Alexander the Great was perhaps history's most successful conqueror. Succeeding his father Philip as King of Macedonia at the tender age of 20, Alexander proceeded to conquer most of the known world. It only took him thirteen years.
With that kind of success, it's no shock that Oliver Stone has been chomping at the bit for years to make a movie about Alexander. Stone came close to getting a project off the ground twice before; once with Val Kilmer and again later with Tom Cruise. Finally, with the help of German financing and young Irish actor Colin Farrell, Stone succeeded. So many years of effort to make this movie beg the question, "Shouldn't he have nailed down a good script first?"
What exactly Stone wanted to say about Alexander with this movie is unclear. He starts with a lengthy section dealing with Alexander's youth and his parents. His mother Olympia (Angelina Jolie) is portrayed as paranoid, greedy for power and about as cuddly as the vipers she constantly plays with. Philip (Val Kilmer) is a drunk and seems to possess little charm and a heavily misogynistic attitude. His idea of foreplay is tackling Olympia. Then there are lessons in politics from Aristotle (Christopher Plummer), wrestling and horses for us to watch. It's a bit tedious to start, further aggravated by a dry narration by Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), a general in Alexander's army, speaking from 40 years in the future where he is now governor of Alexandria in Egypt. Stone would seem to be trying to divine what sort of upbringing spawns an Alexander. Unfortunately, the script (by Stone, Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis) seems to as in the dark about these seeds as the audience. For the first twenty years of his life, Alexander was an unremarkable prince. The last thirteen years of his life are a benchmark for productivity. What possessed Stone to spend so much of this three-hour epic on the least interesting part of Alexander's life is a mystery. It would seem the appropriate point to start would be the death of Philip. From there we could see how Alexander took charge and began his amazing campaign.
The narrative by Ptolemy seems lifted straight from a middle school textbook at times. It often breaks in to vault the proceedings forward to the next point of interest in the story, in the process skipping over many other points of interest. Militarily, King Darius III of Persia was Alexander's greatest rival but the narration skims over their early battles, skipping straight to their climactic battle at Gaugamel where Alexander devised a risky strategy that intended to take out Darius personally. The actual battle is one of the film's highlights. It is a pulse-pounding affair, riddled with battle tactics, savage killing, gallons of blood and magnificent choreography. If you don't find your heart quickened by the scene, you might ask a friend to check for your pulse and possibly call the paramedics. Farrell is at his best here, showing us a king who leads by example, personally leading his men into battle. Alexander clearly relished the conflict and was driven to wade right into battle with his men. His ferocity and manic look about the eyes seem exactly what such a man would need to behave this way. At this point, I jotted something down about the movie's first battle in my notebook. Two hours later, I was starting to wonder if there would be a second battle. There is and it is equally impressive, featuring Indian war elephants, but the wait is brutal. For a man whose life is defined by conquest, we see shockingly little of him in battle. Stone seems far more interested in Alexander's quieter moments, without a strong idea of just what those would be about.
That brings the topic around to love, something Alexander seemed to struggle with. The closest thing he has to a mate is Hephaestion (Jared Leto), a boyhood friend and now one of his commanders. The two speak in an intimate and longing manner but never seem to get anywhere. While historians seem fairly certain that Alexander was bisexual, Stone seems pretty queasy about the subject, preferring to hint at it rather than confront it directly. Further cementing this is the time spent on Alexander's first marriage, to the Sogdian princess Roxane (Rosario Dawson). Not only is the wedding endlessly discussed (the Macedonian core of his army strongly disapproved) but we are treated to a scene about the consummation of their marriage. The feisty Roxane tries to kill him as a form of foreplay. The longing gazes reserved for Hephaestion are ditched in favor of wild lust. Dawson deserves credit for the nerve to take a role that features little dialogue and a whole lot of nudity. The point though is that the movie treats Alexander's homosexual relations with kid gloves while leering at his heterosexual relations. We can't tell if the squeamishness comes from Stone or the studio but either way, it sells the character short.
The movie keeps coming back to Alexander's parents. It almost seems like a therapy session for Stone. Olympia is a broadly drawn character that aims for somewhere between Lady Macbeth and Lady Kaede on the scale of evil women characters. Angelina Jolie rises to the occasion and if anything, overshoots the mark. With an accent Bela Lugosi would have been proud of, she supports and terrorizes her son and it's often hard to tell which is which. Val Kilmer gets to play the rather unsubtle Philip and stumbles through it, literally. While a rather successful king in his own right, having managed to bring many of the Greek city-states under his umbrella, he is portrayed as a drunk who uses his political power to score chicks. The movie strikes a rather a rather discordant image of Philip, showing him as a drunk in person and a titan in the words of others. The implication of all this is that Alexander conquers the world to show up his father and get the hell away from his mother. I think a lot of us have these feelings but oddly, almost none of us act on it by trying to conquer the world. So either we're all a bunch of wimps or Stone needed to dig a little deeper for Alexander's motivation.
A lot of the problems with the film can be pinned on the script. But some of the problems lie with Alexander himself, who inconveniently died young without leaving a good story arc. Plus, the sheer volume of his accomplishments means a movie will struggle mightily to fit a lot of it in and still resemble a coherent story. But the biggest problem is that the movie just doesn't feel like an Oliver Stone movie. He has built a career on being equal parts entertainer and provacateur. His great ability is to tell a good story while setting a big enough portion of his audience on edge to generate controversy. That meant his films were always capable of stirring fierce debate. Alexander would seem fated to only to stir debate over why Stone wimped out on the homosexual angle. And there is definitely something wrong with that.
- John Shea
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