-viewing drop in my estimations, which is, not very much but enough for me to notice it. I still think it's great, and I was already surmising that it will be in the conversation at the end of this decade when I consider candidates for my top 25 films of the past ten years.
Today I want to focus on the appearance of Matt Damon in this film -- which could be one of those character details, along with Ben Affleck's platinum blonde hair, that turn off viewers who already feel predisposed against a movie, kind of like a character dressed up in a fat suit.
I was going to call this post "Matt Damon's brutish mullet," but the use of the word "brutish" put me in mind of Thomas Hobbes' famous quote about life. Since all three of those adjectives effectively described Damon's character, I went with that title instead.
A far simpler film, made 20 years ago, would have had the man fighting for his wife's honor (Damon's Jean de Carrouges) unambiguously heroic, and the man who violated her (Adam Driver's Jacque Le Gris) unambiguously loathsome. In fact, both men are loathsome, and because de Carrouges is on the right side of the central conflict, we need to know it through his appearance -- though it's pretty damn evident in his behavior as well.
And what an appearance. I think most people agree that Damon is a good-looking man, but they've really uglied him up here. The scar on his cheek is one obvious way, though in reality, it speaks to his courage in battle, which even Le Gris in his own accounting of events does not attempt to dispute. I noticed in Le Gris' account, which comes second, he does not paint a different picture of de Carrouges saving him in battle, so it must have gone down the way de Carrouges depicts it. A simpler movie also might have showed Le Gris remembering it as him saving de Carrouges instead. But I'm getting sidetracked.
The real thing that makes him gross to look at is the hair. I have no idea if a mullet is authentic to the period of time -- just as I have no idea if Affleck's platinum blonde hair was a thing -- but it certainly speaks volumes about this man. He's a real brute with no sense of style whatsoever, whose hair might have been cut by a butcher.
He's also a "small" man, hence the Hobbesian "short." Damon's only three inches shorter than Driver -- though those are an important three inches metaphorically -- but he's notably petty, constantly worried about personal slights and threats to his honor. He's concerned about whether Le Gris addresses him as "sir," and he's highly litigious, twice trying to sue Affleck's character for transactions related to real estate. What's more, he takes on the titular duel primarily to defend his own honor -- since, as we learn, rape was actually considered a property crime, perpetrated against the man who owns the property rather than the woman who is his property. With de Carrouges, it's all about property.
Even in de Carrouges' own telling of events, he doesn't come across as very righteous, which I think is one of the best things about this movie -- both he and Le Gris characterize their obvious weaknesses as strengths, which speaks to the blindness of men to their own faults from time immemorial.
It may have been a radical conception of Damon's appearance by the hair and makeup people -- who are obviously doing the bidding of the director and the writers, one of whom is Damon -- but it's a great way to remind us, just by looking at him, not to get it twisted. This man may be fighting a righteous cause in the sense that he's trying to prevent his wife from getting executed -- a foregone conclusion if Damon loses the duel, thereby "proving" that her claim of rape was false -- but his motivations are all wrong-headed, his perspective all backward. When he says he's risking his life for her, she reminds him that he's really risking her life -- for his vanity.
Vanity? Just looking at him, you wouldn't think he had any.
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