Myth and Reality

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 2004)

(Multiple SPOILERS)
There's an essential tragedy enacted when Hector and Achilles meet in this film. Each is brave, honorable man, who in a different circumstance ought to be brothers in spirit. But, as Hector fights for his home and kin and Achilles fights for dead Patroclus and to make himself the very definition of the warrior ethic, each is dedicated utterly to the destruction of the other. Their greatness makes them blind. This scene lifts 'Troy' from being a very ordinary, po-faced recounting of a legend and pumps blood into veins. The following scene, with Peter O'Toole's marvelous take on Priam's grieved request, cements this and the film drives to an appropriately apocalyptic finish.
Many will say 'Troy' is a great film and even more will call it a terrible film; it is neither. It is a sturdy Hollywood epic studded with moments both excellent and lackluster. Critics have delighted in suggesting it's a campy throwback to 50s kitsch of 'The Robe' and its ilk, but this is not true; actually, it's too damned low key and phony arty. A bit more trash would have helped. Coming to it after just reading 'The Iliad' is not kind. Ah ha, you say, but why should it compete with some high-falutin' bit of Grecian poetry when it's supposed to be a good night at the movies? Well, firstly, 'The Iliad' is as vital and solid a piece of writing as any in existence, and it's got more action than any 'Die Hard' flick. Homer could turn a story on a dime and make the confrontation of two men not encountered before in the story of sudden deadly interest. It swings from ugly thrilling slaughter to poetic beauty to tear-jerking sentiment to high farce within pages. In short, it's like all the life of the Greeks and the Trojans have been stuffed onto the page. 'Troy', stripped-down, dourly real, is at no time such a rich and involving, multi-leveled work. Hector and Achilles' solitary confrontation on a vast plain reminded me of the finale of Sergio Leone's 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly', and then the real problem struck me. Leone's films with their operatic style, loopy humor and mythical heroes, are far more Homeric than this film which proceeds academically, even dully, for its first half.
Perhaps its worst crime is to rob its characters of the awe that has made them memorable for 3,000 years, that fame the film reminds us so frequently they are trying to earn. Ajax (only the Larger: Ajax the Runner is left out) is reduced to a big guy swinging a club; both he and Menelaus are killed within minutes of each-other by Hector. Patroclus is supposed to be nearly as brilliant and experienced a soldier as Achilles, where here he's a whelp scarcely out of Myrmidon Junior High. The emphasis on Achilles here helps to dull the others, although David Benioff's unwieldy script doesn't help. Agamemnon's part is also frustrating, and tied in to the film's irritating insistence on projecting Hollywood-type morality. This is tale of ancient times with very different standards, some obnoxious to modern taste. Agamemnon in the legends is no saint, but in this era, the warrior leader puts his money where his mouth is; he fights mightily. The emotional Agamemnon had to sacrifice a daughter to get this war moving. At no time in the film is this portrayed. Brian Cox's Agamemnon is simply a ranting, power-mad dictator. In 'The Iliad' though the Greeks are aggressors, they make us admire them for brave and brilliant. Apart from Achilles and Odysseus, I strongly suspect most audiences watching will wonder why they should care for the Greeks. Whilst this is no Manichean battle as in the 'The Lord of the Rings' films, we are clearly reduced to good guys and bad guys.
Iin 'The Iliad', there is both great tragedy and glory in these two armies mauling each-other, rather lost in this version as the Greeks are reduced to Agamemnon's conquering Panzercorps and the Trojans to besieged ranchers. Troy has proved rich ground for interpretation, from Shakespeare's cynical 'Troilus and Cressida' to cardboard sword and sandal epics. So we have a 'Troy' for the post-9/11 era; lines of loyalty, good, and bad, are terminally blurred; idealism is manipulated by conquerors into a smokescreen of self-righteousness; slaughter gains a snowballing momentum until all have to look upon their basest natures. This is a intelligent take but it's not fulfilled; Barry Unsworth's recent novel 'The Songs of Kings' took many of the same ideas and plays them much more competently; the soldiers' desire for immortality in art, and the excuse of Helen for pillage, conquest, and political success; and the possibility that out of their self-mythologizing and violence will indeed emerge a noble future of Hellenic solidarity and glorious myth. 'Troy' wants to explore these things but still have its classical tragedies and heroes too, and it's an unwieldy combination. It's then neither successful as political metaphor or heroic tale.
Achilles too is changed, to an existential warrior longing both for glory and death. But Benioff has the cheek to turn this into a love story. Where Briseis is simply a minor Homeric pawn setting off Achilles' dispute with Agamemnon, here she's a Trojan royal princess protected by Achilles. Achilles of 'The Iliad' is a perfect soldier as likely to be emotionally involved with a chattel woman as he is to become a wheat farmer in Macedon. This aspect is only added so we accept his killing of family man Hector more easily. In our age which respects strength and bravery much less than purposeful constructiveness and protective impulse, Hector overtakes all the Greeks as the story's tragic hero. Hector's earthy, social sensibility is inevitably beaten because Achilles' relentlessness in war comes from his having nothing to lose. As part-god he is aware of the temporary nature of life - this aspect is well put across but his attachment to Briseis is a shallow distraction. This changes but doesn't kill the tragedy of his and Hector's fight. As Achilles drags Hector behind his chariot, a woman behind muttered 'Oh god!' - the story's primal power came through at last undiminished. There's something anti-climactic about Achilles' death, with his confused, unlikely search for Briseis in the falling Troy. That said, the fall of Troy is good, gut-wrenching sequence.
As film-making, and not myth-making, the film is solid and unspectacular; the CGI armies are rather improved, but it's dull compared to the battles in films like 'Alexander Nevsky' and even Kenneth Branagh's 'Henry V' where it looks like real people are fighting and dying. This is particularly why Hector and Achilles' fight saves it; it's personal and exciting in the way the whole of 'The Iliad' is. Visually it's very ordinary, lacking even the moments of plush decoration that made 'Gladiator' a bit more than a glorified remake of 'Rollerball', except again in the conclusion with a very convincing and dramatic burning city. I doubt this will jump Wolfgang Petersen back to the front rank of film-makers as Ridley Scott managed; 'Troy' is really kind workmanlike, well-told, without confusion, but without risks or inspiration either. That said, where 'Gladiator' fell into a morass of murkiness and bad plotting, 'Troy' lifts as its proceeds, becoming more dense and more passionate. Particularly at the beginning, the acting is stiff; Diane Kruger's Helen is desultory, Orlando Bloom's Paris another breathy pretty boy, Brian Cox all shouts and growls. Eric Bana, a brilliant comic actor, keeps landing parts of humorless gravity. He seems less Homeric here than in 'Black Hawk Down', and struggles not to sound like he's from the Bondi side of Turkey, but to his credit he manages emotional depth and grit. Brad Pitt as Achilles is the most important performer, and the real target, but he's not bad, overcoming like Bana the difficulty of mastering hero-speak and capturing a curiously pained superman; one-note but a sustained note. All of these actors improve as the film continues, but Saffron Burrows and Peter O'Toole make the best impressions, both with tremulous, convincing emotion. What this film leaves you then with is a confused yearning, to have been given more, to have felt more, to have thought more. It should be twice as great as 'The Lord Of The Rings', but it's not half as good a movie.