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.

Sob Sisters

National Review Online, June 26, 2002

Even the trailers were a sign that I was in a strange place. Instead of the usual fare, tantalizing glimpses of fast cars, brutal murders, sinister aliens, and seething high-school passion, the movies previewed included a "mature love story" (apparently dedicated to the astonishing idea that romance is possible among the over-50s) and a multigenerational family drama (we were urged to "go ahead and cry") starring Susan Sarandon. But the sobs would not have to wait for Socialist Sue. For this was chick-flick night, a chance to discover the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a movie that is, warned the Los Angeles Times, "rich in emotional life." And moviegoers know what that means — tears, rows, mothers fighting daughters, daughters fighting mothers, hissy fits, shouting matches, and hugs, all culminating in a definitive reconciliation somewhere towards the conclusion of the final reel, often at about the time one of the key characters perishes of a terminal, but not unsightly, disease.

If that is what you are looking for, the Ya-Yas don't disappoint, except that the only person to die is the hapless (but handsome) Jack Whitman, who comes to the requisite tragic end, but relatively early in the movie. Jack is unlucky in love, and unluckier in war. He joins the air force not long after Pearl Harbor (seemingly more to impress his father than to depress Hitler) and, poor fellow, is killed before he has had much chance to enjoy his budding affair with the lovely Vivi, drama queen and lead Ya-Ya. Like Jack, Vivi (played excellently as a younger woman by Ashley Judd, and, in her old age, by a less-convincing Ellen Burstyn) never appears to get over this setback. Being dead, Jack has an excuse. Vivi does not. No matter. In this movie, self-indulgent is usually just an adjective, only a criticism when applied to those perennial symbols of boomer disdain for the older generation: drink, cigs and Feelgood-era pharmaceuticals.

Of course, a touch of the exotic always helps pull in the ladies: Just ask Fabio. In Divine Secrets this is provided by a gorgeous Louisiana setting, the perfect excuse for good music, bad behavior, ridiculous names (Siddalee!), cookery porn (crayfish!), and wild overacting (ham!). Naturally, this being the south, the past, as Faulkner once put it, is never dead; it is not even past. No one is prepared to follow the advice of another, less distinguished, southerner and simply "move on." Instead, most of the movie is dedicated, mainly through a series of flashbacks, to showing how the damaged Vivi proceeds to damage everybody else for the next six decades. Propped up only by the support of the Ya-Yas (a sorority she formed with her three closest childhood friends), pills, booze, and tobacco, Vivi is a poor wife and unsatisfactory mother. We only meet her husband, Shep, in his later years, but his weary expression is more than enough to tell the tale of a marriage that has been more for worse than for better. Old Shep has become a withdrawn, stoic figure (portrayed with dignified melancholy by James Garner) still fond of his high-maintenance Ya-Ya, but careful always to lock the door to his (separate) bedroom at night.

Vivi's dealings with her children are shown in rather more detail. The high maintenance wife was, it turns out, an even higher-maintenance mother, capable of acts of love, of cruelty, and of something that was a bit of both. As a result, her relationship with her offspring is, to say the least, tricky. Remarks by her eldest daughter, Sidda (a rather muted Sandra Bullock), in a magazine interview trigger a crisis between mother and daughter, which only the Ya-Yas can resolve. They do so by kidnapping Sidda and gradually revealing her mother's deepest, darkest, and far from divine, secret: Vivi once had a breakdown so total that she was taken away from her kids and institutionalized. Relief all round! Mom wasn't nasty after all, just nuts. A blissful Sidda reconciles with Vivi, Shep unlocks his door and Sidda decides to marry her Shep-in-waiting, Connor (a soft-spoken Irish hunk played with quiet charm by Angus MacFadyen), a man who has clearly not been studying his future in-laws' family history.

Does any of this make any sense? Not exactly. An even vaguely believable story is one of the casualties of the film's complex heritage. Divine Secrets is a bowdlerized version of Rebecca Wells's novel of the same name, which is itself a prettied-up companion to her 1992 debut, Little Altars Everywhere, and quite a lot has got lost in the process. Typical products of an era when most Americans seem to have believed that they had been molested by a close relative during childhood, these books fill in the gaps left in the movie's narrative by a creative team unwilling, presumably, to frighten off potential ticket buyers.

The books reveal that Vivi was not only badly abused by her mother (something that is hinted at in the film) but, quite probably, her father too. This complies with a basic rule of boomer fiction (fatally flawed families) and makes much more sense as a source of Vivi's later instability than the more romantic alternative put forward in the movie: that the Ya-Ya was pining for her pilot. Vivi may have been crazy about Jack, but I doubt if his death would have been enough to drive her mad. Equally, the remarkably tortured relationship between Vivi and her grown children becomes more understandable after reading that the abuse she inflicted on them was far worse than anything depicted on screen.

Not that this matters. The audience for this film is expecting two hours of lush Louisiana gush, the moviegoers' equivalent of aromatherapy, massage, and a nice long soak, and that is what they get, much of it in front of the most empathetic stretch of water since that famous Golden Pond. Those few who worry about plot details will probably have read the books, and, as we have discussed, if they haven't they will need to. As for the other characters in the movie, no one has to think too hard about them; their characters are caricatures, crudely drawn bayou nobility with the mannerisms of a clutch of drag queens. They are talking props, a Greek chorus with nothing (but too much) to say and if everyone (except calm Shep and doomed Connor) and everything in this movie seem a little overwrought, well, that's just chick-flick high-jinks. Besides, a quick look at some of Ms. Wells's original prose would suggest that understatement was never on the cards:

"If Sidda Walker had been able to witness Vivi and the Ya-Yas in the light of that summer moon in 1942, their young bodies touching, their nipples luminous in the light, she would have known she came from goddess stock. She would have known that a primal, sweet strength flowed in her mother like an underground stream, and that the same stream flowed in her. Whatever scars Vivi had inflicted with her unhinged swings between creation and devouring, she had also passed on a mighty capacity for rapture."

Oh, is there a little of that loopy feminist-pagan thing swinging around unhinged in there? You bet, but, reduced to a subtext, it is one of the few aspects of the film that is underplayed, except, that is, for a moment of total absurdity near the end: Vivi, standing in the center of a circle of flaring, blazing sparklers is shown offering up a prayer to a Virgin Mary, who, one can only hope, is kindly enough not to burst out into amazed, startled laughter. As for me, a man from Mars watching a film from Venus, it was just another reminder that rationality, logic, and a sense of proportion had long since fled this unapologetically manipulative piece of hokum. If chicks could dig a flick like this, I was ready to proclaim to the world the superior reasoning powers of my own sex. Then I remembered something:

The movies of Jerry Bruckheimer.

Henry Potter Gets His Due

National Review Online, December 22, 2001

He is, of course, the original H. Potter, a silver-screen legend long before young Harry was even a twinkle in a witch's eye. You know him better, perhaps, as "Mister Potter," stern-browed, stentorian, scowling and shrewd, the true star of that annual tryst for our tear ducts, Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Forget, for a while, ingratiating George Bailey, batty Uncle Billy, and Zuzu's precious petals. This Christmas, why not focus instead on Mr. Capra's greatest creation, Henry Potter (no one called him Harry), the J. P. Morgan of Bedford Falls, a Main Street mogul with an empire to build? Played by Lionel Barrymore with a savage gusto, Potter is a titan among pygmies, a force of nature so overwhelming that, despite his wheelchair (in real life, tragically, Barrymore suffered from a disabling form of arthritis) no one else has a chance. We catch our first sight of him early in the movie, clattering along in an old-fashioned coach and horses. It is a glimpse of glory.

"Who is that," asks Clarence the angel, "a king?"

It is an understandable mistake, but the reply (from a more senior seraph) reveals the terrible truth.

"That's Henry F. Potter, the richest and meanest man in the county".

If It's A Wonderful Life is the New World's answer to A Christmas Carol, then Potter is its Scrooge, but he is a very American Scrooge, bigger, badder, and bolder than his cold-crabbed counterpart across the Atlantic. To start with, he likes a bit of luxury. Potter will spend money, so long as it is on himself. From what we read about Scrooge, we know that he was prepared to lavish little on heating ("[he] had a very small fire") and not much on accommodation ("a gloomy suite of rooms" in an office building, apparently). Potter, by contrast lives in some splendor. He employs a manservant and dresses stylishly. In his office there is a large bust of Napoleon. Potter is a man who likes to dream.

We never discover the full extent of his business activities, but it is obvious that, locally, he is the economically dominant figure ("This town is no place for any man unless he is prepared to crawl to Potter") and it has to be admitted (although in Capra's biased script no one ever does) that, with the help of his wealth, Bedford Falls has become a pleasant, if slightly dull place. These days this crippled Croesus would be praised as a role model and profiled in People as an inspiration to the "physically challenged." Without even the help of the ADA, Potter has triumphed over disability and made a large fortune. He is a lender of last resort, and, for some poorer citizens, a landlord. Of course there are complaints about the standards of his rental property, but what tenant does not like to grumble?

He is not, it is clear, overly sentimental ("I am an old man and most people hate me, but I don't like them either, so that makes it even"). A Rumsfeld in a Rockwell town, Potter is not a man to mince words. References to the "rabble" and the need for working-class thrift would point to politics that are reassuringly conservative if not exactly compassionate. His approach to commerce is sound. Charity and business should not be muddled up, credit must be checked and loans repaid. Like Warren Buffett, he is a longer term, contrarian investor, prepared even (at a price) to back Bedford Falls' failing banks in a moment of crisis. Unlike Scrooge he will reward a potentially valuable hire. The deal Potter offered George Bailey, $20,000 a year for three years, was extraordinarily generous, unthinkable from miserly Ebenezer, an employer who begrudged his clerk a lump of coal. Given the opportunity, in that alternative timeline where George Bailey never lived, the energetic and enterprising Potter even manages to transform his sleepy hometown from a PBS sort of place into a WB city, the glamorous, glittering Pottersville, a Yankee Las Vegas complete with Midnight Club (Dancing!), Bamboo Room (Cocktails!), and burlesque (20 gorgeous girls!).

George Bailey, however, did exist, and Pottersville is never to be. Quite why the survival, under his control, of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan should have made such a difference is never made clear. Potter's financial strength cannot have been dependent on the income derived from renting to the likes of Giuseppe Martini, so losses to competition from George's Levittown, the immodestly named Bailey Park, seem unlikely to blame. Perhaps this mystery is to be expected. There is no room for economic logic in a fairy tale or, for that matter, the operations of Bailey Brothers. The building and loan is as much Barnum as it is Bailey. It appears to flourish despite a limited capital base (a shortfall of $8,000, ultimately, is enough to cause a near terminal crisis), nepotism, commingling of personal and bank funds, and a staff that appears to consist only of a bird and a birdbrain as well as Cousin Eustace the shock-haired clerk, a secretary (another cousin, naturally), and, of course, George Bailey himself.

Now George, it is true, is not quite as bland as is sometimes claimed. There are moments of redeeming vice. He is a grown man who picks up a girl at a high-school dance and then tries to impress her with an act of petty vandalism at the old Granville house. This night of shame reaches its dismal nadir when Bailey threatens to leave his date undressed in a shrubbery, a potential public humiliation that would have had terrible consequences in such a small community. Running through the movie there is also the question of uxorious George's curiously ambiguous relationship with Violet Bick, the woman who put the fallen in Bedford Falls, culminating in the occasion when he offers the hussy a "loan" to get out of town. But, these peccadilloes apart, George Bailey is unquestionably a fine fellow, dutiful, decent, and a lifesaver, a Clark Kent without the cape, a modest hero for a straightforward age. It is a testimony to the power of Capra's good guy that, more than 50 disillusioning years later, we are still rooting for him to win.

But not without a backwards glance at old Potter, cruel but compelling, appalling yet attractive, a man who doesn't really need the assistance of trick furniture to dominate his every encounter with George Bailey. His charisma is an old, but effective, cliché. For the most part, as viewers of the bin Laden video were recently reminded, wrongdoers are rather dull, pedestrian types, but whether it is Milton's Lucifer or Oliver Stone's Gekko, the vibrant fascinating villain has become a stock character, a rationalization, perhaps, of our tendency to give in to evil's temptations.

Frank Capra himself seems to have succumbed to his creation's wicked allure. For, while the director does show the financier's descent into outright criminality (the theft of the $8,000 left lying around by Uncle Billy), this squalid behavior seems to bring Mr. Potter little in the way of adverse consequences. Although thwarted in this final attempt to ruin the building and loan, Potter survives the movie unscathed. He gets to keep the $8,000 and unlike the craven Scrooge, he remains proud and unrepentant.

There will, it is clear, be no turkeys from Henry F. Potter for the Cratchits of Bedford Falls.

Apes in Time

Planet of the Apes

National Review Online, July 28, 2001

Well, they finally, really did it. Planet of the Apes is out, and the critics are in (except for this one: the power and global influence of NRO did not stretch to two preview tickets — thanks, Jonah), but it is not true to say that this event marks the return of our monkey masters. They have never left. The original Planet was followed by four sequels, which was no mean feat: The second in the series ended with a supposedly conclusive atomic explosion. Even the sequels had sequels. There was a TV show (the first episode was watched by half the viewing public), a cartoon series, and even a rather serious-minded documentary. Somehow, at some moment in the process, those clever monkeys managed to carve out their own long-armed, human-hunting, ram's horn blowing space right in the sweet spot of American popular culture, up in the pantheon somewhere between Captain Kirk and Danny Partridge.

If you don't believe me, what else can explain the fact that that the orangutan priest/scientist/Machiavellian wily Doctor Zaius, the shrewd guardian of ape orthodoxy, has enjoyed an afterlife that has included an interactive advice bureau over the Internet and being feted by song in The Simpsons ("Doctor Zaius, Doctor Zaius, Doctor Zaius")? Even the altogether less important Aldo, a truculent, but ambitious gorilla, who rises to the rank of general in the course of the final two movies, is celebrated by an action figure, a 96-piece jigsaw puzzle and a loyal following on the web.

So great is the force of this franchise, that it can even bring fame to the silent. In the first two movies Nova is the beautiful, but primitive girlfriend of the marooned astronaut, Taylor. She is given a two-piece costume and a one-word script. As roles go, it's no Ophelia, but more than 30 years later, the actress who played Nova can still be seen at sci-fi and collectables conventions, surrounded by fans, most of whom were born long after the moment she said that precious, unique, loyal word, "Tay-lor." Two syllables, two films. They have proved to be more than enough for immortality.

What is the secret of the simians' success? Well, interactive Doctor Zaius wouldn't tell me ("Why do you bother me with such trivia?") but clearly nostalgia is part of the explanation. By itself that would not be enough. Just ask the hoodwinked hordes who were lured in to see the Brady Bunch movies. In our age of endlessly recycled memories, all the old icons are still out there, never, quite, allowed to fade, (they even remade Mister Magoo) shown in rerun or in syndication, on Nick at Night or AMC, available in DVD, video and retro-style lunch box. Very few of them, though, still have the genuine pull still enjoyed by those damn, dirty apes.

It helped, of course, that the first Apes movie was as good as it was. From the moment that that spacecraft crashed into the stark, strange landscape of an alien planet (in reality, a part of this country now represented in the U.S. Senate by that stark, strange John McCain) the viewer is transported to a world upside down, a world transformed, to borrow Shakespeare's phrase, into a "wilderness of monkeys," where the gorillas ride horses, humans are vermin, and the Statue of Liberty is a shattered ruin, left, like our former civilization, in fragments on a deserted ocean shore.

The script, co-written by Rod Serling, is a splendid period piece, a close cousin of the writer's other great legacy, The Twilight Zone. It features the same crackpot moralizing, the same sly references to current controversies (one of the younger chimps has evidently been to Tom Hayden's Berkeley) and the same imaginative power. Like the best of those shows, it is hokey enough to be nostalgically comfortable, but clever enough, still, after all these years, to thrill, provoke, and enthrall. The cast rose to the occasion, most of all, Charlton Heston (Taylor), the film's greatest and, ironically, most savage presence (once Taylor gets his rifle, the spaceman proves unstoppable. He triumphs: No ape ever gets to pry any weapon from Taylor's cold, dead hands). Played by Heston in a style that is part Shatner, part histrionics, and wholly compelling, it is remarkable performance, made all the more memorable by the fascinating problem with which our hero is confronted. For Taylor is an angry misanthrope who has the misfortune to land on a planet where men no longer rule.

And that is the concept that has ensured the success of these movies. As a species, we have always been intrigued by the notion of a world where the usual rules did not apply. It appeals to our barely controlled love of disorder and escape. The Romans used to celebrate it during the festival of Saturnalia, a time when the aristocrat played the slave, and the plebeian the senator. In medieval Europe, peasants used to delight themselves with tales of the land of Cockaigne, a place that was like Heaven, except more fun, not least because it was the former nobility that had to do all the heavy lifting.

The planet of the apes is a sort of reverse Cockaigne, like Hell, in a way, only worse. In this world, all of us, rich and poor, turn out to have been the nobility, and now we must pay. It is a fascinating, terrifying idea, and one that proved strong enough to sustain the Apes franchise through the distinctly less impressive sequels that followed. The scripts were weaker and, critically, the power of the original concept was diluted by the fact that in the later movies, humanity was in, at least with a chance.

The second movie, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, has its moments, but had to weather a finale that involved grotesque mutants (my guess is that those folks needed no make-up: their features had already been permanently scarred by the uncontrollable laughter triggered by the sight of some of the screenplay) making their quavering way through a hymn in praise of the particularly nasty nuclear weapon that they have chosen to worship. The last three films are best seen as a separate trilogy, and they are burdened somewhat by an unattractive and not particularly subtle sub-text about race relations in mid-20th-century America.

Those wanting to know more about this politicized angle need to contact Mr. Eric Greene, the author of the wonderfully odd Planet of the Apes as American Myth — Race, Politics and Popular Culture. Despite its leaden prose and leftist polemic, Mr. Greene's book is a fascinating and insightful read, even if, at times, the author appears to have been left a little deranged by his obviously intense and repeated exposure to the Apes movies. To the best of my knowledge, he remains the only person to have spotted the sexism inherent within Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Without Mr. Greene's help, I would not have realized that Caesar's choice of mate (Would it be the "demure chimpanzee" Lisa or a "voluptuous and eager" alternative?) revealed that "even in the ape world…women's roles are divided into the stereotypes of either virgin or whore." Who knew?

The ability of the franchise to endure and to survive the occasional missteps of the later films (if you think that the hymn-singing mutants were absurd, just wait until the moment that the monkey statue starts to cry) is a tribute to the strength of its original notion, a notion made all the more seductive by its choice of protagonists, the apes. Planet of the Dogs just would not have packed the same punch. The choice of apes was the masterstroke. It made the films, somehow, believable.

For deep down, we know that, when it comes to the animal kingdom, the apes are in a class of their own, they are different, they are smarter, and they are family. They really could have made this their planet. A few million years ago, at the critical evolutionary moment, it was between them or us. We got lucky, that was all (something to do with monoliths from outer space: it was all explained in 2001: A Space Odyssey), but we never have quite escaped our simian past, and, all too often, it shows. As the 17th Century playwright Congreve, once admitted, it is not possible to "look long upon a monkey without very mortifying reflections."

We use the apes as humanity's distorted mirror, and as its chattering reproachful goad. That is why they so intrigue us, and that is why the Apes movies, with their unsettling suggestion that evolution was not, perhaps, for the best, have had such a grip on our imagination. And so, as soon as I can get my stinking paws on a ticket, I shall go to Tim Burton's new film.

So long, of course, as Doctor Zaius gives me permission.

The British Are Groaning

The Patriot

National Review Online, July 3, 2000

I may be slow, but I'm beginning to think that there's something about us Brits that Mel Gibson doesn't like. First there was Gallipoli in which he played a plucky Australian soldier sent to fight the Turks in World War I. Mel and his fellow recruits are portrayed as free spirits, condemned to a tragic death by their snobbish and incompetent colonial masters, the English.

Then came Braveheart and the limeys get libeled again. The dust and sun of the Dardanelles may have been replaced by the rain and mud of medieval Scotland, but the bad guys remain the same, duplicitous, callous and very, very English. In Braveheart a curious, ahistorical fable (strangely described in NR and NRO as a conservative movie) Mr. Gibson, who also directed, plays William Wallace as a tartan reprise of his role in Mad Max The Scottish leader is shown as, you guessed it, a virile free spirit, a broadsword-wielding contrast to the cruel, yet foppish, invaders from the south. The English are bad in battle and worse in bed. To underline his hero's masculine superiority over the effete enemy, Gibson has Wallace successfully romancing a proto-Princess Diana, Princess Isabella (Sophie Marceau). As Isabella was French and her husband, the English king's son, was homosexual, Gibson's audience may see this as less of a coup than the star would have liked. They would be wrong. Such an affair would have been a truly remarkable testament to Wallace's powers of attraction as, in real life, the mutinous Scot never actually met Isabella. Mr. Gibson, however, doesn't always worry too much about real life.

Which brings me to The Patriot, Mel's latest assault on the evil empire (London edition). In this Revolutionary War epic Mr. Gibson plays, yet again, a splendid free spirit, Colonel Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina farmer loosely based on Francis Marion, one of the heroes of the American war of independence. Martin is a good father, industrious farmer and all-round upright citizen. After the usual agonized "war is bad" introspection required of the fighting man in contemporary entertainment culture, he is also a devastatingly effective warrior — Mad Max in a tricorn.

His opponent, Bad Max, is the beastly English colonel, William Tavington. He too is meant to be based on a real person, the ridiculously named Banastre Tarleton. All sneer and saber, Tavington torches churches, burns congregations alive and shoots children in the back. The closest we get to a sympathetic Redcoat is, unpromisingly, Lord Cornwallis, but he, sadly, bears the stigmata of the typical Gibson Englishman. He's a fop (there's a lot of fuss about his clothes), a loser in war, and a loser in love — his two Great Danes are seduced away from him by Colonel Martin. In a manner rather reminiscent of Princess Isabella they then spend the rest of the movie chasing after Mr. Gibson with their tongues hanging out.

There are others, however, on Mel's tail. A small, rather less friendly, posse of British journalists is also in pursuit, citing the numerous historical inaccuracies that litter the movie. Well, why not? The Patriot can easily be seen as a crude caricature of the English. A few snippy comments from London are to be expected. We're used to Mr. Gibson by now, but his film has come at a bad time. In Saving Private Ryan Steven Spielberg wrote the British out of D-Day, and you had to wait until the final credits to discover that the all-American heroics of the recent U-571 were based on a British exploit.

Now there's a movie planned on the German POW camp at Colditz, with some successful American escapees mysteriously added to the historical record. How, I wonder, would America react, if the English treated U.S. history in this way, making, perhaps, a movie about 'Nigel' McCain (played perhaps by Ralph Fiennes), the RAF's man in the Hanoi Hilton? Not well, I think. We English on the other hand, can take this punishment with only a grumble or two. We beat Hitler (by ourselves, actually, according to my latest film script) and we can survive Hollywood.

So, do your worst, trash our past. We don't care. We've got plenty to spare. And it's not just the past, Brits are bad in the most recent Mission Impossible, a Die Hard or two, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Spike, the really nasty vampire). And you don't have to stop with villains who are at least nominally English — Josef Mengele, Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter — we'll take your money and play them all.

Is it a nasty stereotype? You bet, but the English won't complain (much). It's the Americans, who probably should, however. In the culture wars, the movies' constant characterization of the British as venal, effete and vicious is, I suspect, a last kick at the United States' faded WASP ascendancy, a sly reminder that, in Hollywood's view, this country's Anglo roots should no longer count for very much.

But, unsurprisingly, they do with me, which is why I could enjoy The Patriot without too many (English) patriotic qualms. In many ways the American Revolution was a continuation of a long argument over how Britons should be ruled, the second round, if you like, of the seventeenth century civil war in England. Yes, the troops sent across the Atlantic by (German) George III were sent packing — but it was by folks called Washington, Gates and Pickens. It hurt at the time, but when we British consider our history, a defeat only counts when it's to people with names like Schmidt, Watanabe or Depardieu. In the Revolutionary War, you see, we Brits essentially lost to ourselves, and that's not so bad. We just won't mention that Lafayette fellow.

So in The Patriot, you watch two opposing armies, both of which march under the red, white and blue — the English of the Philadelphia regime against the English of the London government. In the end, the better Englishmen won. The away team, my team, left the pitch at Yorktown and went off to establish a second, wider, empire — a remarkable achievement, Mel, for such a feeble race. The victors, meanwhile, went on to build a country that has inspired the world. So, this year, as I always do, I'll celebrate the fourth of July. Drink in hand, I'll toast the men who made this possible, the founding fathers who wrote, in that Declaration of Independence, some of the finest words that have ever been written in the English language.

Yes, that's right, the English language. My language.