Travesty of "Troy"

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 2004)

In my final year of college I dreamed of writing a screenplay for one of the greatest stories ever told: Homer's "Iliad", the poem that inspired me to pursue a degree in Classics. I was drawn in by Achilles, a semi-divine warrior who is dishonored by a lackluster commander, and whose heart-wrenching loss of his closest friend draws him back to the fateful conflict he had sworn off.
Homer's genius was to take disparate traditions and weave them into the unified tale of Achilles' wrath. The failure of Petersen's "Troy" is that in trying to capture the entire story of the Trojan War in a single movie, his movie becomes a giant narrative centrifuge, sending various bits Troy-tradition spinning off singly into an incomprehensible oblivion. How does he do it? By trying to glom on to anything the average university-educated viewer, or swords-and-sandals epic buff might remember about the Trojan War, and by not settling on any unified vision for his own film.
Don't get me wrong. Though I love the "Iliad", have read many translations of the poem, and have read portions of it in Greek, I am also a reasonable movie-goer. My first demand is that I be entertained for the 8 bucks I deposit at the box-office. It wasn't the fact that his movie wasn't faithful to Homer that most bothered me. Rather, it was Petersen's utter inability to make the psychological motivations of his characters believable for the audience, or capitalize effectively on any of the half-clever ideas which did find their way into the script that managed to keep me at a distance for a full 162 minutes.
*Spoiler warning* Here's an example of a half-clever idea: in Petersen's film, Patroclus becomes a young cousin of Achilles whom we first meet when Odysseus comes to recruit a full-grown Achilles. Achilles is training a young Patroclus in fancy swordplay. Benioff chose to replace the older companion with a younger relative, perhaps to play on the topoi of 1) brothers who go to war, 2) the young man who wants to fight before he is old enough, and 3) confrontation with the death of family on the battlefield.
Differences in the Achilles-Patroclus relationship impact the story. "Troy", like Homer, has Patroclus confront Achilles in tears, distraught over the loss of Greek life and Achilles' apparent unconcern for it. Whereas in Homer, Patroclus volunteers to fight in Achilles place, in "Troy" we are shocked to see Achilles inexplicably charging against the Trojans to be cut down in a premature (for Homeric tradition) duel with Hector. Wow. Anyone who knows the Iliad is in total shock that the story has departed so much from the "original", at least for a second, until he or she remembers that Patroclus first takes the field against the Trojans when Achilles refuses to do so. This gesture almost works because of the educated viewer's uncertainty about how far the filmmakers are willing to depart from Homer.
In "Troy" it is only when Hector pulls off Achilles' helmet that he (and we) discovers that this is not Achilles at all, but Patroclus. Thus Hector, in his short-lived triumph, faces the prospect of death at the hands of the real Achilles. Unlike Homer, who in Greek fashion does not conceive of narrative "surprises", Benioff has given the audience the kind of twist that is suitable for modern movie audiences. Unfortunately we have been given so little material upon which to build sympathy for Patroclus, that the flash of half-cleverness carries no emotional thunder. Petersen's Patroclus is a vacant pretty-boy, who reveals Brad Pitt's weaknesses as a casting-choice for Achilles rather than shoring them up by way of contrast. *Spoiler end*
Other problems: just because Christopher Marlowe penned immortal lines about the "thousand ships" Helen's beauty launched, and computer-graphics wizards have the ability to put them to sea, does not make the vision dramatic on the screen. Rather than compensate for the script's lack of real passion or soul, the giant Greek fleet and epic mass of opposing armies accent the vacancy of the film, replacing gaping awe with empty yawns. Also, the art department really falls down in depicting the Greek gods, whose laughable depiction in paper-mache statuary emphasizes their embarrassing absence from the narrative.
Plusses: Whatever one might think of Petersen's and Benioff's choices regarding the characters Agamemnon and Menelaus, I loved the casting of this fumbling duo. Brian Cox and Brendan Gleeson pull off the swagger and bluster of this seasoned pair of over-reaching brigands with real aplomb. Saffron Burrows as Andromache completely overshadowed Diane Kruger's Helen, proving that the combination of real acting and a-typical beauty will always trump the picture-perfect, yet vacant beauty of Hollywood mannequins. Peter O'Toole did an admirable job with a hopeless role as Priam.
Biggest gripe: the love stories. Here is where my Homer most interferes with my "Troy" experience, though I feel I am justified. Petersen and Benioff turn the doomed episode of erotomania between a serial seductress (Helen) and a beautiful boy-toy (Paris), into a would-be touching romance between a dewey-eyed teenage "playa", Orlando Bloom, and the abovementioned mannequin, Diane Kruger, whose forced attempts at real emotion are never quite credible. Then there is the putatively parallel romance between Achilles and Briseis, which is far less believable than the Bloom-Kruger match.
Why is the Briseis-Achilles romance so off-putting? First, in the Iliad Briseis is a prize of war. Achilles refers to her in material terms as a "prize of honor", physical evidence of his prowess and achievement on the battlefield. Just as lions and men do not make deals (to paraphrase Achilles' words to a pleading Hector), lions and human prizes generally don't move back and forth between mutual disregard and tender romance in a story covering several weeks (the apparent length of the conflict in Petersen's Troy).
Petersen should have taken his relationship cues more from Homer than contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. Every reader of Homer knows that the single sympathetic romantic relationship of the poem is between Hector and Andromache (if one excludes Achilles and Patroclus, and I am not sure why we should). The lust of Paris and the ownership of Achilles strike the modern reader as negative contrasts to the true family feeling that exists in the household of Hector, Andromache, and their son Astyanax. Oddly in "Troy" the same is true, though not by design; Bana, Burrows, and baby are the only group that excite real emotional sympathy, the epic pairings of Bloom and Kruger and Pitt and Byrne, for all their looks, are nothing short of annoying.
Conclusion: as I endured "Troy" (and I noticed many people around me checking their watches periodically), there were moments when I was less irritated. I saw stray pins of light poking through the morass of ineptitude, spanning the ages back to Homer. If you know the "Iliad", and are curious to see how badly it can be hatcheted yet again by the modern Hollywood movie mill, you might want to check out "Troy" on video. Frankly the big screen doesn't really improve the experience enough to justify the extra outlay of cash. If you are the average movie-goer looking for an entertaining diversion, unless your standards are pretty low, I'd say give it a miss. "Troy" is not engaging enough to hold your attention for more than half an hour, neither is it bad enough to be amusingly campy.