All hail Maximus Acronyms - Romans Unite Before Bullying Insurgent Spanish Heman! (possible spoiler in final paragraph)

Rating: 1/10 (16 May 2000)

There is a lovely film in here about a spoilt brat teenager who unfortunately has tyrannical rule over the Roman Empire. So whereas most sulky boys kick tables and storm off to their room, Commodus Caesar gets to throw those who annoy and humiliate him to digitally enhanced cats. Joaquin Phoenix gives a magnificent performance, camp in the best swords and sandals tradition, throwing childish fits when he doesn't get his way, sporting marvellously gothic eyeliner (Romans vs Goths, you see), scheming elaborate punishments for his big sister, which, for him, unlike the rest of us, who get our hair pulled, can actually, horribly, be realised.
It's also nice to see that the hackneyed tide of postmodernism has been stemmed Canute-like, and a complex period in Roman history, with its plagues, revolts, tyrannies and back-room intrigues and murders can be 'crystallised' in a young boy's feeling unloved by his father. Haven't we all felt this melancholy burden at one time or another, the failure to do what is right, honourable and Stoic, when ambition and privilege seem much more immediately rewarding?
Add to this the accursed, tragic flaws of incest and worse (the difference between mad tyrant and noble hero must always be expressed in terms of neurotic sexuality and fertility-turned-ascetic renunciation), and you have a truly harassed, 'modern' hero, well supported by a ripe mixture of theatrical greats (Derek Jacobi) and former 60s icons (Oliver Reed, David Hemmings - is this Scott's THE LIMEY?). He gets to watch some champion gladiating too.
Of course, a film of this stature, size and scope must inevitably have its longueurs, here an elaborate sub-plot involving Russell Crowe, an inexorable melange of MAD MAX/BRAVEHEART (noble hero turned insane revenger after wife and family slaughtered; the bleak landscapes witnessing vastly scaled pub brawls; the lengthy, dimly lit, self-agonising indoor scenes, as a 'man' debates within himself his 'man'liness and duty; the loaded dichotomy between caricatured, vicious Imperials and unswervingly decent warrior; buddy-buddy development; Godardian, alienating, swelling score) and SPARTACUS (the violent gladiator scenes; the chinned sincerity; the captive peasant taking on the might of the Roman Empire; the structural homophobia).
Crowe is a revelation - and reveals a hitherto unmined talent for comedy and parody. Of course, this works because, like Leslie Nielsen, he marshalls a tautly disciplined straight face, but his clenched surliness, his Heston-like intergrity, his attempt to absorb the Stoic precepts of Marcus Aurelius (his scenes with Richard Harris are worthy of that masterpiece oof classical epics, CARRY ON CLEO), his reciting dialogue Abrahams-Zucker-Abrahams would have been proud to have written, are so funny (the scene where he rises off the ground of the auditorium to 'meet' his family is pure comic genius), so expertly pomposity-bursting, so winding up the pretensions of an entire genre, I emerged from the film with great respect for this stunningly versatile, deceptive actor.
He couldn't have done it, though, without the help of Ridley Scott, essaying another mass culture in decline, who has bravely exorcised the complexities, ambiguities and enigmas of BLADE RUNNER to create an admirably simplistic epic, to abandon the weight of historical validity in favour of Boys' Own fantasy. It would have been easy with this budget to create a teeming, living, authentic Rome, but Scott the postmodernist recognises the impossibility of this project, and, in an act of avant-garde innovation, hangs his drama on a handful of geometric signifiers, with little relation to any reality beyond the drawing board.
There has been an extraordinary , and for me higly promising, strain in modern Hollywood filmmaking (eg TITANIC, THE PHANTOM MENACE), in which the new digital technology is not used to create novel, vast, convincing, strange worlds, but to elucidate the principles of Brechtian epic theatre, to foreground artificiality, implausibility, soullessness, encouraging the audience out of the narrative, to stand back and reflect on issues such as the construction of history, mass spectacle etc. The dreams of the New Wave may finally have come to fruition.
Like most films of this type, GLADIATOR is about a hero who is too good for his society, who cannot live in it. But is he? The absence of historical verity in the story set me thinking to about what Scott was trying to say. Because the film is a story about a man who lets his family die, who isn't there for them. This is a curious hero to celebrate, though appropriate in an age where fathers often abandon their families, even to the extent of not paying alimony. After Maximus (Scott must have been a Monty Python fan) sees the charred crucified bodies, the film goes momentarily into dream mode. But does it ever come out of it? This is a story that is full of doubles, strange correspondances, mirror scenes; it thoroughly interrogates the nature of family, and finally reaches a ritual climax in which both sides of the same coin (sons) wipe each other out, like Gothic doppelgangers. Is the whole film Maximus's guilty dream, about guilt, emasculation, eternal torture over failure, the descent into bestiality? Is it a theme of America's guilt over slavery and subsequent race traumas, or a renunciation of them (both whites and blacks are slaves here). Whatever. This is the first great comedy of the millennium.