Gone to America

I didn’t think this would be good. I wanted to see it because Oliver Stone is an excellent, interesting filmmaker, and if he had screwed up this badly he would at least have screwed up in an interesting way. It wouldn’t be bland, or inept, or merely dull – it’s failure would be epic, and educational. I wanted to watch this train wreck and evaluate it for myself.

I feel cheated. I feel lied to. It’s good! It’s a really good movie! It’s a little peculiar at first to hear the entire Macedonian ruling elite talking with Irish accents (at one point John Kavanagh refers to himself, the general Parmenion, as “an auld sod”) but it’s really no stranger than ancient Romans talking in modern American. I got over it very quickly, but some people in the audience didn’t, and there were giggles throughout. This says more about them than the movie.

And Colin Farrell is blonde – big deal. His performance is admirably committed, intense, driven and charismatic as appropriate. He manages to portray a character whose insecurities and doubts don’t undercut but rather explain his passion and ambition. He’s plausibly young and inexperienced, but also plausibly honoured and authoritative. I’ve never been Farrell’s biggest fan (for some reason he really got under my skin in a bad way when I was the DAT monkey in ADR sessions for Ballykissangel – nothing to do with all the girls liking him, obviously) but I’m impressed with his performance here, particularly in communicating Alexander’s combination of love and horror of war.

The battle scenes are extraordinary. Stone is keen to show us not only Alexander’s personal bravery but his tactical nous, making these scenes of war actually interesting and not just gory horror shows. There is gore, I won’t deny it, but it feels in place, particularly in the extremely bloody, vicious climactic battle in India where Alexander’s army face monstrous elephants.

I never felt that it was overlong, or ponderous. I was never bored. It is long, but appropriately so. I honestly don’t understand the criticisms I have read or heard. People complain that Stone has failed to make any kind of narrative out of Alexander’s sprawling life, or that the flashback to his father Philip’s murder is unmotivated and pointless. They complain about Anthony Hopkin’s Ptolemy, calling him “wordy”.

What film were they watching? Stone and his writers do an amazingly intelligent job of structuring Alexander’s career as a struggle between the life of the senses and the life of the mind. The flashback is perfectly placed to illuminate his colllapse by showing us that the conflict that drove him to his victorious rule also contained the seeds of his downfall. The framing device works perfectly. Ptolemy tells us what we need to know to appreciate the action, provides us with an interesting context and point of view, and – most importantly – is a well drawn, interesting character in his own right. Stone gives us enough details of his life as it is that these scenes serve to underline the epic nature of Alexander’s achievements – Ptolemy, a Macedonian general, has been the Pharoah of Egypt for fourty years.

Anyway, I’m obviously missing something. A movie, any movie, only works with the consent of its audience. It walks a tightrope, and it only takes a small nudge for an audience to turn and ridicule it. I’m not sure what the nudge was here, and why I didn’t feel it. Maybe it was the Irish accents, maybe it was the homosexuality (not as coy as I had expected). Maybe it was that the genre of historical epic has been conflated with the genre of fantasy and myth since the days of Cecil B. DeMille, and audiences just won’t accept something closer to Stone’s own Nixon than Wyler’s Ben-Hur.

Anyway, give it a chance. As Stone has Ptolemy say about Alexander: “Failure? His failures tower over other men’s successes”. It’s about a million times better than either Troy or Gladiator. That’s not saying much, mind you. Maybe I should say instead that it’s nearly as good as Spartacus. And it’s shorter!