The Mists of Avalon

A four-hour, two-night TV movie begins with the words ”Most of what you think you know about Camelot…is nothing but lies.” What’s this — another expose of the randy, tragedy-prone Kennedy clan? Not at all — it’s an expose of the randy, tragedy-prone King Arthur clan, complete with lines like ”I feel the loss of you, dear cousin. No one touched me like you did.” Woo-hoo, sword and sorcery and double entendres!

Gotta admit, I didn’t go into The Mists of Avalon expecting very much; never had much use for the sort of fantasy writing that best-selling author Marion Zimmer Bradley purveys: fairy-tale feminist codswallop, swirled in purple prose. But as adapted by Gavin Scott and directed by Uli Edel (1989’s Last Exit to Brooklyn), this Avalon is far less misty than I’d anticipated. It helps, certainly, that the tale’s central figure, Morgaine, a priestess in the imaginary British kingdom of Avalon, is played by ER’s Julianna Margulies with a crisp manner that assiduously avoids campiness and a crisper English accent than I thought she could get away with without sounding foolish.

Instead, Margulies embodies the sort of skirt-wearing power figure that Bradley and her legion of mostly female readers admire. Avalon’s got a surprisingly bold-for-these-times message: There is a male God but also a supreme Goddess. Anjelica Huston’s Viviane (the vaunted Lady of the Lake) asserts that this Goddess is ”everything in nature…. She is everything that is beautiful and everything that is harrowing as well.” If her words, delivered with arm-waving imperiousness, remind you of those old ”It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” margarine commercials, well, you’re not far off: Bradley and her adapters posit a ”great sisterhood of the Goddess” whose all-female followers inhabit a dream kingdom (queendom?) separated from the corporeal world by — you got it — the mists of Avalon, which can be penetrated only by a woman-turned-priestess herself.

Among the latter are three sisters: Huston’s Viviane; Caroline Goodall’s fragile Igraine, who in Anglo-Saxon Britain is the duchess of Cornwall; and Joan Allen’s marvelously devious Morgause. Margulies’ Morgaine is Igraine’s daughter, who — bear with me, now — has sex with her half brother, King Arthur (Edward Atterton), but she doesn’t know she’s committing half incest, because at the time they were wearing masks that would have even fooled Tom Cruise in an outtake from Eyes Wide Shut. Morgaine gives birth to a bad seed with greasy braids named Mordred, played by Hans Matheson (think Corey Feldman with a sense of purpose), who grows up wanting to rule Britain. And I haven’t even got space to mention Arthur’s best bud, Lancelot (scruffily sexy Michael Vartan), who’s in love with Arthur’s wife, Samantha Mathis’ Gwenhwyfar (typical of this sort of fiction is the use of alternate, archaic spellings of a name like this, which we know more commonly as Guinevere).

True, there are occasional howlers like the singsongy line ”You are a warrior, Lancelot — you like to throw yourself into the fray, come what may.” (Tra-la-la-la-la.) But Avalon, filmed in a suitably grimy-looking section of Prague by Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), is regularly punctuated with impressively staged battle scenes between the ”Saxon barbarians” and the noble Christian/Goddess alliance. There’s even a nifty effect in which Arthur’s legendary sword Excalibur floats up into the sky and becomes a glowing cross — a vibrant synthesis of the worldly and the spiritual themes of the story.

The heart of Avalon, however, remains its woman-centered mythology. Comic books ranging from Wonder Woman (which predated Bradley’s work by a couple of decades) to writer Alan Moore’s current Promethea (about a goddess who becomes a pulp-fiction heroine reincarnated through generations of women), attest to the pop-culture allure of girl power. The TV Mists of Avalon taps into this hunger for superior female exemplars.

The filmmakers blew a good musical cue, however: They overplay Loreena McKennitt’s Celtic New Age dirges; instead, they should have layered in the lush, heraldic tune sung by Bryan Ferry on Roxy Music’s 1982 album. Its title? ”Avalon.”