Not a Natural-Born Subject for Oliver Stone

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2011)

Although Alexander the Great had a distinguished military career, historians generally agree that he took no active part in the Vietnam War. He never served as President of the United States, and not even the barmiest conspiracy theorists have tried to implicate him in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. So what is Oliver Stone doing making a film about him? "Alexander" was the third and last film in the brief revival of the Classical epic in the early 2000s. (The other two were "Gladiator" and "Troy"). The film tells the story of Alexander's life- his boyhood in Macedon, his difficult relationship with his father King Philip, his accession to the throne at the age of 20 following Philip's assassination, his war of conquest against the Persian Empire, his relationship with his close friend Hephaestion, and his death at the age of only 33. The story is narrated by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's close associates and generals who went on to found the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt.
The film was made in the style of the grand epics of the fifties and early sixties; another film about Alexander, starring Richard Burton, was made in 1956. Stone, however, was able to deal with a subject which would have been taboo during that period; the relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion is presented as a homosexual one. This caused some controversy at the time, but while there is no direct evidence that the two men were lovers in the sexual sense, they were undoubtedly devoted friends and lived in a culture in which gay relationships were generally regarded as acceptable. A sexual relationship between them, therefore, is by no means out of the question.
Another controversial issue was the way in which Alexander's campaign against the Persians is compressed into a single battle. Alexander actually won three major victories against the Persian armies, but only the last of these, the Battle of Gaugamela, is shown. This is not, however, a fault in my view. To have given the battles of the Granicus and Issus the same treatment as Gaugamela would have made for a more historically accurate film, but not necessarily for a better one. It would, moreover, have stretched an already over-extended budget to breaking-point and would have made a film which already stretches to nearly three hours even longer.
The film failed at the American box office and was not much liked by the critics; its failure brought an end to the brief epic revival, just as the failures of "Cleopatra" and "Fall of the Roman Empire" put an end to the original epic cycle in the mid-sixties. It was even nominated for several Razzies. Although it has some high points, such as the battle scenes, I would largely agree with the critics; I would not rank it as highly as "Gladiator" or even "Troy". Colin Farrell, although his acting is better than his "Worst Actor" nomination might suggest, does not make a very charismatic hero- certainly not in the same class as Russell Crowe. Admittedly, Farrell has a rather difficult task; twenty-first century audiences are perhaps unlikely to warm to a man who launches a bloody war of conquest out of motives of personal vanity. None of the other cast members stand out, and Angelina Jolie as Alexander's mother Olympias seems particularly miscast, being only a year older than Farrell himself.
Yet there is, I think, another, more basic, reason for the film's failure; it lacks conflict. That might seem an odd criticism to make of a film much of which is taken up with warfare, but I was using the word in its dramatic rather than its military sense. Compared with some Hollywood distortions of history, "Alexander" is a relatively accurate depiction of its hero's life, but there are times when history can benefit by being fictionalised. Thus in "Gladiator", Ridley Scott turns the story of the historical Emperor Commodus into a classic revenge plot by inserting the fictional hero Maximus, and in "Troy" Wolfgang Petersen, while reinterpreting the traditional version of the Greek myth to make it more relevant for modern times, keeps the various conflicts (Greeks v Trojans, Achilles v Agamemnon, etc.) which lay at the heart of the original story.
There is no similar dramatic conflict at the heart of "Alexander". Although the Greeks are fighting the Persians, there is no attempt to explore the causes of the war (other, perhaps, than Alexander's own ego), and the Persian King Darius is a relatively minor figure. The film often seems less like a drama than like an academic history lecture, with Anthony Hopkins's Ptolemy cast in the role of the dusty lecturer vainly struggling to prevent his students from falling asleep. It is not particularly bad by Razzie standards- it is certainly far better than the awful "Natural Born Killers", by far Stone's worst movie, but neither is it particularly interesting. Stone has never really struck me as a natural born epic film-maker; most of his best films ("Salvador", "Wall Street", "Heaven and Earth") have, even if set against major historical events, concentrated on the lives of ordinary men and women. "Alexander" lacks the dramatic power necessary for the success of epic movie, and lacks the emotional intimacy of its director's best films. Perhaps he should have stuck to Vietnam and American politics. 5/10