The Man in the Iron Mask

Randall Wallace’s film takes the last movement of Dumas’s Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. Wallace, nominated for an Academy Award for the Braveheart screenplay, directs his own script here for the first time. Readers of the novel should brace for the ending. In Dumas the swap fails: Louis takes back the throne, Philippe returns to a cell in an iron visor he cannot raise without dying for it, and d’Artagnan dies of a wound taken at a siege. The film reverses all of it and leaves Philippe crowned. The palace is not Versailles. It was still a building site the king had not moved into, so the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte stands in. Wallace never pulls the musketeers into one voice: Gabriel Byrne, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich and Gérard Depardieu share a table sounding like four countries. Opening weekend, 13 to 15 March 1998, the film took 17.3 million dollars and finished second to Titanic on 17.6 million: DiCaprio lost to himself by about three hundred thousand. The Golden Raspberries then gave Worst Screen Couple to “Leonardo DiCaprio and Leonardo DiCaprio (as twins)”. A good fit if you accept that the weight sits with the four older men and Athos’s son rather than DiCaprio. Not for you if you want the ending Dumas wrote; this one is its exact reverse.