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Alexander (Film Review)
Another film now streaming which I didn't see in the cinema, this one due to a combination of factors: a) while I have several friends who feel passionately about Alexander the Great, I never did, and b) the reviews were terrible. Sometimes bad reviews make me feel mulishly determined to watch anyway, but i need some investment about the subject in that case, and it wasn't there. However, in the many years since then, I at least warmed up to some of the Alexander contemporaries, due to various interesting fictions (mostly "Stealing Fire" by Jo Graham), and even to the man himself in one particular version (Roz Kaveney in her ongoing epic series did a great, no pun intended, Alexander, not least because he's possessing someone very different, and the two have to come to some arrangement, which suddenly made Alex himself interesting to me).
Now, Stone's movie has at least four versions floating about. Googling after the fact, I've come to the conclusion that the one put up at Amazon Prime, Germany, is the original theatrical cut, and that both the director's cut and the final cut actually deal with some of the more obvious narrative problems. For example: Old Ptolemy as the narrator might be a nice gig for Anthony Hopkins and is sort of historically justified in that Ptolemy's memoirs were supposedly a key source for later histories about Alexander, even though they themselves are lost. But young Ptolemy has basically just once scene with dialogue wiith Alexander, which gives no sense of his character, and so within the theatrical version, there is no reason why he should be the narrator. (Sidenote: the narrator doesn't have to be a main character, or someone close to the main character, but there should be a reason why this person is telling the story. See the series of musical who got considerable tension out of making the narrator someone opposed to the main character (or at least ending up so), from "Jesus Christ Superstar" via "Evita" to "Elisabeth" and, of course, "Hamilton".) Now an historical movie usually has the problem that reality offers far, far more characters than can be put in a two hours (or three hours, for that matter) story, and you ruthlessly have to cut and choose. So, within the characters offered by Stone's movie who actually do get some characterisation, here are two I could have imagined to be interesting narrators, with their agenda at once making the audience sit up and pay attention to what they're saying precisely because they can't be sure whether or not to trust any of it: Olympias, Alexander's mother (especially since her relationship with Alexander is given so much weight by the narrative), or Cleitus the Black, the Macedonian officer who goes from being close to Alexander to being killed by him in a drunken quarrel. Cleitus would be a narrator from the beyond, but look, this would be hardly the first time (see also: Sunset Boulevard). I hear that the later cuts offer a bit more of young Ptolemy, character wise, but based on the theatrical version, I stand by my alternate narrator choices.
(Of course, Stone could also have forked over some money to Mary Renault's heirs and made Bagoas the narrator, since there is more than one nod to Renault's Alexander trilogy anyway, but his Alexander is somewhat more screwed up than hers, so Bagoas as narrator wouldn't have quite fit. BTW, I hear Bagoas gets some actual character scenes in the final cut, too, but in the theatrical cut, he has the big dancing scene with the kiss and is glimpsed a few time in the background, and that's it.)
Generally, the film I saw strikes me as an interesting failure, and I mean both parts of this, the "interesting" as well as the "failure". At a guess, Stone might have wanted to produce the kind of epic Lawrence of Arabia is, i.e. one which deconstructs its hero as much as it builds him up, shows him as spectacularly messed up and yet never loses sight of his humanity. However, you need Robert Bolt level scriptwriters to pull that one off, and no offense, but you and your pals weren't, Mr. Stone. (For example: Both movies mirror the triumphant battle in the first part of the film with a battler devolving into a massacre in the second part. Lawrence of Arabia, however, hows shown us in between exactly both how our main character and the people around him got from one to the other emotionally, and how both are connected.) (This said, Stone does show off his considerable directing skills in both both battle sequences; the one at Gaugemela also gives a far better imipression of what an ancient world battle was like than the godawful Zack Snyder attempt.)
Anyway, I think one big problem for Alexander is that both potential target audiences back in the day had reasons to feel alienated. It's not a straightforward Great Man Biopic, and not just because Stone mixes up the time structure, withholding the truth about the death of Alexander's father Philip and the aftermath of it until Alexander is at his emotional lowest, which is when we get a big flashback. Googling old reviews, I see that this wasn't too long after Gladiator made a lot of box office cash, but Gladiator offers some really black and white good/bad characterisation. Our hero Maximus is presented as an honest soldier and family man forced into slavery and gladiator-dom by the evil villain of the film. Lest we should question his own ambitions before that happens, we're explicitly told that the dying Marcus Aurelius wants him to reintroduce the Roman Republic (which is historically ridiculous, but never mind). Otoh, Commodus is a clearly denoted villain given an understandable motive for his start into villaindom (feeling himself unloved by Dad) yet shown so evil that there's no question he needs to go. Meanwhile, Alexander doesn't have a clearly nominated bad guy, and it tries for some actually complicated historical circumstances. So the same Aristotle who tells his students about the nobility of male love if you bring out the best in each other also offers a whole lot of biased indoctrination about "barbarians", and it's to the movie's credit that instead of going with the "manly west/ decadent east" tale, it actually has Alexander realize (unlike most of his Macedon companions) that the civilization he finds in Persia (and beyond) is far older than the one in Greece and can offer things to learn from. The army's eventual tiredness of going further and further is presented sympathetically, but the horror of many a Macedon at the idea of Persians who joined Alexander's army being treated as their equals is not. And of course, there's Alexander himself. One of the things I had osmosed about the movie was that Stone (whose track record on same sex relationships presentation isn't the best, between one of the villains from JFK on the one hand and the handwaving of both Castro's and Putin's treatments of homosexuals on the other) was chickening out of showing Alexander as actually in a same sex relationship with Hephaistion. This, it turned out, wasn't true. What he avoids is showing them in a sexual situation (whereas Alexander does get a sex scene with Roxane, and one kiss with Bagoas). But he also presents them unambigously as lovers. The film makes it clear both in dialogue and by their interactions Hephaistion is the person Alexander loves most in this world, it even works in the "Alexander suffered his only defeat etc." quip, we get the "He, too, is Alexander" scene, Alexander completely loses it after his death, and no one ever tries the "he loves him like a brother" excuse. So for a conservative audience simply wanting a blood and sandals spectacle with a badass hero fighting villalins, this movie's Alexander probably was not too their taste for that reason already. (As for the sex scene with Roxane, leaving aside it's staged in a really weird way: since the movie explicitly has Alexander say she's a younger, paler version of his mother, it's not the poster child for het sexuality, either.)
Otoh, I very much doubt that another potential target audience which I'll summarize in a simplified way as "Renault fandom" (meaning not just readers of Mary Renault's trilogy but people with a fondness for Alexander/Hephaistion and/or Alexander/Bagoas from history) was pleased with this movie, either, and the lack of a same sex scene is the least of it. This movie's Alexander is deeply neurotic, explicitly as the result of his parents' spectacularly dysfunctional marriage, and between child!Alexander seeing a depiction of the myth of Oedipus, wanting his father's approval yet resenting him at the same time and each and every scene he has with his mother, he's the most blatantly Freudian movie main character since Norman Bates. In case the flashback about Philip's death and the confrontation between son and mother afterwards (which also includes a kiss) doesn't make it clear to the audience, both Ptolemy's narration and an earlier scene with one of the companions telling Alex that sometimes he wonders whether all this drive to go to the end of the world is just him wanting to escape his mother spell it out. Alexander's mixture of love and revulsion for his mother Olympias, not his love for Hephaistion, is the passion the film develops best. (And while Jared Leto as Hephaistion isn't bad, and gets to look soulful and give good advice a lot, Olympias is played in a no holds bared gloriously over the top performance by Angelina Jolie and gets all the push-pull, passionate argument scenes. No competition.) Also, never mind Ptolemy, the first time we see Alexander in the theatrical cut is as a child when Mom shows him how to interact with snakes, and the last time in the narrated past before we cut back to old Ptolemy at the end of the film we see Olympias learning of her son's death - from an eagle, no less, because why not - and breaking down. See, this why she's one of my two choices for who should have been the narrator. We even get her letters to Alexander through the movie so she's not absent when he's world conquering.
So much for the "interesting" part. Here are my own reasons for "failure", of which the decision to go the Freudian road isn't one. Colin Farrell (not one of nature's blonds, and it shows, though hey, his wig is at least better than that of Richard Burton's) isn't bad, exactly (here I disagree with reviewers); he's decisive, torn, crushed, benevolent, tender etc. when the scene in question requires him to be. But charismatic enough to make me believe not just all the Macedon and Greek soldiers are following him for a such a long time but the Persians, having been newly conquered, already are cheering for him, he's not. Or enigmatic. He always presents the main emotion the scene in question requires, but nothing more. Again, I have to make the Lawrence of Arabia comparison, now in terms of the performance young Peter O'Toole delivered there. (Take the scene where Lawrence reports to Allenby and tells him about having to shoot Khasim. There are such a lot of spoken and unspoken things going on with Lawrence there, and only some of them transmitted in dialogue. Neither Alexander's script nor Farrell's performance can deliver something like that.)
Then there's the problem that even in the slimmed down version (compared with the number of rl people), this film has too many characters who never have a chance to gain a personality. Ptolemy is but one case in point. Cleitus is really the sole non-Hephaistion companion who gets some character stuff to do, and his is mostly in the lead up to his death. And while the movie shows that the original reason Alexander gives for fighting the Persians (avenging Philip, whose killer he knows wasn't paid by them) is a lie and the whole "Greek freedom!" rethoric less than honest as well, Alexander's growing appreciation for non-Greek cultures, especially Persians, would work a whole lot better if we'd seen him interact with some instead of just gazing admiringly as Babylonian architecture. (According to the articles I've googled, the Final Cut does have several more scenes between him and Bagoas, which might help there.) As it is, it's a lot of tell over show. And then there's the final reveal by old Ptolemy that his generals killed Alexander, which he then immediately orders the scribe to erase again. This, too, would work a whole lot better emotionally if we'd been given the chance to care about the relationships between Alexander and the various generals, or if we'd seen them interact with each other. As it is, it's supposed to be a shock but it's not earned.
There are a couple of other reasons, too. Poor Rosario Dawson as Roxane gets to speak in pigdin English while her father speaks without a problem, so if that's supposed to show she doesn't talk Greek, it's a bit odd that he does. But that's nothing to the indignity of the wedding night scene, which starts out looking like a rape scene, and then it switches gears to Roxane and Alexander growling at each other like animals, and no, it doesn't feel sexy. Also, the scene with Philip and child!Alexander seeing the depiction of various Greek myths is so incredibly sledgehammery and... never mind.
So, all in all: not a misunderstood masterpiece, and I'm not sure my curiosity is large enough to hunt down the final cut so I see what kind of personality Ptolemy and Bagoas do have there. But hardly the terrible trash it was bashed at, either.
Now, Stone's movie has at least four versions floating about. Googling after the fact, I've come to the conclusion that the one put up at Amazon Prime, Germany, is the original theatrical cut, and that both the director's cut and the final cut actually deal with some of the more obvious narrative problems. For example: Old Ptolemy as the narrator might be a nice gig for Anthony Hopkins and is sort of historically justified in that Ptolemy's memoirs were supposedly a key source for later histories about Alexander, even though they themselves are lost. But young Ptolemy has basically just once scene with dialogue wiith Alexander, which gives no sense of his character, and so within the theatrical version, there is no reason why he should be the narrator. (Sidenote: the narrator doesn't have to be a main character, or someone close to the main character, but there should be a reason why this person is telling the story. See the series of musical who got considerable tension out of making the narrator someone opposed to the main character (or at least ending up so), from "Jesus Christ Superstar" via "Evita" to "Elisabeth" and, of course, "Hamilton".) Now an historical movie usually has the problem that reality offers far, far more characters than can be put in a two hours (or three hours, for that matter) story, and you ruthlessly have to cut and choose. So, within the characters offered by Stone's movie who actually do get some characterisation, here are two I could have imagined to be interesting narrators, with their agenda at once making the audience sit up and pay attention to what they're saying precisely because they can't be sure whether or not to trust any of it: Olympias, Alexander's mother (especially since her relationship with Alexander is given so much weight by the narrative), or Cleitus the Black, the Macedonian officer who goes from being close to Alexander to being killed by him in a drunken quarrel. Cleitus would be a narrator from the beyond, but look, this would be hardly the first time (see also: Sunset Boulevard). I hear that the later cuts offer a bit more of young Ptolemy, character wise, but based on the theatrical version, I stand by my alternate narrator choices.
(Of course, Stone could also have forked over some money to Mary Renault's heirs and made Bagoas the narrator, since there is more than one nod to Renault's Alexander trilogy anyway, but his Alexander is somewhat more screwed up than hers, so Bagoas as narrator wouldn't have quite fit. BTW, I hear Bagoas gets some actual character scenes in the final cut, too, but in the theatrical cut, he has the big dancing scene with the kiss and is glimpsed a few time in the background, and that's it.)
Generally, the film I saw strikes me as an interesting failure, and I mean both parts of this, the "interesting" as well as the "failure". At a guess, Stone might have wanted to produce the kind of epic Lawrence of Arabia is, i.e. one which deconstructs its hero as much as it builds him up, shows him as spectacularly messed up and yet never loses sight of his humanity. However, you need Robert Bolt level scriptwriters to pull that one off, and no offense, but you and your pals weren't, Mr. Stone. (For example: Both movies mirror the triumphant battle in the first part of the film with a battler devolving into a massacre in the second part. Lawrence of Arabia, however, hows shown us in between exactly both how our main character and the people around him got from one to the other emotionally, and how both are connected.) (This said, Stone does show off his considerable directing skills in both both battle sequences; the one at Gaugemela also gives a far better imipression of what an ancient world battle was like than the godawful Zack Snyder attempt.)
Anyway, I think one big problem for Alexander is that both potential target audiences back in the day had reasons to feel alienated. It's not a straightforward Great Man Biopic, and not just because Stone mixes up the time structure, withholding the truth about the death of Alexander's father Philip and the aftermath of it until Alexander is at his emotional lowest, which is when we get a big flashback. Googling old reviews, I see that this wasn't too long after Gladiator made a lot of box office cash, but Gladiator offers some really black and white good/bad characterisation. Our hero Maximus is presented as an honest soldier and family man forced into slavery and gladiator-dom by the evil villain of the film. Lest we should question his own ambitions before that happens, we're explicitly told that the dying Marcus Aurelius wants him to reintroduce the Roman Republic (which is historically ridiculous, but never mind). Otoh, Commodus is a clearly denoted villain given an understandable motive for his start into villaindom (feeling himself unloved by Dad) yet shown so evil that there's no question he needs to go. Meanwhile, Alexander doesn't have a clearly nominated bad guy, and it tries for some actually complicated historical circumstances. So the same Aristotle who tells his students about the nobility of male love if you bring out the best in each other also offers a whole lot of biased indoctrination about "barbarians", and it's to the movie's credit that instead of going with the "manly west/ decadent east" tale, it actually has Alexander realize (unlike most of his Macedon companions) that the civilization he finds in Persia (and beyond) is far older than the one in Greece and can offer things to learn from. The army's eventual tiredness of going further and further is presented sympathetically, but the horror of many a Macedon at the idea of Persians who joined Alexander's army being treated as their equals is not. And of course, there's Alexander himself. One of the things I had osmosed about the movie was that Stone (whose track record on same sex relationships presentation isn't the best, between one of the villains from JFK on the one hand and the handwaving of both Castro's and Putin's treatments of homosexuals on the other) was chickening out of showing Alexander as actually in a same sex relationship with Hephaistion. This, it turned out, wasn't true. What he avoids is showing them in a sexual situation (whereas Alexander does get a sex scene with Roxane, and one kiss with Bagoas). But he also presents them unambigously as lovers. The film makes it clear both in dialogue and by their interactions Hephaistion is the person Alexander loves most in this world, it even works in the "Alexander suffered his only defeat etc." quip, we get the "He, too, is Alexander" scene, Alexander completely loses it after his death, and no one ever tries the "he loves him like a brother" excuse. So for a conservative audience simply wanting a blood and sandals spectacle with a badass hero fighting villalins, this movie's Alexander probably was not too their taste for that reason already. (As for the sex scene with Roxane, leaving aside it's staged in a really weird way: since the movie explicitly has Alexander say she's a younger, paler version of his mother, it's not the poster child for het sexuality, either.)
Otoh, I very much doubt that another potential target audience which I'll summarize in a simplified way as "Renault fandom" (meaning not just readers of Mary Renault's trilogy but people with a fondness for Alexander/Hephaistion and/or Alexander/Bagoas from history) was pleased with this movie, either, and the lack of a same sex scene is the least of it. This movie's Alexander is deeply neurotic, explicitly as the result of his parents' spectacularly dysfunctional marriage, and between child!Alexander seeing a depiction of the myth of Oedipus, wanting his father's approval yet resenting him at the same time and each and every scene he has with his mother, he's the most blatantly Freudian movie main character since Norman Bates. In case the flashback about Philip's death and the confrontation between son and mother afterwards (which also includes a kiss) doesn't make it clear to the audience, both Ptolemy's narration and an earlier scene with one of the companions telling Alex that sometimes he wonders whether all this drive to go to the end of the world is just him wanting to escape his mother spell it out. Alexander's mixture of love and revulsion for his mother Olympias, not his love for Hephaistion, is the passion the film develops best. (And while Jared Leto as Hephaistion isn't bad, and gets to look soulful and give good advice a lot, Olympias is played in a no holds bared gloriously over the top performance by Angelina Jolie and gets all the push-pull, passionate argument scenes. No competition.) Also, never mind Ptolemy, the first time we see Alexander in the theatrical cut is as a child when Mom shows him how to interact with snakes, and the last time in the narrated past before we cut back to old Ptolemy at the end of the film we see Olympias learning of her son's death - from an eagle, no less, because why not - and breaking down. See, this why she's one of my two choices for who should have been the narrator. We even get her letters to Alexander through the movie so she's not absent when he's world conquering.
So much for the "interesting" part. Here are my own reasons for "failure", of which the decision to go the Freudian road isn't one. Colin Farrell (not one of nature's blonds, and it shows, though hey, his wig is at least better than that of Richard Burton's) isn't bad, exactly (here I disagree with reviewers); he's decisive, torn, crushed, benevolent, tender etc. when the scene in question requires him to be. But charismatic enough to make me believe not just all the Macedon and Greek soldiers are following him for a such a long time but the Persians, having been newly conquered, already are cheering for him, he's not. Or enigmatic. He always presents the main emotion the scene in question requires, but nothing more. Again, I have to make the Lawrence of Arabia comparison, now in terms of the performance young Peter O'Toole delivered there. (Take the scene where Lawrence reports to Allenby and tells him about having to shoot Khasim. There are such a lot of spoken and unspoken things going on with Lawrence there, and only some of them transmitted in dialogue. Neither Alexander's script nor Farrell's performance can deliver something like that.)
Then there's the problem that even in the slimmed down version (compared with the number of rl people), this film has too many characters who never have a chance to gain a personality. Ptolemy is but one case in point. Cleitus is really the sole non-Hephaistion companion who gets some character stuff to do, and his is mostly in the lead up to his death. And while the movie shows that the original reason Alexander gives for fighting the Persians (avenging Philip, whose killer he knows wasn't paid by them) is a lie and the whole "Greek freedom!" rethoric less than honest as well, Alexander's growing appreciation for non-Greek cultures, especially Persians, would work a whole lot better if we'd seen him interact with some instead of just gazing admiringly as Babylonian architecture. (According to the articles I've googled, the Final Cut does have several more scenes between him and Bagoas, which might help there.) As it is, it's a lot of tell over show. And then there's the final reveal by old Ptolemy that his generals killed Alexander, which he then immediately orders the scribe to erase again. This, too, would work a whole lot better emotionally if we'd been given the chance to care about the relationships between Alexander and the various generals, or if we'd seen them interact with each other. As it is, it's supposed to be a shock but it's not earned.
There are a couple of other reasons, too. Poor Rosario Dawson as Roxane gets to speak in pigdin English while her father speaks without a problem, so if that's supposed to show she doesn't talk Greek, it's a bit odd that he does. But that's nothing to the indignity of the wedding night scene, which starts out looking like a rape scene, and then it switches gears to Roxane and Alexander growling at each other like animals, and no, it doesn't feel sexy. Also, the scene with Philip and child!Alexander seeing the depiction of various Greek myths is so incredibly sledgehammery and... never mind.
So, all in all: not a misunderstood masterpiece, and I'm not sure my curiosity is large enough to hunt down the final cut so I see what kind of personality Ptolemy and Bagoas do have there. But hardly the terrible trash it was bashed at, either.
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On the other hand, Robin Lane Fox was apparently very excited to get to be an extra in the Macedonian cavalry.
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Whereas I've seen a lot of other movies which have been received poorly, and perhaps because I went in with low expectations, really enjoyed them.
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+1.