Saturday Morning Classic Literature
Beowulf
The New York Sun, November 16, 2007
Mighty Beowulf fought for glory, honor, and immortal renown. If, however, the hero of that ancient Anglo-Saxon epic had been unlucky enough to see three recent movies inspired by his exploits, he would, I reckon, have opted instead for obscurity.
The first, Graham Baker's "Beowulf" (1999), was an incoherent fiasco starring Christopher "Highlander" Lambert, and set in a dank, dismal techno-medieval future. Next came Sturla Gunnarsson's "Beowulf & Grendel" (2005), a movie of such numbing sanctimony (trolls as oppressed minority, or something like that) that not even the beauties of Iceland and Sarah Polley were able to redeem it. And now, well, let's just say that Robert Zemeckis has done to "Beowulf" what Grendel never could.
In discussing a film this bad, it is, as with a particularly unappetizing meal, difficult to know where to start. A good place might be its most distinctive feature: the way it looks. This owes a great deal to the technique, known as "performance capture," first used by Mr. Zemeckis in "The Polar Express." Sensors attached to the actors' faces and bodies enable their movements, gestures, and mannerisms to be stored digitally for later use. With this method at his disposal, Mr. Zemeckis could, quite literally, do what he wanted with his cast. Eat your heart out, Mr. DeMille. He altered their appearance, he dressed or, oh yes, undressed them at will, and then inserted them into the computer-generated backdrop against which the film lurches along its blowsy, hectic, and heedless way.
Sometimes the results are striking: Ray Winstone, an actor of average height, middling age, and respectable stoutness, is turned into six and a half feet of ripped Viking hunk. But usually they are just clumsy: John Malkovich's Unferth resembles one of those annoying Geico cavemen, Anthony Hopkins's King Hrothgar becomes a pudgy Pillsbury satyr, and the lovely Robin Wright Penn (Wealthow) is given the bland prettiness of a lesser Disney princess. It is telling that the most successful transformation is that of Angelina Jolie (Grendel's unsettlingly yummy mummy), an actress whose most distinctive features may already owe a little something to science.
Worse, even if we ignore the obstacle posed by a laughably inept script, these added layers of technological artifice appear to have prevented a talented cast from breathing needed life into their characters. The makers of "Beowulf" might like to claim otherwise, but their actors have largely been reduced to cartoons. This need not have been fatal. Done well, the otherness of animation can be used to spirit audiences away to a parallel world of myth, magic, and the strange. But doing it well is more than a matter of megabytes. The imagery must awe, disturb, and beguile. Here and there, "Beowulf" does. The scenes in Grendel's lair are beautifully done — eerie, majestic, and resonant, the stuff, as they should be, of legend. As for Grendel's gorgeous mom, a nerd-core idol if ever one existed, the dangerous temptation she represents to Hrothgar and Beowulf is easy to understand. She is, insists Hrothgar, "no hag." Indeed she's not.
But these are exceptions, not the rule. Even viewed in their occasionally spectacular (and, in such a doggedly one-dimensional film, decidedly ironic) 3-D format, the visuals in "Beowulf" are, for the most part, shockingly banal. Nowhere is this more the case than in the depiction of Grendel (Crispin Glover), the "grimma gæst" (grim demon), whose repeated murderous onslaughts on Hrothgar's great hall summon Beowulf across the seas, to the rescue, and into the high school English curriculum. In the original text, Grendel is, to borrow descriptions from Seamus Heaney's grand and clever translation, "a shadow-stalker, stealthy and swift … [a] huge marauder … warped in the shape of a man." In this movie, he's little more than a jittery, whiny comic-book grotesque.
Similarly, the source of the fury that drives Grendel's lethal rampage has been dumbed down and jazzed up. It's no longer enough for him to be enraged by his sense of exclusion from God's good graces. Now he has family issues: Dad's the real problem, not God. In some respects, the writers of this film have turned a saga into soap opera, complete with warring spouses, infidelity, jealousy, and an examination of the wreckage left behind by unsuitable couplings. They attempt to justify this by claiming that it's a way to fill in gaps in the original narrative. We'll leave scholars to debate the extent of any such gaps, but it's difficult to avoid the suspicion that the screenwriters' real motive was to sidestep the core themes running through that bleak Anglo-Saxon verse: The implacability of fate and the impermanence of existence don't exactly make for the most promising box-office material.
To the tough-minded pagans of Beowulf's time, the most intelligent response to the inevitability and permanence of death was to try to live on in memory. Back then, the best chance for that was through heroic feats of arms, a concept that the screenwriters clearly understand, but which, I suspect, leaves them uneasy. It's true that some of their dialogue mourns the death of the age of heroes, but those passages seem primarily designed to take a swipe at the impact of newly arrived Christianity (something that does a disservice to the original poem's subtle blend of Norse and biblical mythology). This film's Beowulf is a brute, a liar, and a boor. He's also brave, and he is prepared to sacrifice himself for others. But if he is a hero, he's a hero diminished, if not debunked.
This, then, is not a very heroic film. It's not even a heroic failure.