Despite Myself, I enjoyed it...

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 2004)

I came in to this movie with pretty low expectations (not as low, though, as I did for "Last Samurai"), so, as usually happens when ones does that, I left rather pleased... though stilled inevitably peeved at certain details.
I don't want to give away a spoiler, but my reaction to one moment in the film epitomizes how I feel about the whole movie. At a certain point, Paris runs into Aeneas (carrying Anchises, of course) and gives him something. I hope I didn't ruin the moment for the rest of the theater by laughing heartily for about thirty seconds, but at the same time I could not help feeling giddily uplifted by the same abuse of the traditional story.
First, a word on the sets and costumes. When staging the Homeric world, I think one only has two choices: 1) stage it as reflecting Classical Greek culture (architecture, costumes, weaponry of, say, Periclean Athens), i.e. contemporary to the audience of the Iliad we are most familiar with; or 2) to go out all hog and stage it as reflecting Mycenean Greek culture, i.e. contemporary with the events remembered however distantly in the epic itself.
This movie mixes the two styles, Classical and Mycenean, usually with infelicitous results (though often not unpretty). The bricolage that the movie inflicts on the Trojans is fascinating: there is everything from Egyptian colossi to intricate jewelry that I thought odd until I realized that they must echo the gold in Schliemann's hoard.
For novelty's sake, I'd prefer a Mycenean rendering: wouldn't a real Mycenean-looking Iliad be a salutary defamiliarization? If we want to modernize the epic, why don't we bring in what modern scholarship has discovered -- that Paris (Alexandros) may have actually been a historical figure, the Alaksandush mentioned in Hittite records as a troublemaker in western Anatolia?
To get on to some weightier matters... the movie has an anti-religious subtext, I think, one that hardly squares with the mindset of the epic itself. Except for Achilles' mother, the gods, so prominent in the Iliad, are invisible and mute. Even Hector voices skepticism in the gods even as he affirms how he has always honored them. There is an implication that decisions made out of piety (above all the decision to bring in the Horse) are always mistakes.
Oddly for a secularizing reading of the Iliad, it recasts the heroes, including most egregiously Achilles, in a quasi-Christian mode more appropriate to the "Chanson de Roland." Achilles weeps, feels pity and remorse, etc. -- he is also chivalrous when it comes to the ladies.
That brings me to the subject of Patroclus. I pretty much expected a Hollywood movie to refuse to touch with a ten-foot pole the gay romance at the heart of the epic. The movie makes him a "beloved younger cousin" to Achilles and, at least to my taste, cast someone who is hardly as lustable over as Pitt, Bana, or Orlando (which by every rights Achilles' lover should be) -- though maybe the make-up people deliberately deglamorized the actor in question.
That being said, the death of Patroclus is still what sets Achilles off and the way they plot that it still is plausible within the logic of the film itself.
I guess that sums up what I feel about the movie itself: it works on its own terms. I don't know if it is better to come into the movie with less rather than more acquaintance with the Iliad itself. One might enjoy the movie more if one knew nothing of the epic, but then again if one knew nothing of the epic one would miss out on a lot of the comic relief the movie does unintentionally offer.
Still, I must say much in the film was genuinely awesome and moving. The way the Achaean army swoops down on the city at the end truly filled me with terror, horror, pity, and an infinite desolation at the thought of how little we have changed in 3000 years. I thought of all the innocents, floods of fleeing refuge-seekers, dying in burning Warsaw or Berlin.