Film

'Alexander' the Dull

Oliver Stone and Sominex® Team Up for a Biopic

by Bradley Steinbacher

Tools

• Email This
• Print
• Share
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Newsvine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
• 0 comments

+ Enlarge this Image

Rick Altergott

The last Oliver Stone film, Any Given Sunday, was a near-three-hour opus about clashing armies, brazen young men, and tight ends. His new film, Alexander, is a near-three-hour opus about clashing armies, brazen young men, and tight ends. The difference between the two? Any Given Sunday was about the brutality of football; Alexander is about the brutality of bad filmmaking.

It's also about homos--specifically, those who like a little manly caressing after the heat of battle. But while "queer cinema" is usually just another way of saying "terrible cinema" due to Hollywood sanitization or indie navel gazing, the gayness of Alexander is often its most vital ingredient. Without the glitter, Stone's biopic of Alexander the Great is something far more offensive than man lying with man: It's completely unremarkable.

Colin Farrell is the man of the title. His bottom? His closest comrade, Hephaistion (Jared Leto), in whose eyes Alexander apparently found much of his soul. Together, both men make for an absurdly pretty pair, and as Alexander unspooled I had hopes that Stone, who has never been known for his subtlety, would nudge the drama toward the kingdom of Jeff Stryker: gay hardcore--the only possible way to save this film. There is much President Bush and his cronies undoubtedly admire about Alexander the Great; I wanted Stone to loudly broadcast the parts they can't even bring themselves to admit.

But he doesn't. Instead, he keeps things painfully chaste between Alexander and Hephaistion (save for some googly eyes and pillow talk about avenging each other's deaths--swoon), thereby consigning the majority of Alexander to its own dusty devices. And, to be honest, if you've seen one sword-and-sandals epic, you've seen them all--from Charlton Heston watching stuntmen get trampled to Brad Pitt taking a digital arrow through the ankle. Stone's film, despite its hefty budget, does little to expand the genre. Alexander exposes the fatal flaw of biopics: Interesting lives, those worthy of the biopic treatment, are usually far too burly to be contained in a single film. The best biopics--David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Spike Lee's Malcolm X--are able to flesh out and smartly condense at the same time. Alexander, under Stone's thundering direction, reduces matters to the depth of CliffsNotes. It's a stuffed turkey, heavily garnished but painfully unsatisfying.

This is not to say that there aren't some startling moments; Stone may be a hack, but he's never been an entirely dull one. Take the battle scenes: Suitably chaotic, infused with brutality, they are earth- and heaven-bound at the same time, alternating from frightening grit to sweeping splendor in the breath of a single edit. Computer-enhanced shots of armies colliding may have long since become cliché, but when Stone plummets his camera into the thick of things you realize that, despite how terrible his canon may be (and every Oliver Stone film is terrible when you get down to it--even Platoon), the old man does, indeed, have talent. Of all of Stone's films, JFK is by far his most accomplished, and the reason for this is clear: Buried deep below the conspiratorial sleaze is a technical skill that can't be denied. During its scenes of carnage, Alexander nearly matches its predecessor's breakneck tempo. Not since Kill Bill: Vol. 1 have so many limbs been lost onscreen--unlike Tarantino's brilliant fit, however, Stone's work makes violence seem beautiful and terrible at the same time. He can still make war into a gorgeous hell.

Outside of warfare, however, the rest of Alexander fails. It's a suitable failure, though--as in, suitably grand for its subject. Alexander the Great was a man who conquered the world by the age of 25; how fitting, then, that the life of such a sizeable figure could be turned into such a colossal blunder. Big lives necessitate big renditions, even if it's a gigantic fuck-up-- otherwise, what's the point of the endeavor? Perhaps Stone himself realized this. How else can you explain his casting of Angelina Jolie as Olympias, Alexander's mother? Thick of lips, thin of talent, Jolie is far too modern for the role, especially when sparring with the likes of Val Kilmer, whose rendition of Alexander's father, Philip, is yet another lap around the lip of the Jim Morrison dustbin. Typecasting has long stunted careers, but for Kilmer, the Lizard King has been a ridiculously perfect fit. Whether Kilmer's performance forever altered him or he really is that thickheaded is an argument for another time--what matters now is that his spin as Philip is often unwatchable. But here's the punch line: He's by far the best thing in the picture.

Any film about such a figure as Alexander the Great lives and dies by its casting, and in Colin Farrell--who was so brilliant in Tigerland and, especially, that other Joel Schumacher travesty, Phone Booth--Stone may have felt that he'd found the perfect fit. That he didn't is perhaps Alexander's biggest fault, for not only did Stone do a great figure a great injustice, but for the first time he's made Farrell appear mortal. There is but one moment when Farrell is allowed to fully breathe in the film, a moment where he beautifully sighs to Hephaistion about his untrustworthy mother, "It's a high ransom she charges for nine months' rooming in the womb." The rest is pure drowning, and it's a tragedy to watch. Say what you want about Braveheart (and there is indeed much to say, beginning with, "It's a piece of shit"), but during the scenes where Mel Gibson rallies his troops, his delivery is so forceful that you never doubt his followers' commitment to him. Farrell, sadly, can muster no such power--either on the battlefield or in the theater. Good directors build a foundation for their actors; Stone has given Farrell a crumbling house. How do you make someone like Alexander the Great into a square? Call Ollie and ask him--he surely has volumes of notes on the matter.