Queen of the Desert

Not sure who Gertrude Bell is? Or why her accomplishments are significant? Unfortunately, Queen of the Desert doesn’t provide much illumination.

While squandering a high-powered cast, this lumbering (and long-delayed) biopic is more content to tell us, rather than show us, the basics about an influential British writer, cartographer, diplomat, and explorer who’s perhaps best known for drawing boundaries in the Middle East following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

And so the action begins prior to World War I, when Gertrude (Nicole Kidman) flees the stuffy British aristocracy for a life of adventure, after being designated by Winston Churchill to map Arabia and Mesopotamia — a region that now comprises Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq.

Her strong-willed approach with political leaders draws romantic interest from a British officer (James Franco) stationed in Tehran. The two bond over a shared affinity for Arabic poetry.

Their relationship becomes doomed, but Gertrude presses forward on her mission, forming an alliance with T.E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson) and with an Army official (Damian Lewis) who later impacted the war.

Queen of the Desert is a misfire for venerable filmmaker Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man), whose prolific documentaries in recent years have been far superior to his fictional projects. In this case, he incorporates plenty of eccentric little visual details, but not enough to overcome the turgid storytelling.

The heartfelt but heavy-handed film tries to position Bell as a feminist pioneer who shattered gender barriers a century ago, yet it undermines that effort by focusing so dubiously on her romantic travails instead of her contributions to the sociopolitical landscape.

Although handsomely mounted considering the budget, the film’s sweeping epic aspirations are unfulfilled. The sequences in the desert itself lack authenticity, in part because Kidman always appears as though she’s just come from the salon, even when she’s supposedly spent days atop a camel navigating snowy mountains or windswept dunes.

Herzog’s screenplay offers a half-hearted examination of colonialism and pre-war British foreign policy, although much of the context becomes lost in a film that turns rambling and tedious when it should be at its most suspenseful.

Bell’s achievements are worth spotlighting, but deserving of a more sincere treatment than this earnest melodrama filled with historical embellishments, stilted dialogue, and an overbearing score. Like its setting, the film is flat and dry.

Rated PG-13, 112 minutes.