“The Man in the Iron Mask” arrived in 1998 with a tagline promising honor, destiny and “all for one,” and a cast that reads like a roll call of serious actors: Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gérard Depardieu, Gabriel Byrne. It also arrived with Leonardo DiCaprio, two years after his breakout, playing twins. Randall Wallace wrote, directed and produced it — his first time in the director’s chair — and the result is a film caught between the swashbuckler it wants to be and the prestige drama it keeps gesturing toward.
Trailer, via Amazon MGM Studios.
Leonardo DiCaprio Plays Both Halves of a Kingdom
The premise is Dumas by way of a mirror. DiCaprio is King Louis XIV, a young and callous monarch who bankrupts France with his wars against the Dutch, then takes the army’s spoiling food and hands it to his starving citizens as though it were a gift. He is also Philippe, the identical twin brother who has spent his life behind an iron mask in the Île Sainte-Marguerite prison, unaware of who he is.
The dual role is the film’s central gamble, and it is the clearest place where “The Man in the Iron Mask” splits in two. Louis is written as pure appetite — he seduces Christine Bellefort, the fiancée of Raoul, then sends Raoul to his death on the battlefront and takes Christine as his mistress. Philippe is written as the opposite: compassion and benevolence, a king who would not need to be replaced if the throne had gone to him.
DiCaprio can play the smirk. The problem is that the film asks him to play the smirk and its absence, and the absence has no texture. Philippe is a good man because the script says so, and the actor is left holding a part that is mostly reaction. The twins never share a scene with any real charge, which is a strange thing to say about a movie built on two men who look exactly alike.
The Musketeers Reunite, and the Movie Wakes Up
What works, and works better than it has any right to, is the old guard. Irons is Aramis, now a clergyman who is secretly leading the renegade Jesuits and also serves as the film’s narrator. Malkovich is Athos, a retired musketeer and former nobleman who loses his son to the king’s vanity and lashes out at the musketeer barracks, wounding soldiers and renouncing his allegiance.
Depardieu is Porthos, an aging ex-musketeer and former brigand who is now suicidal — a detail the film treats with a shrug, which is either a small mercy or a missed chance. Byrne is D’Artagnan, captain of the king’s guard, the man who foils a Jesuit assassination plot at a palace festival in Versailles, defuses a riot over the rotten food, and then refuses to join his old friends when they ask him to depose the king.
That refusal is the best decision in the screenplay. D’Artagnan is the one musketeer who still believes in the office, and Byrne plays him straight, without irony, which is the only way the part survives.
A Plot That Moves Like a Checklist
Wallace, adapting loosely from Dumas’s 1847–1850 novel “The Vicomte de Bragelonne,” keeps the machinery turning. Aramis summons Athos, D’Artagnan and Porthos for a secret meeting and reveals himself as the Jesuits’ leader with a plan to depose Louis. Athos, Porthos and Aramis infiltrate the prison and free the masked prisoner.
Then comes the backstory, delivered rather than dramatized: when Queen Anne gave birth to twins, King Louis XIII sent Philippe to be raised in the country without knowledge of his true identity and told the queen the child had died. On his deathbed he told his wife and son the truth. Louis XIV, fearful of losing his throne, forced Aramis to seal his brother in the iron mask for life.
It is a good story. It is told here in a rush, as exposition, and the film never sits long enough in any of it to let the weight land. Louis orders his chief advisor Pierre executed and future rioters shot. Anne Parillaud’s Queen Mother Anne — Louis and Philippe’s mother, and D’Artagnan’s lover — gets a handful of scenes and a history the film mostly assumes we already feel.
The supporting cast is thinner than the credits suggest. Judith Godrèche’s Christine is a prize passed between men. Peter Sarsgaard’s Raoul yearns to be a musketeer and is gone before he becomes one. Hugh Laurie and David Lowe appear as advisors to the king, and Edward Atterton is Lieutenant André, D’Artagnan’s second in command. None of them get enough to do, and the film does not seem to notice.
Where the 1998 Version Sits Among the Others
This is not the Dumas novel, and it is not trying to be. The film’s plot stays closer to the flamboyant 1929 silent version, “The Iron Mask,” starring Douglas Fairbanks, and to the 1939 version directed by James Whale, than to the book. That is a legitimate choice. The mask is a myth, and every generation gets to bend it.
But the earlier versions knew what they were. They were adventures, and they moved. “The Man in the Iron Mask” at 132 minutes wants to be an adventure and a tragedy and a political thriller, and it keeps stopping to announce which one it is. The tagline — “For the honor of a king. And the destiny of a country. All for one.” — promises a rousing picture. What the film delivers is a solemn one, and solemn is the wrong register for a story about four old men breaking into a prison to swap one twin for another.
What Actually Holds Up
Ranked against the film’s own ambitions, here is what survives:
- Jeremy Irons as Aramis — the narrator, the conspirator, the priest. He carries the plot and the film’s only real sense of regret.
- Gabriel Byrne as D’Artagnan — the loyalist who will not betray the crown, and the film’s moral center by default.
- The prison break at Île Sainte-Marguerite — the one sequence that delivers the movie the tagline sold.
- John Malkovich as Athos — a grief-stricken father, and the only performance that seems to cost the actor something.
- Gérard Depardieu as Porthos — underused, but the film is warmer whenever he is on screen.
Everything else — the twins, the romance, the palace intrigue — is scaffolding.
Mixed Reviews, Real Money
The film took mixed reviews and made money anyway: $183 million worldwide against a budget of $35 million. That gap tells you what the movie was. It was an event, sold on DiCaprio and the musketeer brand, and audiences showed up. The critical score settled at 4.8 out of 10, with Metacritic at 48 out of 100. Those numbers are not a mystery. They describe a film whose parts are more interesting than its whole.
The strange thing is that “The Man in the Iron Mask” is not dull. It has a real cast, a real story and a real director’s debut behind it. What it lacks is conviction about what it is. The musketeers are the movie. The twins are the marketing. Wallace never decides which one he is making, so the film keeps handing the weight to DiCaprio and taking it back, and by the end neither brother has earned the throne the plot hands over.
Worth watching once, for Irons and Byrne and the prison. Worth remembering, mostly, as the version that had everything and trusted none of it.
4.8 of 10.
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