With its technological expertise, its
abundance of talent in all areas, and its penchant for excess, the American
cinema quite naturally excels at the grand gesture, which often translates as
the epic mode. Some recent cinematic investigations of certain chapters in the
distant past — Gladiator, The Passion of the Christ, Troy, and now, Alexander — indicate the possibility of a return to the glory
days of Hollywood epic, when Cecil B. DeMille and his colleagues re-created
some of the more spectacular moments of the Bible, along with some versions of
Greek and Roman history, on the silver screen.
Oliver Stone’s unfortunate proclivity
for great length and sloppy construction, even in his best work, may explain
his attempt at imitating some of Hollywood’s past glory, but hardly justifies
the great mass and mess of Alexander.
Attempting to deal with the life and
career of Alexander the Great, who conquered the known world in the 4th century
B.C., the movie dwells in a decidedly contemporary fashion on the psychological
makeup of its protagonist. The picture devotes considerable time, including a
strange out-of-sequence flashback, to Alexander’s childhood and family life,
his relationships with his father, King Philip of Macedon (Val Kilmer), a bully
and a drunk, and his scheming mother, Olympias (Angelina Jolie), an exemplar of
the great Hellenic maternal tradition that includes Jocasta, Medea, and
Clytemnestra. (Inexplicably, it fails to show the legendary cutting of the
Gordian knot.)
Alexander’s early years occupy so
much of this immensely long picture that one of his generals, Ptolemy (Anthony
Hopkins) must supply a narration that explains the many gaps and omissions, as
well as commenting on the abrupt and downbeat ending. Oddly, the character who
emerges from the tension and violence of Macedonian history and politics and the
tutelage of Aristotle, the brave and brilliant warrior who conquered the world
at the age of 30, frequently seems petulant, impulsive, whiny, and self
indulgent.
In the script’s and Colin Farrell’s
interpretation, in fact, the great hero behaves like a neurotic twit, confused
about his sexuality, browbeating his inferiors, constantly berating his
generals, vague and contradictory in his speech and motivation. Why brave men
should follow him and sacrifice their lives for his generally incomprehensible dreams
remains a mystery the film never reveals.
In keeping with its subject, the
movie naturally employs the necessary epic amplitude in many of its scenes and
sequences, including a couple of great battles in the Hollywood tradition of
spectacular set pieces. Two major engagements pass the DeMille test of color,
noise, action, and sheer thrill — the battle at Gaugamela, where Alexander’s
force of 40,000 men routs Darius’s army of 250,000 and thus establishes his
rule over the Persian Empire, and his last battle, a defeat in India.
The Indian encounter pits Alexander’s
cavalry against elephants, with one terrific moment that first slows down then
freezes Alexander and his famous horse Bucephalus rearing up against a war
elephant, forming a visual metaphor for the violent opposition between East and
West that motivates much of the picture and looking very like a scene on a
flag, a tapestry, a painting.
The other obligatory pieces involve
the sets themselves, especially the technological triumph of the city of
Babylon, an endless landscape of magnificent palaces, glittering with the
wealth of the East. The interiors also feature an Oriental opulence, which
contrasts with the comparative austerity of Macedon, stressing all the vice and
luxury of the conquered peoples, including the harem, the usual dancing girls,
and of course hints of the mandatory orgy and suggestions of Alexander’s
eclectic sex life.
The cast apparently concluded that Alexander demanded an epic acting style,
which means that most of them shout the bogus and meretricious dialogue and
misbehave excessively and outlandishly in one of the most uniformly horrible
displays in recent cinematic history. Colin Farrell, who has previously
demonstrated some competence, attains an almost admirable and entirely
embarrassing consistency — he is uniformly horrible in more ways than I would
have thought possible, whether urging his men to war or making love to his pal
Hephaestion (Jared Leto).
Despite the enormous length, the
rickety architecture, the endless repetition, the clumsy editing, the appalling
writing, the abysmal performances, a decent and perhaps even wonderful picture
lurks inside the overblown mess of Alexander.
The Greek lawyers threatening to sue Oliver Stone for showing the great hero as
a homosexual — shocking — might be better off suing him for not allowing a
great story of courage, pride, and nobility, and a remarkable and apparently
complicated character to come alive.
The splendid background of color and
action needs some people and some ideas commensurate with its magnificence.
Oliver Stone, alas, fails to provide them.
Alexander (R), starring Colin
Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto, Rosario
Dawson, Christopher Plummer, Elliott Cowan, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Connor Paolo,
Rory McCann, Neil Jackson; screenplay by Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle, Laeta
Kalogridis; directed by Oliver Stone. Cinemark Tinseltown; Loews Webster;
Pittsford Plaza Cinema; Regal Culver Ridge; Regal Eastview; Regal Greece Ridge;
Regal Henrietta.
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2004.
