The Legend Of Suriyothai

Directed by a prince and financed by a queen, The Legend of Suriyothai is a sprawling Thai epic in the tradition of Hollywood's biblical extravaganzas of the 1950s. A former film student-turned-prince of Thailand, director and co-writer Chatrichalerm Yukol recruited film-school classmate Francis Ford Coppola to shape this ambitious production (originally over three hours long) into a 142-minute "Reader's Digest" version for an international audience, and the result is a mixed blessing: There's more pomp, circumstance, and pageantry in this historical saga than you'd find in a half-dozen lesser films, with bloody battles, assassinations, beheadings, parades of elephants, and jaw-dropping sets and costumes galore, and the attention to physical detail is astonishing. It's also a narrative mess, spanning two decades in the 16th-century story of Suriyothai, princess of Ayuthaya (now Thailand), where two kingdoms are quarreling while war with Burma (to the north) is about to erupt. Palace intrigue, lavish ritual, and traitorous deception abound, unfolding at a deliberate pace that will either test your patience or command your attention. As history lessons go, it's occasionally slow but certainly never boring.