”; instead, and rather more unpretentiously, posters call it a “comedic tale of friendship and adventure.” And yet, while friendship and adventure abound in this “tale,” why such an oddly glossy retelling of Cortes’ landing in Mexico is the context for these general themes is another question entirely.
The film uses many elements of Cortes’ actual meeting with Moctezuma in the story of Miguel (Kenneth Branagh) and Tulio (Kevin Kline), our two “friends and adventurers,” while omitting the wholesale slaughter that followed los conquistadores’ welcome in Moctezuma’s court. It opts instead for a moral lesson, in which the comic duo renounce paradise and their own worldly desires in order to save the inhabitants of the city from Cortes and his mirror-cuirassed thugs. Not to say that Cortes is missing entirely from the narrative. He shows up periodically as a menacing, square-jawed clod, striking momentary fear into the audience and implying the real danger posed by Spanish “explorers.” But the archetypal conquistador is not the primary villain here, just a historical signifier.
The primary villain in The Road to El Dorado is a scheming, deceptively obsequious high priest, Tzekel-Kan (Armand Assante). Tzekel-Kan, the representative of the native religious beliefs (which are caricatures of Aztec religion), is portrayed as a misanthropic zealot with an overwhelming bloodlust for human sacrifice, not, it seems, as an offering to the gods, but just for the sheer pleasure of it. In this paradise, religion is the oppressor, and the representative Europeans, Miguel and Tulio, are heroic liberators who rid the city of their psychotic priest and his black magic. Cortes is also identified with religion, proclaiming to Miguel and Tulio as he towers and glowers over them that, “My crew was as handpicked as the disciples of Christ.” Cortes as a stand-in, handpicking, scary Christ here embodies some superficial awareness of the use of Christianity as a mechanism of colonial conquest and slavery. But this hardly ameliorates the troubling suggestion that the inhabitants of El Dorado must be rescued from Tzekel-Kan’s tyranny by the two Spanish “adventurers” recalls those colonial apologists who argued that Europeans rescued the “savages” from their primitive, bloody religions and brought them a more “civilized” western humanity. While human sacrifice is repulsive and incomprehensible to us (and quite disturbingly represented in a couple of scenes), the treatment of Aztec belief systems here is too simplistic: they are condemned as a mechanism of control that is used, like Christianity, to enslave and terrify people, rather than provide them with a shared cultural tradition.
Still, we must keep in mind that this is a fun family film that promises, in one of Elton John’s piano-pop songs, to “turn legend into fact… myth into history.” That said, it often succeeds in doing just the opposite, or to scramble the terms so much that such distinctions collapse. Much of the story does appear to draw from and contort Cortes’ own dealings with Moctezuma. Tulio and Miguel, like the historical Cortes, are greeted as gods when they arrive in El Dorado. Instead of using this reception to deceive and murder their hosts, they parade around like fools, planning to take the gold offered them as tribute and sail back to Spain, fearing all the time that they will be discovered as imposters and killed. Tzekel-Kan and the Chief (Edward James Olmos) are much too hip to the Spaniards to believe in their divinity. And of course, everyone speaks the same language in this film, trading in the difficulty of one culture confronting another without the benefit of a common language for a contest founded in moral absolutes.
Tulio, the more pragmatic of the two, is greedy (imagining he is dying, his final regret is that “I never had enough gold”) and so serves as a foil to Miguel’s dreamy idealism. Being that Miguel and Tulio are ineffectual if comic losers, they come off as pilgrims in a strange land who are transformed by their adventure while their homosocial friendship surv