Alexander
The story seems familiar. The son of a king, always feeling as though he hasn’t lived up to his father’s standards, drives his army across the world to Babylon (modern day Iraq) to conquer an empire. This empire (Persia) is commanded by a tyrant whose rule, or so goes the Macedonian propaganda machine, is based only on brutality and slavery. With hatred fueled by rumors that Persian gold paid for the father’s assassination, the son invades this romanticized eastern world. But if you believe writer and producer Oliver Stone’s version of how this gripping film came to be, Alexander has nothing to do with modern day politics. It is only storytelling in pictures.
Oliver Stone has played that game before. On numerous occasions, Stone has denied imposing art onto truth in his work. He took a lot of heat for his artistic license in such films as JFK and Nixon all the while claiming that he had no intention of revising history and only sought to pursue the artist’s main objective of producing a great fictional work.
Alexander has endured another kind of criticism, however. David Ansen, writing for Newsweek, describes the film as 'stupefying' and a 'madly ambitious film [that] doesn’t compute.' Ansen is puzzled by the film’s main contradiction: Alexander’s idealistic claims about the liberation and freedom his imperial ambitions have brought the people of the world is contrasted by the reality of war’s violence, the struggle for power within the ruling class of Macedonia, the enslavement of inferior 'barbarian' peoples, mass murder, and the blatant racism that ideologically fuels the drive for conquest. Ansen appears to be wondering, aloud unfortunately, that if the movie is supposed to be an idealistic portrayal of a great figure in history, why all the bad stuff?
For Ansen the only decipherable moments in the movie are the love story and the battle scenes. He shouldn’t feel alone, though. Two older gentlemen whom I followed out of the theater expressed similar concerns about the film. 'I didn’t get it,' said the older man (probably in his early 70s). 'Disgusting,' proclaimed the younger (mid-50s). 'Without those battle scenes, the movie was nothing.' Apparently his disgust for Alexander’s sexuality outweighed his reaction to the gore and violence of extremely graphic and extensive battles.
If I hadn’t followed those guys out of the theater, I might have wondered if Ansen and I hadn’t seen two different movies. Then I remembered how deep the divisions in US society actually run. I felt that the movie quite directly represents our contemporary life in a stark and honest manner – perhaps even more vividly than such a wonderful documentary as Fahrenheit 9/11. Stone has a way of picking at myth and history – a major theme of this film – until the very thin line between legend and reality, truth and fiction is exposed.
What Ansen misses is that Stone’s work sublimely challenges the foundations of our knowledge about our modern world. In viewing Alexander, we cannot help but conclude, despite Stone’s insistent denials, that indeed our own leader, while nothing compared to this idealized version of Alexander, is obsessively pursuing expansion of an empire, that indeed it is a short-lived and futile adventure based not on a quest for universal humanitarian ideals but a grasping, violent struggle for power. The roots of empire are murder, racism, brutal war, hate, treachery and ultimately failure. And for what?
While those who control our current imperial struggle want us blinded by fear and empty belief in our own inherent greatness and grand ideals of liberating the world’s current barbarians – who just so happen to be the same as Alexander’s – from themselves and their own savagery, Stone’s Alexander provides a lens into what is real about the myth. For some viewers, I imagine, what this contradiction of images produces is difficult to understand and may be jarringly uncomfortable. For the rest of us, let us heed the advice of the older Ptolemy (skillfully rendered by Anthony Hopkins): those who lead us into these ventures must be stopped before they get us killed. Actually, Ptolemy, who in Stone’s version is part of a faction in the ruling elite that has come to see Alexander’s adventurism as dangerous to the wealth and power they have accumulated, says, 'we had to kill him, before he got us all killed.' Ptolemy then erases that nugget of truth from the history books and hands down the idealized mythic Alexander the world came to know.
In a commanding performance, Colin Farrell plays the adult Alexander. This may be his tour de force, marred only by some moments of insincerity in scenes with Jared Leto, who brilliantly plays Alexander’s male lover Hephaistion. Farrell is certainly believable as a bold and violent emperor, but the personal life of the Macedonian leader seems a bit askew. Despite the fact that the film’s plot calls for Alexander clearly to prefer Hephaistion romantically and to be sexually unavailable to his Persian wife Roxane, Farrell appears more comfortable in a love scene with Rosario Dawson (Roxane) than in several otherwise very moving and tender scenes with Hephaistion. Nevertheless, Farrell and Leto’s performances are groundbreaking and produce some touching and romantic moments that compete with the likes of Bogey and Bacall.
Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer turn in respectable performance as Alexander’s parents, even if you are wondering how these two could have produced a blonde son with an Irish accent. Panoramic shots of gorgeous mountain and desert terrain as well as large-scale special effects make this movie a must-see in the theater. In sum, don’t believe the critics. Go see this film and make up your own mind. It is a provocative movie that says a great deal about myth and history, but also about what is really going on now. I came to this movie half-expecting in our post 9-11 world to see a celebration of war and empire; I was pleasantly surprised.
--Roberta Jones writes on movies and music for Political Affairs online and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
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