How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (18 page)

And yet the matter of accents, however admirably motivated, also helps to illuminate a weakness that is characteristic of the film in general. For the director's clever notion ends up being an empty gesture, since there are virtually no Greeks in his film for the Macedonians to be contrasted
with
. Apart, that is, from a two-minute appearance by Christopher Plummer as Aristotle, who is shown lecturing to his pubescent charges among a pile of (inexplicably) fallen marble columns, describing the differences between the beneficial and the deleterious brands of same-sex love—a scene patently included in order to prepare audiences for the fact that little Alexander and Hephaistion will grow up to be more than just wrestling partners. (Provided with this Aristotelian introduction, we are supposed to breathe easy in the assumption that they're the kind who, as the great philosopher puts it, “lie together in knowledge and virtue.”) The absence of Greeks in the movie is more than structurally incoherent: it's a serious historical omission, given that Alexander's troubles with the Greeks back home were a critical problem throughout his career.

The narrative of much of
Alexander
has, indeed, a haphazard feel: it's not at all clear, throughout the three hours of the film, on what basis Stone chose to include, or omit, various events. Vast stretches of the story are glossed, with patent awkwardness, by a voice-over narration by the aged Ptolemy (who's shown, in a prologue sequence set in his palace in Alexandria, busily writing his history forty years after Alexander's death). But in lurching from Alexander's youth to his victory at Gaugamela, the film misses many crucial opportunities to dramatize its subject: there is nothing about Egypt, no oracle at Siwah—an event of the highest importance and certainly worthy of visual representation—and no double sacrifice at Ilium, which would have nicely suggested the intensity of Alexander's attachment both to the Achilles myth and to Hephaistion, certainly more so than the silly dialogue about “wild deer listening in the wind” that Stone puts in the lovers' mouths. (As with many an ancient epic, this one veers between a faux-biblical portentousness and excruciating attempts at casual
ness: “Aristotle was perhaps prescient.”) Even after Gaugamela, there are inexcusable omissions. Where, you wonder, is Darius's mother; where, crucially, is the mass interracial wedding pageant at Susa? And what about the story of the Gordian knot, a chestnut that illustrates, with brilliant concision and in an eminently filmable way, Alexander's approach to problem solving?

 

What does get packed into the film, on the other hand, is often treated so perfunctorily as to be meaningless to those who don't already know the life; a better title for this film would have been
Lots of Things That Happened to Alexander
. Famous tidbits of the biography—a reference to his tendency to cock his head to one side; another to an embarrassing episode in which his father mocked his fondness for singing—are awkwardly referred to
en passant
to no purpose other than to show that the screenwriters have studied hard and know about these details. Much that is of far greater importance is similarly poorly handled: the conspiracies against his life, the mutiny in India, and above all his ongoing and ultimately failed efforts to impose the “prostration,” the Persian ritual obeisance to the king, on Macedonians and Persians alike are either so briefly alluded to or so hurriedly depicted as to leave you wondering what they were about. Historical characters are similarly paraded across the screen, often without being introduced, again merely to show that the filmmakers have done their homework. The beautiful Persian eunuch Bagoas, who our sources tell us was presented to Alexander as a peace offering by a surrendering satrap, and who seems to have remained faithful to his new master for the rest of his life, suddenly appears, in this version, as little more than an extra in the harem at Babylon, and the next thing you know he's giving Alexander baths. Something, you suspect, got left on the cutting-room floor.

There is little mystery, on the other hand, about why other episodes are prominently featured. The courtship and marriage to Roxana, for instance, get a disproportionate amount of screen time—not least, you can't help feeling, because Stone, whatever the loud claims that here, at last, was a film that would fearlessly depict Alexander's bisexuality, was eager to please his target audience of eighteen-to-twenty-six-year-old males. Hephaistion and Alexander occasionally give each other
brief, manly hugs, whereas a lengthy, stark-naked wedding-night wrestling match between Alexander and Roxana makes it clear that they, at least, were not going to be lying together in knowledge and virtue. (The sexual aspect of Alexander's relationship with his longtime lover is, in fact, entirely relegated to Ptolemy's voice-over: you don't envy Anthony Hopkins having to declare that Alexander “was only conquered by Hephaistion's thighs,” one of the many clunkers that evoked snickers from the audience.)

The perceived obligation to cram in so much material affects Stone's visual style, which—apart from some striking sequences, such as a thrilling and imaginatively filmed battle between the Macedonians on their horses and the Indians on their elephants—is often jumbled and incoherent. There's a famous story about how, when the captive Persian royals were presented to the victorious Alexander, the queen mother, mistaking the taller and handsomer Hephaistion for the King, made obeisance to him. “Don't worry, Mother,” Alexander is reported to have said, “he, too, is Alexander.” This crucial encounter, so rich in psychologically telling detail, is filmed so confusingly in
Alexander
that it's impossible to tell, among other things, that the Persian lady (here, for no reason at all, it's Darius's wife rather than his mother) has made a mistake to begin with, and so the entire episode disintegrates into nonsense.

What all this betrays is a problem inherent in all biography, which is that a life, however crammed with dazzling incident, does not necessarily have the shape of a good drama. The reason it's exhausting, and ultimately boring, to sit through
Alexander
—and why the movie started disappearing from theaters so soon after its release—is that while it dutifully represents certain events from Alexander's childhood to his death, there's no
drama
—no narrative arc, no shaping of those events into a good story. They're just being ticked off a list. To my mind, this failing is best represented by the way in which the action of Stone's movie suddenly and inexplicably grinds to a halt three-quarters of the way through in order to make way for an extended flashback to Philip's assassination a decade earlier. It seemed to come out of nowhere, was lavishly treated, and then disappeared, as the filmmaker scrambled to get to the next historically accurate moment. A lot of
Alexander
is like that.

 

Even this wouldn't necessarily have mattered if the movie had managed to convey Alexander's unique appeal. From the very beginning of his film it's clear that Oliver Stone has succumbed to the romance of Alexander, and wants us to, too. “It was an empire not of land or of gold but of the mind,” the aged Ptolemy muses aloud as he shuffles around his palace, which itself is a fairly typical mix of the scrupulously accurate and the inexplicably wrong. (The scrolls piled in the cubbyholes of his library rightly bear the little identifying tags that were the book jackets of the classical world; on the other hand, the tacky statuary on Ptolemy's terrace looks suspiciously like the work of J. Seward Johnson Jr.) “I've known many great men in my life, but only one colossus,” he drones on, as a put-upon secretary scurries after him with a roll of papyrus. (He would, for what it's worth, have been writing on an erasable wax tablet; costly papyrus was only for fair-copying.)

You can't help thinking that one reason you have to be told so explicitly and so often about the greatness of Alexander the Great is that the actor Stone has chosen to portray Alexander is incapable of conveying it himself. Colin Farrell is an Irishman with a sly, trickster's face that betrays nothing of what may be going on behind it; in films like
Phone Booth
, in which he plays a sleazy PR executive, he has a skittish authenticity. It's true that he shares certain physical characteristics with Alexander: like the Macedonian, the Irishman is small, a bantamweight who looks fast on his feet. (Alexander himself was such a good runner that for a while he was considered a candidate for the Olympic games, until he protested that he would compete only against kings.) But he simply doesn't have the qualities necessary to suggest Alexander's remarkable charisma. As he trudges through the film, earnestly spouting lines that describe what we know Alexander was thinking (“I've seen the future…these people want—need—change”), he looks more and more like what he in fact is: a Hibernian character actor with a shaggy-browed poker face trapped in a glamorous leading man's part.

The void at the center of this biopic must be especially embarrassing to the filmmakers, given how much fuss they made about another aspect of the film's attempts at capturing “historical accuracy”: the gru
eling boot-camp training that Farrell and the actors playing his troops had to go through in order (presumably) to lend his on-screen generalship authenticity. The night before the press screening I attended, the Discovery Channel aired a documentary entitled
Becoming Alexander
, which showed Farrell jogging under the hot Moroccan sun with the loyal extras and talking about the bond that had grown up between him and the men whom he would be leading into cinematic battle. A military expert hired to advise the filmmaker opined that, as a result of this earnest process, Farrell had been transformed from “an Irish street kid” into a “leader of men.”

Whatever else it illuminates, the patent fatuity of this hype—if the actor hadn't attended the boot camp, would the extras have disobeyed his orders at Gaugamela?—suggests that
Alexander
gets at least one thing across successfully: the vanity of the filmmakers. With its dramatically meaningless detail and almost total failure to convey the central allure of its subject, the film at least betrays its creators' satisfaction with their own effort and expense—with, that is to say, their ability to outdo other classical epics that have sprung up since
Gladiator
was a hit a few years ago. (Or betrays, perhaps, their own biographical agendas: it occurs to you that Stone, who an early autobiographical novel reveals was the product of a rocky union between a wealthy, powerful father and a rather unstable, alluring mother, may really have been making a movie about himself.)

But the reason
Gladiator
was successful was not that its characters sported historically accurate togas and lolled about in Roman orgies, but that it had an irresistible
story
: a noble and innocent hero betrayed by an ostensible friend, a long, tormented imprisonment where the hero nonetheless acquires the arcane skills and resources that will make his vengeance possible, and then the elaborately staged, long-awaited comeback, the climactic revenge. (It's essentially a remake of
The Count of Monte Cristo
.) For all the talk of authenticity and of identification with the ancients on the part of the director and actors responsible for
Alexander
, no one seems to have paused to wonder, while they spent months and millions on re-creating the Battle of Gaugamela with earsplitting, eye-popping verisimilitude, whether the “accuracy” of such a reconstruction of the classical past actually adds anything to our understanding of that past—whether it helps tell the story or enhances
our appreciation of why Alexander may be more worth making a movie about than other ancient conquerors are. To my knowledge, there are no medieval romances in Armenian about Julius Caesar.

If the above sounds disappointed, it is. I became a classicist because of Alexander the Great: at thirteen, I read Mary Renault's intelligent and artful novels about Alexander,
Fire from Heaven
and
The Persian Boy
(the latter told from the point of view of Bagoas the eunuch), and I was hooked. Adolescence, after all, is about nothing if not
pothos
; the Alexander story's combination of great deeds and strange cultures, the romantic blend of the youthful hero, that Odyssean yearning, strange rites, and panoramic moments—all spiced with a dash of polymorphous perversity which all the characters seemed to take in stride—were too alluring to resist. From that moment on all I wanted was to know more about these Greeks. Naturally I've learned a great deal since then, and know about, and largely believe, the revisionist views of Alexander, the darker interpretation of the events I read about thirty years ago in fictional form; but I will admit that a little of that allure, that
pothos
, still clings to the story—and to the Greeks—for me.

At the age of sixteen, soon after I read Renault's novels (from which, I couldn't help noticing, a good deal in Stone's film is borrowed without credit, not least a Freudian scene illuminating the sources of Alexander's hatred of his father, and perhaps of his indifference to women), I wrote the author a fan letter, which I concluded by shyly hoping that she wouldn't reply with a form letter. Her response, which was the beginning of a correspondence that lasted until her death ten years later, and which inspired me to go on and study Classics, came to my mind when I was hearing Colin Farrell described as a “leader of men” in
Becoming Alexander
. “I wonder,” Miss Renault wrote to me in April 1976,