How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (16 page)

There are here, to be fair, incessant references to one bona fide Homeric value: the premium placed on the glory heroes derive from being celebrated in song through the ages. And yet here again, the gritty twenty-first-century realism favored by those responsible for
Troy
makes nonsense of a genuinely Bronze Age element they have nonetheless retained. For the endless references to immortality through future fame (“men will write stories about you for thousands of years to come,” one character says, blissfully innocent of the fact that there is no writing yet) are undercut both by the pervasive cynicism and by the grim modern character of the milieu Benioff works so hard to establish. There's no reason to believe that men as disillusioned and irreligious as those we keep seeing here would ever believe in anything so fuzzy as “immortality” in the first place. Anyway, if the Trojan War was really no more than a territorial affair—“about power, not about love,” as one character puts it—you have to wonder just what about it, precisely, is worth celebrating at such great length in all those epics—epics which clearly include this movie itself?

And so, in the end, Benioff successfully ascribes convincing motivation to precisely one character—Agamemnon, with his lust for world hegemony—while neglecting the other 49,999 Greeks whom we constantly see in computer-generated battle scenes. Had
Troy
featured just one shot of the men gathered enchantedly around a blind bard who's singing of someone's great martial prowess, much of the movie would have made more sense; such a scene would have given depth and complexity to his otherwise monotonously hard-bitten warriors. But clearly this isn't gritty enough for the creators of
Troy
: as with many genuinely Homeric elements alluded to here, the filmmakers slavishly invoke the idea of immortal fame while failing to be able to account for it, to integrate it.

 

But then, they're making the wrong kind of movie for the message they want to convey. The notion of a deconstructed, antiwar Trojan War
story, a grittily realistic story about men with cousins rather than codes of honor, a fable about the emptiness of heroic illusion, is of course one that the ancients themselves entertained—not, however, in epics, but in tragedies. (
The Trojan Women
, for example.) The Greeks knew enough to realize that if you're making an epic, the potency and grandeur of the epic action, the magnificence and scope of the genre itself, would undercut any attempts to subvert it from within. This is as true for epic movies as it is for epic poems. We go to films like these precisely to be overwhelmed by the bigness and wonder of it all, and it's confusing to be told—even as we're invited to attend a film like
Troy
because it's a (I quote the recent ads for the film) “magnificent, opulent, passionate” and “sensational” “action spectacle”—that all the magnificence and opulence and spectacle are really worthless.

It's telling that the few critics who have really liked Troy are those who fail to perceive that the movie's form works so disastrously against its “message”—which is to say, they think that Homer is, essentially, antiwar and anti-epic, too. In
Slate
, David Edelstein confidently announces that “the story” of
Troy

“The picture,” he goes on to say, “stays surprisingly true to its grim inspiration. The little stuff is often haywire, but the big themes are on the money.” Writing in a similar vein in
The New Yorker
, David Denby found
Troy
“both exhilarating and tragic, the right tonal combination for Homer.” Denby goes on to describe how, by the end of Petersen's film, we see that at Troy “the Greeks don't win anything worth winning”:

This, he declares, honors the intentions, if not the style or the means, of the poets.

It would be difficult to find more lopsided mischaracterizations of the
Iliad
and its themes than these. Whatever else war is in Homer, it's anything but a “grotesque waste”: among other things, it's the occasion for the song that Homer has composed, which in turn is the vehicle for the perpetuation of the fame of those who died—the thing Benioff keeps having his characters talk about without ever suggesting what it really means. For the characters (and, very likely, the audience) of Homer's great songs, the celebration of one's exploits in the song of poets, immortal fame or
kleos
, is the very linchpin of the heroic code; it is precisely the prospect of commemoration in song that makes the bitterness of war, and even more the horror of death, worth enduring. Those who have read the
Iliad
closely know that a standard adjectival epithet for battle is, in fact, “bringing-glory-to-men.”

Those who have read Homer's great poem carefully know, too, that as terrible as war can be in it, battlefield violence is something that heroes are eager for, rejoice and exult in, something they enjoy wholly apart from considerations of the glory it will bring them. Homer's warriors are, as it were, professionals, and they enjoy a job well or even elegantly done: a memorable simile from Book 16, the book in which Patroclus is killed, likens the Greek warrior, who has driven a spear into the head of an enemy soldier, cantilevering the poor man out of his chariot, to an angler who, “perched / on a jutting rock ledge, drags some fish from the sea, / some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.” As the classicist Bernard Knox reminds us, in his splendid introduction to Robert Fagles's supremely fluent and elegant translation of the
Iliad
, from which I have just quoted, “one of the common words for combat,
charmê
, comes from the same root as the word
chairô
—‘rejoice.'” In Homer, war can be hell, but just as often it's sheer heaven. If you don't get this, you don't get Homer—and you don't, really, get epic either, a genre whose amplitude and grandeur are reflections not of the number of events that take place in it, but rather the splendor of its subject, which is as beautiful as it is terrible.

 

One thing that does follow—fatally—from the filmmakers' decision to strip from the Trojan War the “heaven” implicit in its Greek epic donnée—the exultation of war, the grand and rigid notions of honor and glory and heroism that motivate real heroes, the golden-hued and sometimes rather charming Olympian interludes—is a disastrous failure in tone. It's one thing to try to show the characters of myth as believable human beings, but quite another to vulgarize them, and vulgarize is what this film inevitably does again and again as it seeks, but never finds, an appropriate register for its unholy hybrid of contemporary cynicism and mythic plot. Some of the dialogue is in a mode perhaps best described as faux-legendary—the kind typically accompanied by much clasping of forearms (“May the gods keep the wolves in the hills and the women in our beds!”)—whereas a good deal of it seems to have been airlifted from southern California. (“I'm making you another seashell necklace, like the ones I used to make you when you were a boy,” Thetis, Achilles' mother, announces, clad in what appears to be a tie-dyed housedress.) It's bad enough having both in the same film; when they clash in the same scene, it's excruciating. “You are a Princess of Troy now!” Hector admonishes Helen. “And my brother needs you tonight!”

Visually, too, Petersen's film is awkward—yet another instance in which the ideology of the filmmakers goes against the genre of the film. For a movie that cost $170 million, this one looks shoddy and, apart from a few impressive computer-generated action shots (not least, the rather thrilling first glimpse of the Greek armada sailing to Troy, which appears to number at least a thousand ships), surprisingly sparse. The sets look cheap and are, to boot, inauthentic: there's a scene in Menelaus's palace that looks like a party at a Turkish-themed restaurant, and Troy itself is a bizarre hodgepodge of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Mycenaean motifs. As I watched
Troy
, I kept wondering why, given his Olympian budget, Petersen couldn't have paid some nice classicist a heroic sum of money to tell him what these Bronze Age cities ought to look like. (There are a lot of gaffes which could easily have been avoided: one portentous title indicates that the seaside palace we're looking at is in “the Port of Sparta,” which, given Sparta's actual location, is a bit like setting a movie in the “Port of Tulsa”; another scene depicts a confrontation between the armies of Agamemnon and those of the king of Thessaly in central Greece, whose subjects are, hilariously, repeatedly referred to
not as “Thessalians” but—in a skip north to an entirely different region of Greece that no doubt owes much to the writer's vague memories of the letters of St. Paul—as “Thessalonians.”) Worse, the battle scenes lack clarity and impact, and the crowd scenes are messy and unconvincing. Petersen's fall of Troy appears to devastate about thirty people.

Petersen became famous with the 1981 film
Das Boot
, about life aboard a German U-boat during World War II, and it may be that tight spaces bring out the best in him; he brings to
Troy
none of the visual panache that makes even the most imperfect of old Hollywood epics fun to watch. In Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963
Cleopatra
, overblown, underrated, and not at all unintelligent, there's an over-the-top sequence portraying the Egyptian queen's entrance into Rome, and it's a breathtaking showstopper not least because the director knows how to build up to a big moment; he doesn't show you Cleopatra until you've had to sit through an endless parade of acrobats and fan-wavers, so that by the time Elizabeth Taylor appears (on a gilded palanquin atop a rolling pyramid-thing), you're as impatient as a Roman. In
Troy
, the entrance of the fabled horse into the city—a moment that should evoke an almost macabre poignancy, given that the Trojans think the fatal object is a peace offering—falls flat: Petersen shows you the horse first, and then a few people desultorily doing a line dance below, like grown-ups at a bar mitzvah reception. Then, anxious as ever to get to the next scene, he cuts away.

Virtually every big moment in Troy is sapped of impact in this way. Petersen either doesn't know how to frame a scene (the final encounter between Achilles and Hector, which should feel overwhelmingly climactic, is particularly lifeless) or he beautifully establishes a shot or a tableau that he doesn't allow to sink in: a creepy glimpse of a panting Achilles, the first day of slaughter behind him, hunched on a parapet and looking, you suddenly realize, more leonine than human, a terrific Homeric touch; an impressive-looking sequence showing the Greeks burning their dead at night; a macabre nocturnal funeral for Hector, with the royal womenfolk draped in black, sitting on an impossibly high dais. Just as I had begun to relish each of these, Benioff's skittish script and Petersen's anxious camera zipped along to the next scene, desperate to tick off the next Big Epic Moment, unaware that the real impact of epic lies precisely in the moments this director and screenwriter keep abandoning, the moments that further our understanding of the action, the
praxis
.

Not surprisingly, given Petersen's directorial strengths, the only scene that has even a frisson of genuine feeling is one that takes place in extremely close quarters. Toward the end of the film, old Priam sneaks into Achilles' tent in order to try to persuade the implacable hero to surrender the battered body of his son so that the Trojans might give it a proper burial. Priam keeps trying to get close to Achilles, who keeps sliding away, at once repelled and embarrassed. The awkward physicality of this brief scene efficiently and quite movingly conveys some real emotions (whether they're Archaic emotions is another matter): the old king's humiliated but necessary self-abasement, Achilles' sudden, grief-stricken realization that the only people he can admire are the Trojans, his enemies—and that the only father figure he can admire is the father of the man he's just killed. (It's the only scene in the movie in which Brad Pitt warms up as an actor; you can tell that here, finally, he's dealing with something he can understand.) The dynamic between a fatherless young hero and a bereft older man in particular is a genuinely powerful motif that could have been the basis of a valid rewriting of Homer, had Benioff and Petersen been interested in creating a coherent action instead of ticking off a list of events to be covered. Such a rewriting would, moreover, have been entirely Greek: the theme of unexpectedly riven loyalties in a young Greek hero looking for a father figure is, in fact, what shapes Sophocles'
Philoctetes
.

And so
Troy
goes, skidding from one event to the next, from one undernourished conceit to another, anxious simply to get to the inexorable end. But in the end, there's nothing to hold
Troy
together, apart from that lumbering momentum to the narrative finish line. The movie manages to be (literally) a textbook example of everything an epic shouldn't be, which is to say both tedious and overstuffed at the same time. Or, to use the correct Aristotelian diction (for of course Aristotle could have predicted all this), “too extensive and impossible to grasp all at once,” but also “far too knotty in its complexity.”

 

Three hundred years after Aristotle committed his thoughts on epic to paper, the Roman poet Horace addressed a verse epistle to a would-be littérateur from a wealthy and well-connected family. Although technically known as
Epistles
2.3, this witty but quite canny verse handbook
on the writer's art has since been known as the
Ars poetica
, the “Art of Poetry,” and it contains a piece of advice about how to construct epic plots that is so famous that, like certain other Roman expressions—
caveat emptor
, for instance—we can utter it in the original and be confident of being understood. Here is the passage in which it occurs, in David Ferry's 1997 translation: