Despite the prevailing dark mood, Martin determines that the show must go on, but at the last minute, rather than putting on yet another biblical drama, he instead decides to tell the story of the murdered boy.
An unplanned detour takes the troupe to a rather ominous town that is in the midst of sentencing a mysterious woman (Elvira Minguez) to hang for the strangling death of a young boy.
Bettany plays Nicholas, a young priest on the run from the authorities and a shadowy past (adultery would appear to play a part) who takes refuge with a group of itinerant actors led by the charismatic Martin (Dafoe). Even if it fails to make good on all that promise, "The Reckoning" still deserves attention for its noble intentions, but it's going to be a true test of Paramount Classics' marketing abilities to make that happen given the picture's tough-to-categorize genre. Ironically, the Paul McGuigan film stumbles in the third act and ultimately falls prey to the very theatricality that its characters were attempting to move beyond, stranding an able ensemble led by Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany.
That's the neat trick of "The Reckoning", a beguiling, multilayered drama based on the Barry Unsworth novel "Morality Play", about a troupe of traveling actors who inadvertently pull the lid off corruption in a small village and end up forever changing the scope of their chosen art form in the process. Opens Friday, March 5 It's not every week that a bona fide medieval murder mystery rolls into town, especially one with a plot line that could have been ripped from today's headlines while remaining true to its 14th century English setting.
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