Wolfgang Peterson's Troy is an odd mix-- a summer blockbuster with the patina of a sincere attempt at adapting 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 Greeks and Trojans couldn't put 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 on 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 the edge of most characters has been filed down to a glossy sheen. Achilles' (Brad Pitt) insufferably godlike ego is now merely spoiled-celebrity annoying; his near-homoerotic friendship with Patroclus (Garett Hedlund) has been explained away as love for a cousin; Paris (Orlando Bloom) and Helen are dewy young, genuinely in love. Everyone has been pulled down to ground level, humanized, made-- well-- rather nice; even Hector's (Eric Bana) bloodthirstiness feels dutiful and restrained. Other changes seem more drastic: the siege of Troy is reduced from a bone-wearying nine years to what seems like 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 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 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 noble and faded 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 biggest of the Hollywood variety to deliver the necessary wattage--forgetting that playing a big star is still a performance, and 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 his lover-- sorry cousin--has died, he manages to squeeze out a constipated expression as if he needed more nonsoluble fiber. You only need wait a little longer, when O'Toole's Priam gazes at the (spoiler warning--but is it at all necessary?) devastation of Troy, to see what real acting looks like.
The Iliad for all intents and purposes is 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 term 'Homeric' in visual terms. The list of filmmakers isn't long: Griffith, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Welles. In Jean-Luc Godard's Fritz Lang plays a filmmaker intent on filming The Odyssey; bet no cinephile will deny the thrill that shot down their spines, considering the possibility of Lang doing Homer.
Alas, Wolfgang Petersen isn't one to inspire such thrills; he's purely a meat-and-potatoes filmmaker in dire need of salt. Not unintelligent, but incapable, after years of Hollywood productions, of lifting both feet off the ground. His battle scenes aren't stupid per se, nor 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 recent 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 CGI); 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 5.21.04
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