The Fall of Troy

Troy

National Review Online, June 2, 2004

It took three movies to do justice to The Lord of the Rings, five (so far) to tell the tale of Star Wars, two to chronicle the demise of Tarantino's Bill, and three, incredibly, to give us the Matrix saga, a saga with a concept, but no plot at all. In Wolfgang Petersen's new Troy, by contrast, Homer's Iliad, a story that has endured intact for 3,000 years, one of the glories, indeed, of Western culture (or, if you are the reviewer at the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, "a dry classroom epic"), is sliced, diced, and distilled into blandness, all so it can fit into the confines of just one film and, presumably, rake in a buck or two. Homer's Troy took ten years to fall, Petersen's collapses in about three weeks, taking most of the ancient epic with it. There's no Cassandra, for example, and there are no gods. Achilles survives long enough to skulk inside the Trojan Horse, Ajax falls in battle rather than (the usual story) by his own hand, and Agamemnon is butchered honorably at war rather than, on his return home by, embarrassingly, his wife's boyfriend. And no, the fact that the film has a bit of the Odyssey tacked on at the end (all that business about a horse) is absolutely no compensation, particularly for those of us who were rooting for the Trojans.

But perhaps this is too harsh. It's never easy to film a much-loved classic. The very success of the original is evidence of its hold over the imagination. The dreams and the images that readers conjure up for themselves are far more powerful than anything the filmmaker can produce. There are exceptions, Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, Schlondorff's Tin Drum, certainly, and, of course, The Lord of the Rings trilogy itself. Against that, who can forget the spectacle of all those querulous tots grumbling that the first Harry Potter movie wasn't "quite right"—even as the ungrateful little swine lined up to see it again and again and again? Adaptations are, by their nature, tricky, and whether it's Dickens or Wharton or Highsmith or Wolfe or any one of countless others, we can all think of authors badly let down by their transfer to the silver screen.

Mention of Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, suggests a kinder way to look at Petersen's epic. Measured against Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the greatest novels of the late 20th century, Bonfire of the Vanities (the movie) was a terrible disappointment. Seen as an entertainment in its own right, however, it really wasn't too bad. No, no, it really wasn't. Perhaps then, to be fair, we should take a step back from the blind poet and his wine-dark seas and just take a look at the merits of Troy in its own right.

Unfortunately, that won't take very long.

Troy is, let's just say this now, a bad movie. It's certainly not Gigli bad, and it's not even Van Helsing bad, but it's still bad, and, and unlike the much underrated Mummy movies (bad in a good way), it is bad in a bad way. The script is more wooden than the horse; the special effects lack the grandeur we have come to expect in our epics and Troy's gimcrack Troy looks like Rome/Babylon/Athens as re-imagined for one of Las Vegas' lesser casinos. And here's something else. One thing those ancients could do was, you know, sculpt. Well, the statues in Petersen's Troy look as if a blind man had carved them with a cheese grater, so much so that when they toppled (a moment of tragedy) it was difficult not to cheer. On the credit side, the battle sequences themselves are fine, if not Zulu, LOTR, or Private Ryan; but it is only the marvelously shot (and performed) hand-to-hand combat between Achilles and Hector that, despite its odd blend of Shaolin and Sparta, really manages to grip.

The cast? Well, leaving aside the fact that so many are blondish and blue-eyed that I kept thinking that it was the Vikings who were storming the beaches of Troy, they do their best. Eric Bana is sympathetic as Hector the prince, the brother, the husband, if slightly unconvincing as the warrior (on a $175 million budget surely the filmmakers should have been able to pull in Viggo Mortensen), Peter O'Toole is ham as much as Priam, but finely cured and well worth watching. Sean Bean (Odysseus) is terrific and much of the criticism of Orlando Bloom's weak and ineffectual Paris seems poorly judged when one remembers that, according to Homer, Paris was weak and ineffectual.

But if Paris has had a rough ride from the critics, that's nothing compared with poor Helen (Diane Kruger). Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, thought she was "pretty enough in a Darien, Connecticut, kind of way—not exactly Helen of Troy, but maybe Helen of Abercrombie & Fitch (Think of her as the face that launched 1,000 golf carts)," while Phillip French of the London Observer thought she looked "more like a waitress than a princess, less a face that launched a thousand ships than a face that served a thousand lunches." The Washington Post's Stephen Hunter rated hers "as a 457-ship face," not generous, but kinder than Slate's David Edelstein who reckoned that this Helen would only be able to raise one hundred ships, "although if you throw in that lithe body and a favorable wind, you could bump the number up to 250." Fussy, fussy, fussy. Diane Kruger is gorgeous. One thousand ships, no question. End of discussion.

And Achilles? Well, given what we know about certain nautical traditions, Brad Pitt's resplendent Achilles could probably have launched a fleet in his own right. Buff, muscled, and tough, "Rachel's" husband looks the part, every inch the warrior, even if his blond mane, mumbled diction, and somewhat simian features are more suggestive of a surf nazi than Zeus's beloved, the best of the Achaeans. Pitt's problem is not his acting, but his script. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles is the central figure around which the drama revolves. Remove too much of that original text, and there's not much of Achilles that remains.

Take the death of Patroclus, the event that brings Achilles back into the war to kill Hector. In the movie, Patroclus is Achilles's teenage protégé and cousin, close, but with nothing not to ask or not to tell about. With Achilles still sulking in his tent, the youngster takes the great man's armor, and is slain by a Hector convinced that he is battling the Greek hero himself, a sad loss to Achilles, doubtless, but one that is difficult to reconcile with the grief, rage and the revenge we are shown in Troy, a revenge that culminates in Achilles attaching Hector's corpse to his chariot, and dragging it around and around the walls of the besieged city, an outrage as much then as it would be now.

With Homer, it all makes so much more sense. Although the Greeks tended to define these matters far less rigidly than we do, Achilles and Patroclus were almost certainly lovers, and, far from being surprised that Patroclus was mistaken for him, that was exactly why Achilles lends him his armor all the while warning Patroclus not to push his luck too far, a temptation, he knew, that his friend would find hard to resist. But carried away by early victory, Patroclus ignores that advice, with terrible results. Hector kills him, strips him of his armor ,and it is only a fierce fight by the Greeks that prevents his body from being left out there for the dogs.

Now we understand Achilles's rage. It is a blend of guilt, love, and, both for him and the lost Patroclus, humiliation. Quite why Petersen chose to PG the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is anyone's guess. Perhaps he thought that a bisexual warrior (oh yes, Achilles liked girls too. A lot.) would be bad box office in our own, more conventional, era. And it was, I suspect, also convention, and an astonishing lack of imagination, that made Petersen turn his back on the gods. He thought, he said, that they were "silly" and unnecessary to the plot. Well, there's one in the eye for the blind poet who insisted in writing the whole thing in the first place.

Except, of course, that it isn't. The gods were central not only to the arc of Homer's glorious enchantment, but to its meaning. To the Greeks fate was capricious, often unfair and frequently unkind. The good could perish miserably, and the bad could prevail. All that man could do was his best. His best hope was to be remembered well. And it is there we find the tragedy of Hector (a good man despite the rather problematic treatment of the dead Patroclus) as he does battle with Achilles, son of the sea nymph Thetis, a battle he could not win (go for the heel!), a battle against a man who was all but invulnerable (go for the heel! Go for the heel!), a man who was being helped by a goddess. And this tragedy is an echo of the tragedy that lies at the heart of the Iliad, the tragedy of the individual helpless before fate. To be sure, that's not dissimilar to the belief of modern, secular man, recognizing, at last, that we are adrift in an indifferent universe, but even that bleak view has its own bleak comforts. Our universe at least isn't out to get us. The Greeks, believing in fickle gods who turned hostile on a whim, could never be so sure.

If Petersen thinks that's "silly" he should consult Christopher Logue, the man he should have asked to be his scriptwriter. Logue, an English poet, has been working on an "account" of the Iliad for the last 40 years, an adaptation, possibly the finest ever written in the English language. And it has plenty of room for the gods:

Patroclus fought like dreaming

His head thrown back, his mouth-wide as a shrieking mask—

Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind

And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him,

To lock them around his waist, red water, washed across his chest,

To lay their tired necks against his sword like birds.

—Is it a god? Divine? Needing no tenderness?—

Yet instantly they touch, he butts them,

Cuts them back:

—Kill them!

My sweet Patroclus,

—Kill them!

As many as you can,

For

Coming behind you through the dust you felt

—What was it?—felt Creation part, and then

Apollo!

Who had been patient with you

Struck.

Silly? I don't think so. Stripped of its tragic core, and its magic, its necessary, wonderful magic, this pedestrian, pointless, prosaic Troy never involves, never engages. We never care. Achilles, Paris, Hector, Helen, whatever. So, in what looks a lot like desperation, Petersen has tried to inject some invented contemporary "relevance" into a story that, properly filmed, would already have had it.

"Nothing has changed in 3,000 years. People are still using deceit to engage in wars of vengeance. Just as King Agamemnon waged what was essentially a war of conquest on the ruse of trying to rescue the beautiful Helen from the hands of the Trojans, President George W. Bush concealed his true motives for the invasion of Iraq."

Oh whatever, Wolfgang, whatever.