Looking a gift horse in the mouth

Noel Vera

Wolfgang Peterson's "Troy" is perhaps an odd mix--an attempt at a
summer blockbuster with the patina of a sincere attempt at a big-
picture adaptation of a literary classic painted all over its bright
surface. David Benioff's script, loosely--very loosely--based on
Homer's epic, tries to re-imagine the story as it might really have
happened, that is, closer to what people might conceivably have
thought and felt, filtered through what we might feel happened. For
starters, Benioff (a newcomer, but not an entirely inept one--he
wrote the novel "25th Hour" and adapted it for Spike Lee to direct)
does away with all the inconvenient gods and goddesses, without whom
you get the impression that the Greeks and Trojans would be incapable
of putting one foot in front of the other, much less wage a war. Then
he incorporates a more cynical, more realpolitik motive for Agamemnon
(Brian Cox) to go into battle: not to win back his brother Menelaus'
(Brendan Gleeson) stolen wife Helen (Diane Kruger), but to use her
kidnapping as a pretext to move on Troy, a bid to add the mighty
kingdom to his already impressive collection of conquered territories
(an act of arrogant aggression, in effect, by an established world
power).

Which is all well and good, an interesting attack at the problem of
telling a well-known story in a fresh way. It's the second step--
filtering all this through what we may feel happened--that's
problematic, the "we" presumably meaning the summer movie crowd
(which couldn't care less about the quarrels of dead Mediterranean
dictators), and "filtering what we may feel happened," meaning taking
out what motives and acts violate our ideas about the world--motives
and acts so alien to our narrow conception of human thought and deed
that we might reject the movie completely.

As a result, much of the edge of the film's characters has been filed
down to a glossy, uninteresting sheen. Achilles' (Brad Pitt)
insufferably godlike ego is now merely celebrity-strength annoying;
his close, almost homoerotic friendship with Patroclus (Garett
Hedlund) has been explained away by making him a cousin; Paris
(Orlando Bloom) and Helen are dewy young lovers, genuinely in love.
Everyone has been pulled down to ground level, humanized, and made,
well, rather nice; even Hector's (Eric Bana) bloodthirstiness is now
dutiful and restrained. Other changes seem as if not more drastic:
the siege of Troy is reduced from a bone-wearying nine years to what
seems to be a matter of weeks--instead of soldiers so tired of
attacking and retreating and attacking again for over three thousand
days that they snatch at every excuse to go home, we get a quick
bivouac; the troops must feel as if they hardly got to see the place.

Even the gods are missed. They may meddle in the affairs of men, but
to my mind they also served a vital purpose in Homer's vision: they
represented the less inhibited, more chaotic, at times more
transcendent sentiments of the human protagonists--their id and
superego, if you will. The gods are in effect humans to the nth
power, so if the human characters seem so shallowly conceived, it's
because the gods were there, above and behind and around them,
thinking their baser and nobler thoughts for them.

So Benioff's script has taken Homer's immortal characters and given
them mortal emotions and motivations--fine; perhaps the crucial
question to ask is: how are the actors that play these characters?

Brian Cox probably comes closest to the original concept of his
character with his bombastic, scenery-chewing Agamemnon (they should
have just let him gnaw on the gates of Troy if they wanted in so
bad). Eric Bana does well with his kindler, gentler Hector; he gets
to glower intensely, and look sorrowful as he takes leave of wife
Andromache (Saffron Burrows--who, incidentally, would have made a
lovelier, more fascinating Helen) and child. Sean Bean as wily
Odysseus gives an entertainingly intriguing performance, with his low-
key presence that hovers between a sense of genuine affection for
Achilles and a sense that he's perhaps exploiting him. Peter O'Toole
as King Priam gives a command performance, all frailty and past
grandeur in the same shaky, skinny frame.

Orlando Bloom and Diane Kruger as the aforementioned Paris and Helen
are pretty faces, and a complete waste of screen space (every moment
spent on them is a genuine pain); Garett Hedlund leaves little
impression as Brad Pitt's lookalike and object of lust--sorry--of
cousinly affection. As for the Pittster himself, I suppose the idea
was that since Achilles had such a serious star complex, they needed
one of the Hollywood variety to deliver the necessary wattage--
forgetting that playing a big star is still a performance, and that
all you really need is an actor in the role. Pitt has fearsome biceps
and an undemanding physical grace, but in the major dramatic moments,
when, say, he realizes that his lover--sorry, cousin--has died, he
squeezes out a kind of constipated look, as if his diet were
seriously wanting in fiber. You only need wait a little longer, when
O'Toole as Priam gazes at the (spoiler warning--but is it at all
necessary?) devastated city of Troy, to see what real acting looks
like.

"The Iliad" is, for all intents and purposes, a comic book--violent,
ribald, funny, full of bright colors, and except for all the names
and history to keep track of, gloriously unmarred by the subtler
shades of human psychology. What presumably lifts this popular
entertainment to the level of great art would be the poetry, the use
of metaphor and literary device in a way that transforms all the
vulgar elements into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Short of having someone actually recite the entire work in front of a
camera--interesting idea, but hardly anything a major studio would
fork $200 million over to produce--you need to come up with the
cinematic equivalent to all that divine poetry; you need an artist
who can evoke the adjective "Homeric" in visual terms. The list of
filmmakers isn't long: D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira
Kurosawa, Orson Welles. In Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt," Fritz Lang
plays a filmmaker intent on filming "The Odyssey," the sequel to
the "Iliad;" I'll bet no one who knows films will deny the thrill
that played down their spines, thinking of the possibility of Lang
doing Homer.

Alas, Wolfgang Petersen isn't one to inspire such thrills; he's
purely a meat-and-potatoes filmmaker (one in dire need of salt). Not
unintelligent, but incapable, after years of Hollywood productions,
of raising both feet off the ground at the same time. His battle
scenes aren't stupid, per se, neither do they excite the senses; his
big shots, of millions of digitally rendered Trojan and Greek
warriors marching across the plains and beaches of Troy, look
indistinguishable from any other millions of digitally rendered
warriors marching across movie screens in the past few years. The
drama has some traction, thanks to Benioff's fairly cunning
screenplay, but it finally sinks under the weight of Pitt's epic
inadequacies as a dramatic actor. "Troy" fails to be even a halfway
decent adaptation of one of the great works of Western literature;
perhaps the filmmakers realized this, and never meant to aim for such
lofty goals. But it also fails as entertainment, unlike Homer's epic.

Truth of the matter is, Homer's "Iliad" was or still is superb
popcorn fare--the headlong narrative full of incident; the larger-
than-life characters; the constant intercession of superpowered gods
(Greek literature's equivalent to the CGI effect); it's even proven
property, having thrilled wide-eyed readers for almost three thousand
years. The filmmakers could have realized this and done a
straightforward rendition of the story, instead of making a $200
million, hundred-and-sixty-plus minute waste of time.

(First published in Businessworld, May 21, 2004)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)