Genius.

Rating: 10/10 (17 November 2004)

Last night I saw Alexander.
I don't know where to start. I guess the two main questions are "Is it any good/Did you like it?" and "How was The Gay?" Actually, that's three questions - I often like movies even though I don't think they're good. But I'll roll the first two into one answer, anyhow.
And the answer, in this case, is the same to both: an enthusiastic and unqualified yes.
Whatever else you might say of Oliver Stone, he is a passionate filmmaker, and passion is exactly what is required to tell the story of Alexander the Great. I am very curious to see what the Alexander afficianados will have to say about it, since by necessity much was amalgamated and even more was left out. I'm equally curious about what those who know nothing of him will make of it. For myself, I found the story Oliver Stone and his co-writers came up with to be cohesive, coherent, and compelling. It privileged the man over the achievements, and while there were some awesome (in the sense of inspiring awe, at least in me) battle scenes, the war campaign was not the heart of the film: the heart of the man was the heart of the film.
Which brings me to the question of The Gay.
While it's true that there is no on-screen sex between men in the film (there is one fade-to-black when Alexander beckons Bagoas to his bed), the film does not shy away from the love between Alexander and Hephaestion. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think Val Kilmer, in this month's Vanity Fair, makes reference to "the scene where Alexander and Hephaestion pledge their love to each other" as being one of the most moving he's seen. My question to him is, "Which one, Val?" For there are no less than three scenes that I would say fit that description. *emogasm* Honestly, the emotions are so intense and are portrayed so wonderfully and wondrously by the two actors, that I don't miss the sex. I wish I had taken notes in the Q&A, because that question came up and Colin went into an impassioned explanation of what they chose to show and why. He talked about how bisexuality as we know it today did not exist in Alexander's day, so when they were making the film they didn't think about whether or not he was gay. They just looked at his relationship with Hephaestion and wanted to show the love. The purity of it; Colin came back to that a couple of times. And he made it very clear that he didn't mean they weren't physically involved, it was that sexual relations were not the defining characteristic of the love: "Whether or not they ever had sex," he said, "their love was as pure as the driven snow." He went on to say that their sexual relationship, if they had one, most likely came about naturally as they grew up and explored together; and by the time we see adult Alexander and Hephaestion in the film, that aspect of their relationship had passed. I'm doing my best to preserve the language and manner in which Colin spoke. He seemed to equivocate in the beginning of sentences sometimes, never outright stating that Alexander and Hephaestion had been lovers; but in the middles and ends of sentences, his belief (or what I'm interpreting as his belief) came through. Someone asked about Alexander's death, since it was unclear to her from the ending of the film what he actually died of. Colin said they left it open because there's no definitive proof: some speculate he was poisoned, others that he died of a broken heart ("and I may be one of them, at times," Colin said), still others that it was the cumulation of years of injuries ("and a broken heart," Colin added), or maybe it was typhoid. He also said somewhere in there that he himself is a romantic.
It would be very difficult for me to love Colin any more than I do right now.
Another thing he talked about, and I'm veering back to more general discussion of the film, is how Oliver Stone is a deeply patriotic filmmaker. He likened Stone's films to an intervention: it's not that Oliver Stone hates America, rather that he loves it so much he wants it stop destroying itself, and he's trying to show it how it's going wrong. There is a scene in Alexander that marries politics of sexuality to military politics, in an insistent and subversive way that makes me want to label the film genius. Unfortunately, I think it's genius that's destined for box office failure; America's not in the mood for this type of mirror right now.
There's so much more, but I think I should wait for the film to come out so I can have actual discussions with people, instead of babbling at you!