The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a beautiful movie. The film’s shooting locations are exquisite. The sets are stunning. The costumes are gorgeous. The actors are superlative.

Too bad the movie sucks.I was once asked what I thought of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. “A gorgeous crappy movie,” I said simply. The same could be said of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the second remake of Thorton Wilder’s novel by the same name.

Opening with the examination of a Franciscan monk on trial before the Spanish Inquisition for heresy, the film is primarily a series of flashbacks narrated by the monk on his years-long quest to discover the reason why five seemingly unconnected souls perished when the Incan rope bridge they were crossing split apart and sent them tumbling to their deaths. Was the incident, the monk asks, an act of God or just a simple accident?

“Either we live by accident and die by accident,” he says, “or live by plan and die by plan.”

The cast is heavy with big names (Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin)—so big, in fact, that you ask yourself why you haven’t heard of this film. But even these fine actors are unable to cover the cracks in an awkward, unevenly-paced script and haphazardly edited film that is composed of a series of often-attractive scenes with little to no emotional undertow. To be completely honest, while DeNiro is one of our finest actors, he fails miserably here, as he generally does in any sort of period piece. The same could be said for Kathy Bates. They look like Americans playing dress-up, their mannerisms and accents unaltered. Why a movie about the Spanish in Peru is helmed almost exclusively by Americans was one of the film’s major missteps.

The film attempts too much, packing in over a half dozen stories that could be justified as films in and of themselves. Unlike some movies that integrate seemingly random coincidences of human collisions (Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, Crash), this film’s meetings seem forced and the individual characters, even in the midst of their own stories, are woefully flat. Emotionally unconnected, we simply don’t care about anyone or anything in the story.

© Copyright 2005 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.