But then, they’re making the wrong kind of movie for the message they want to convey. The notion of a deconstructed, antiwar Trojan War story, a grittily realistic story about men with cousins rather than codes of honor, a fable about the emptiness of heroic illusion, is of course one that the ancients themselves entertained—not, however, in epics, but in tragedies. (The Trojan Women, for example.) The Greeks knew enough to realize that if you’re making an epic, the potency and grandeur of the epic action, the magnificence and scope of the genre itself, would undercut any attempts to subvert it from within. This is as true for epic movies as it is for epic poems. We go to films like these precisely to be overwhelmed by the bigness and wonder of it all, and it’s confusing to be told—even as we’re invited to attend a film like Troy because it’s a (I quote the recent ads for the film) “magnificent, opulent, passionate” and “sensational” “action spectacle”—that all the magnificence and opulence and spectacle are really worthless.
It’s telling that the few critics who have really liked Troy are those who fail to perceive that the movie’s form works so disastrously against its “message”—which is to say, they think that Homer is, essentially, antiwar and anti-epic, too. In Slate, David Edelstein confidently announces that “the story” of Troy
of course, comes to us largely from Homer’s The Iliad, and while artists over the centuries have added their own gloss, the thrust remained unchanged: For all the heroics of these legendary warriors, the Trojan War was a grotesque and needless waste of lives.
“The picture,” he goes on to say, “stays surprisingly true to its grim inspiration. The little stuff is often haywire, but the big themes are on the money.” Writing in a similar vein in The New Yorker, David Denby found Troy “both exhilarating and tragic, the right tonal combination for Homer.” Denby goes on to describe how, by the end of Petersen’s film, we see that at Troy “the Greeks don’t win anything worth winning”:
The Greek heroes and generals, showoffs with eagle pride, tell one another that poets will someday celebrate their exploits. But the bitterness of loss is what they will sing of.
This, he declares, honors the intentions, if not the style or the means, of the poets.
It would be difficult to find more lopsided mischaracterizations of the Iliad and its themes than these. Whatever else war is in Homer, it’s anything but a “grotesque waste”: among other things, it’s the occasion for the song that Homer has composed, which in turn is the vehicle for the perpetuation of the fame of those who died—the thing Benioff keeps having his characters talk about without ever suggesting what it really means. For the characters (and, very likely, the audience) of Homer’s great songs, the celebration of one’s exploits in the song of poets, immortal fame or kleos, is the very linchpin of the heroic code; it is precisely the prospect of commemoration in song that makes the bitterness of war, and even more the horror of death, worth enduring. Those who have read the Iliad closely know that a standard adjectival epithet for battle is, in fact, “bringing-glory-to-men.”
Those who have read Homer’s great poem carefully know, too, that as terrible as war can be in it, battlefield violence is something that heroes are eager for, rejoice and exult in, something they enjoy wholly apart from considerations of the glory it will bring them. Homer’s warriors are, as it were, professionals, and they enjoy a job well or even elegantly done: a memorable simile from Book 16, the book in which Patroclus is killed, likens the Greek warrior, who has driven a spear into the head of an enemy soldier, cantilevering the poor man out of his chariot, to an angler who, “perched / on a jutting rock ledge, drags some fish from the sea, / some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.” As the classicist Bernard Knox reminds us, in his splendid introduction to Robert Fagles’s supremely fluent and elegant translation of the Iliad, from which I have just quoted, “one of the common words for combat, charmê, comes from the same root as the word chairô—‘rejoice.’” In Homer, war can be hell, but just as often it’s sheer heaven. If you don’t get this, you don’t get Homer—and you don’t, really, get epic either, a genre whose amplitude and grandeur are reflections not of the number of events that take place in it, but rather the splendor of its subject, which is as beautiful as it is terrible.
One thing that does follow—fatally—from the filmmakers’ decision to strip from the Trojan War the “heaven” implicit in its Greek epic donnée—the exultation of war, the grand and rigid notions of honor and glory and heroism that motivate real heroes, the golden-hued and sometimes rather charming Olympian interludes—is a disastrous failure in tone. It’s one thing to try to show the characters of myth as believable human beings, but quite another to vulgarize them, and vulgarize is what this film inevitably does again and again as it seeks, but never finds, an appropriate register for its unholy hybrid of contemporary cynicism and mythic plot. Some of the dialogue is in a mode perhaps best described as faux-legendary—the kind typically accompanied by much clasping of forearms (“May the gods keep the wolves in the hills and the women in our beds!”)—whereas a good deal of it seems to have been airlifted from southern California. (“I’m making you another seashell necklace, like the ones I used to make you when you were a boy,” Thetis, Achilles’ mother, announces, clad in what appears to be a tie-dyed housedress.) It’s bad enough having both in the same film; when they clash in the same scene, it’s excruciating. “You are a Princess of Troy now!” Hector admonishes Helen. “And my brother needs you tonight!”
Visually, too, Petersen’s film is awkward—yet another instance in which the ideology of the filmmakers goes against the genre of the film. For a movie that cost $170 million, this one looks shoddy and, apart from a few impressive computer-generated action shots (not least, the rather thrilling first glimpse of the Greek armada sailing to Troy, which appears to number at least a thousand ships), surprisingly sparse. The sets look cheap and are, to boot, inauthentic: there’s a scene in Menelaus’s palace that looks like a party at a Turkish-themed restaurant, and Troy itself is a bizarre hodgepodge of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Mycenaean motifs. As I watched Troy, I kept wondering why, given his Olympian budget, Petersen couldn’t have paid some nice classicist a heroic sum of money to tell him what these Bronze Age cities ought to look like. (There are a lot of gaffes which could easily have been avoided: one portentous title indicates that the seaside palace we’re looking at is in “the Port of Sparta,” which, given Sparta’s actual location, is a bit like setting a movie in the “Port of Tulsa”; another scene depicts a confrontation between the armies of Agamemnon and those of the king of Thessaly in central Greece, whose subjects are, hilariously, repeatedly referred to not as “Thessalians” but—in a skip north to an entirely different region of Greece that no doubt owes much to the writer’s vague memories of the letters of St. Paul—as “Thessalonians.”) Worse, the battle scenes lack clarity and impact, and the crowd scenes are messy and unconvincing. Petersen’s fall of Troy appears to devastate about thirty people.
Petersen became famous with the 1981 film Das Boot, about life aboard a German U-boat during World War II, and it may be that tight spaces bring out the best in him; he brings to Troy none of the visual panache that makes even the most imperfect of old Hollywood epics fun to watch. In Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra, overblown, underrated, and not at all unintelligent, there’s an over-the-top sequence portraying the Egyptian queen’s entrance into Rome, and it’s a breathtaking showstopper not least because the director knows how to build up to a big moment; he doesn’t show you Cleopatra until you’ve had to sit through an endless parade of acrobats and fan-wavers, so that by the time Elizabeth Taylor appears (on a gilded palanquin atop a rolling pyramid-thing), you’re as impatient as a Roman. In Troy, the entrance of the fabled horse into the city—a moment that should evoke an almost macabre poignancy, given that the Trojans think the fatal object is a peace offering—falls flat: Petersen shows you the horse first, and then a few people desultorily doing a line dance below,
like grown-ups at a bar mitzvah reception. Then, anxious as ever to get to the next scene, he cuts away.
Virtually every big moment in Troy is sapped of impact in this way. Petersen either doesn’t know how to frame a scene (the final encounter between Achilles and Hector, which should feel overwhelmingly climactic, is particularly lifeless) or he beautifully establishes a shot or a tableau that he doesn’t allow to sink in: a creepy glimpse of a panting Achilles, the first day of slaughter behind him, hunched on a parapet and looking, you suddenly realize, more leonine than human, a terrific Homeric touch; an impressive-looking sequence showing the Greeks burning their dead at night; a macabre nocturnal funeral for Hector, with the royal womenfolk draped in black, sitting on an impossibly high dais. Just as I had begun to relish each of these, Benioff’s skittish script and Petersen’s anxious camera zipped along to the next scene, desperate to tick off the next Big Epic Moment, unaware that the real impact of epic lies precisely in the moments this director and screenwriter keep abandoning, the moments that further our understanding of the action, the praxis.
Not surprisingly, given Petersen’s directorial strengths, the only scene that has even a frisson of genuine feeling is one that takes place in extremely close quarters. Toward the end of the film, old Priam sneaks into Achilles’ tent in order to try to persuade the implacable hero to surrender the battered body of his son so that the Trojans might give it a proper burial. Priam keeps trying to get close to Achilles, who keeps sliding away, at once repelled and embarrassed. The awkward physicality of this brief scene efficiently and quite movingly conveys some real emotions (whether they’re Archaic emotions is another matter): the old king’s humiliated but necessary self-abasement, Achilles’ sudden, grief-stricken realization that the only people he can admire are the Trojans, his enemies—and that the only father figure he can admire is the father of the man he’s just killed. (It’s the only scene in the movie in which Brad Pitt warms up as an actor; you can tell that here, finally, he’s dealing with something he can understand.) The dynamic between a fatherless young hero and a bereft older man in particular is a genuinely powerful motif that could have been the basis of a valid rewriting of Homer, had Benioff and Petersen been interested in creating a coherent action instead of ticking off a list of events to be covered. Such a rewriting would, moreover, have been entirely Greek: the theme of unexpectedly riven loyalties in a young Greek hero looking for a father figure is, in fact, what shapes Sophocles’ Philoctetes.
And so Troy goes, skidding from one event to the next, from one undernourished conceit to another, anxious simply to get to the inexorable end. But in the end, there’s nothing to hold Troy together, apart from that lumbering momentum to the narrative finish line. The movie manages to be (literally) a textbook example of everything an epic shouldn’t be, which is to say both tedious and overstuffed at the same time. Or, to use the correct Aristotelian diction (for of course Aristotle could have predicted all this), “too extensive and impossible to grasp all at once,” but also “far too knotty in its complexity.”
Three hundred years after Aristotle committed his thoughts on epic to paper, the Roman poet Horace addressed a verse epistle to a would-be littérateur from a wealthy and well-connected family. Although technically known as Epistles 2.3, this witty but quite canny verse handbook on the writer’s art has since been known as the Ars poetica, the “Art of Poetry,” and it contains a piece of advice about how to construct epic plots that is so famous that, like certain other Roman expressions—caveat emptor, for instance—we can utter it in the original and be confident of being understood. Here is the passage in which it occurs, in David Ferry’s 1997 translation:
And don’t begin your poem the way the old
Cyclic “Homeric” poets saw fit to do it:
“I sing of the famous war and Priam’s fate.”
What’s to come out of the mouth of such a boaster?
The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse.
Ridiculous. He does much better who doesn’t
try so hard to make such grandiose claims….
He goes right to the point and carries the reader
Into the midst of things, as if known already;
And if there’s material that he despairs of presenting
So as to shine for us, he leaves it out;
And he makes his whole poem one.
“Into the midst of things”: in medias res. Whatever its claims to Homeric inspiration, however much it (inadvertently) invokes the lost “cyclical epics,” the only ancient texts that Petersen’s Troy ends up shedding light on are those works of criticism, very old but clearly still valuable, whose caveats the makers of this flaccid film have so powerfully if unintentionally proved valid. The ancients, who were less apt than we are to confuse size with import, knew that an epic without a focus—without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make—was just a very long poem. Petersen’s very long movie boasts a budget of many millions, a cast of thousands, and a duration of several hours; but despite those “epic” numbers, the movie looks and feels small. You could say, indeed, that mountains of money, time, and talent have labored and brought forth a $170 million mouse. In more ways than one, this Troy is a Little Iliad.
—The New York Review of Books, June 24, 2004
Alexander, the Movie!
Whatever else you say about the career of Alexander the Great—and classicists, at least, say quite a lot; one website that tracks the bibliography lists twelve hundred items—it was neither funny nor dull. So it was a sign that something had gone seriously wrong with Oliver Stone’s long, gaudy, and curiously empty new biopic about Alexander when audiences at both showings I attended greeted the movie with snickering and obvious boredom. The first time I saw the picture was at a press screening at a commercial theater, and even from the large central section that was (a personage with a headset informed us) reserved for “friends of the filmmaker,” you could hear frequent tittering throughout the film—understandable, given that the characters often have to say things like “from these loins of war, Alexander was born.” A week later, at a matinee, I got to witness a reaction on the part of those who were unconstrained by the bonds of either duty or amity: by the end of the three-hour-long movie, four of the twelve people in the audience had left.
This was, obviously, not the reaction Stone was hoping for—nor indeed the reaction that Alexander’s life and career deserve, whether you think he was an enlightened Greek gentleman carrying the torch of Hellenism to the East or a savage, paranoid tyrant who left rivers of blood in his wake. The controversy about his personality derives from the fact that our sources are famously inadequate, all eyewitness accounts having perished. What remains is, at best, secondhand: one history, for instance, is based largely on the now-lost memoirs of Alexander’s general and alleged half-brother, Ptolemy, who went on to become the founder of the Egyptian dynasty that ended with Cleopatra. At worst, it’s highly unreliable. A rather florid account by the first-century A.D. Roman rhetorician Quintus Curtius often reflects its author’s professional interests—his Alexander is given to extended bursts of eloquence even when gravely wounded—far more than it does the known facts. But Alexander’s story, even stripped of romanticizing or rhetorical elaboration, still has the power to amaze.
He was born in 356 B.C., the product of the stormy marriage between Philip II of Macedon and his temperamental fourth wife, Olympias, a princess from Epirus (a wild western kingdom encompassing parts of present-day Albania). His childhood was appropriately dramatic. At around twelve he had already gained a foothold on legend by taming a magnificent but dangerously wild stallion called Bucephalas (“Oxhead”)—a favorite episode in what would become, after Alexander’s death, a series of increasingly fantastical tales and legends that finally coalesced into a literary narrative known as the Alexander Romance, which as time passed was elaborated, illuminated, and translated into everything from Latin to Armenian. While still in his early teens,
he was at school with no less a teacher than Aristotle, who clearly made a great impression on the youth. (Years later, as he roamed restlessly through the world, Alexander took care to send interesting zoological and botanical specimens back to his old tutor.)
At sixteen he’d demonstrated enough ability to get himself appointed regent when his father, a shrewd statesman and inspired general who dreamed of leading a pan-Hellenic coalition against Persia, was on campaign. The young prince used this opportunity to make war on an unruly tribe on Macedon’s eastern border; to mark his victory he founded the first city he named after himself, Alexandropolis. At eighteen, under his father’s generalship, he led the crack Macedonian cavalry to a brilliant victory at the Battle of Chaeronea, where Macedon crushed an Athenian-Theban coalition, thereby putting an end to southern Greek opposition to Macedonian designs on hegemony. At twenty, following the assassination of Philip—in which he (or Olympias, or perhaps both) may have had a hand—he was king.
That, of course, was just the beginning. At twenty-two, Alexander led his father’s superbly trained army across the Hellespont into Asia. Next he liberated the Greek cities of Asia Minor from their Persian overlords (i.e., made them his own: the governors he appointed were not always champions of Hellenic civic freedoms), staged his most brilliant military victory by successfully besieging the Phoenician island fortress of Tyre (part of his famous strategy to “defeat the Persian navy on land” by seizing its bases), and freed a grateful Egypt from harsh Persian suzerainty. While in Egypt, he indulged in one of the bizarre gestures that, wholly apart from his indisputable genius as a general, helped make him a legend: he made an arduous and dangerous detour to the oracle of Ammon in the desert oasis of Siwah, where the god revealed that Alexander was in fact his own son—a conclusion with which Alexander himself came increasingly to agree. While in Egypt he also founded the most famous of his Alexandrias, a city that eventually displaced Athens as the center of Greek intellectual culture, and where his marvelous tomb, a tourist attraction for centuries after, would eventually rise.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 15
