Livening up the Anglo-Saxons

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2007)

Sturla Gunnarsson's film version of this Anglo-Saxon poem and legend a couple of years ago robbed the story of its legendary elements. Since Beowulf is a national myth freely blending the magical, fantastic, and historical, nothing very memorable, or even appropriate, came out Gunnarsson's well meaning effort to make it brooding, "historical," and "realistic"--except that he did capture the overwhelming gloom of much Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Robert Zemeckis has done a new version, vivid and full of life, gore, and occasional humor. To achieve this effect he has used motion capture technology, with improvements over the previous feature to use the effect, Polar Express. He's also enlisted some rather famous actors, and the movie's been shown in regular format, a 3-D projection with the old glasses bit, and I-Max.
All of which turn the tale into something fabulous, perhaps a bit kitsch, pretty entertaining, and the most ridiculous PG-13 movie ever. It's extraordinarily violent; but then, so are many traditional children's stories, myths--and national epics (the Iliad and the Odyssey aren't sweet little nursery tales; but that's the point: nursery tales aren't sweet).
In the 3-D version I saw, as in the old days of 3-D, which never did catch on, spears and drops of blood and pebbles spew constantly in your face. We'd be dead or maimed if our mugs were thrust so close to such events. But after a while you get used to it. You adjust to the motion capture imagery too. It makes sense for legendary characters to have an artificial gloss. The point is there's no naturalistic way to render the Beowulf story.
This movie has done well at the US box office. Some have compared it to a computer game, and it's certainly comic book or graphic novel material in the Zemeckis version. But the result is surprisingly effective, and despite some jarring elements--most people may just remember a naked Angelina Jolie with an odd accent, and maybe Crispin Glover covered in gore and spore and magnified to fifteen times a man's size, as Grendel, the monster.
A highly computer-enhanced Ray Winstone (provided with a super-nautilus body) plays Beowulf, the Geat who comes to slay Grendel for Hrothgar, leader of the Danes. The story opens with the great "mead hall" where the early Scandinavians got drunk and swore oaths they later were held to. Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) is a drunken, fat old man with a young wife Wealhtheow (Robin Wright Penn); he's nonetheless extraordinarily brave. When the monster Grendel, a misshapen, outcast creature, comes to kill many of Hrothgar's men in the hall, Hrothgar stands up to him boldly--and survives. But the next day he closes the hall and goes into a period of grieving.
When Beowulf comes along offering to slay Grendel and boasting of his prowess, he is challenged, primarily by Unferth (John Malkovitch)--an interesting character, unappealing, cowardly, but a useful foil for Beowulf whom the hero ultimately forgives and in the film version turns friendly. Unferth accuses Beowulf of exaggerating his prowess in a swimming contest. In the movie, Beowulf is a liar several important times. This is not exactly the way the story originally went, but writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary have embellished the original in interesting ways.
The most obvious one is Angelina. "Grendel's dam" (an animal term for mother) as the poem calls her is never clearly described--certainly not as a big-breasted, bee-sting-lipped naked babe. This is certainly a lively element, but a pretty distracting one. Beowulf has to battle Grendel, then his mother, and then, later, a great dragon. Arguably the dragon is even more distracting, since it's a huge, spectacular, golden creature. But this makes for an appropriately grandiose climax.
Grendel is pretty weird looking, a little too grotesque and disgusting and not monstrous on a heroic scale as the epic poem implies, but naturally Crispin Glover does good things with the character, making him a pitiful as well as scary figure.
Scholars argue endlessly about the meaning of various elements in the story; a big issue is how strong the Christian element in it is. As someone who studied the original pretty closely at one time myself, I was impressed at how well this movie brings the story to life. It doesn't seem to have appealed much to the critics. But the ancient bard who spun out the original poem was not an art-house filmmaker. Yes, it's kitsch; yes, Angelina's a jarring element; and yes, the various accents are a dreadful mixture. But anything that leads people back to the oldest English literary tradition of all and gives it popular appeal again seems pretty worthwhile to me.