Conventional portrait of an unconventional woman

There’s an outstanding movie to be made about Gertrude Bell, the intensely independent British noblewoman who, in the first decades of the 20th century, traveled throughout the Arab world and contributed to the formation of the modern Middle East.

[...] it’s an unhappy surprise is that this quite conventional movie was made by Werner Herzog, renowned for his depictions of the visionary and idiosyncratic.

The film does not stint on detailing Bell’s accomplishments and showing her intelligence and determination, nicely conveyed by Nicole Kidman.



[...] Herzog’s work has focused on male megalomaniacs and misfits — think of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and the other films he made with the mercurial Klaus Kinski.

[...] “Queen of the Desert” is tasteful to the point that it borders on anemic, though it comes from a filmmaker who usually errs on the side of grandiosity.

In her travels through the desert, Bell encounters warlords and wannabe potentates, and uses her brains, a bit of charm, and some forged documents, to go place that are way off limits to the British establishment.

Who’d have expected a Herzog film to invoke thoughts of “Masterpiece Theater” and Merchant-Ivory productions at their most stiff and formal? I surely did not.