MOVIE REVIEWS Alexander (2004)

• Directed by Oliver Stone
• complete credits: see IMDb entry

• Review

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Bla

Rating: 3 of 10        

I must admit, I'm somewhat biased. I'm a fan of Stone's work, especially regarding Nixon, U-Turn and Any Given Sunday. The man can direct. There's a certain meticulousness and madness to his work that I find very much appealing. Capturing grandeur and aiming for historical accuracy, often combined with correcting a stereotype, that's oftentimes his greatest strength.

In Alexander, he aims for the same things: capturing the ideas of past times, the energy and madness of Alexander the Great, his drive, looking for an explanation for his inane quest for empire. It's true, Alexander created a great empire, yet it soon fell apart, unable to hold itself together. Quest and exploration, initially born out of the conviction to eliminate the Persian threat once and for all, lead to conquest and domination. Through the Macedon kings, the Hellenic world, setting out to overcome Persian corruption, is corrupted just the same through eating the Persian empire. The figure of Alexander, his energy, his insane drive, all's very well captured by Stone's picture.

The battle of Gaugamela is done brilliantly, lots of other scenes are convincing as well.

Yet still. I'm a great fan of Anthony Hopkins', but his scenes simply drag on for too long, they smack of preaching and worship. A story should not have to say that someone was a great man, it should demonstrate it, otherwise it's a very weak move. Colin Farrell is great, the rest of the cast though are a tad uninteresting. Jared Leto, even from an entirely heterosexual perspective, is damn fine looking, yet what does he do? Angelina Jolie plays the stereotypical evil mother, oh please. With serpents and everything. Why do we get a (fantastic) nude shot of Alex's wife, but not of him and Hephaistion? Not that I'd want to see that particularly, but why is it that Stone chooses to treat women characters so differently, basically as monsters and sexual bodies? Ain't that a bit too much inside the text? I understand the showing of Aristotle's grotesque remarks regarding race, but those are shown as coming from Aristotle, and that's basically correct. Also, the praise by Ptolemy may still be seen as just that. But who's guiding the glances, is that also Greek perspective, or is that just done for the sake of the audience? In any case, it's weak, a particularly annoying fallback into sexism and exoticism.

Vangelis' score is great for background listening, in the movie, it only works in Gaugamela. The rest of the time, it just pours a very sweetish kind of sauce over the pictures and aims for a weird sort of hero-worship. Who is speaking here, Ptolemy or Stone? Or is Stone's perspective uttered through Ptolemy? I'm not saying you cannot be oblique, that you would have to make a definite political stand. But to be that uncritical to the point of worship, that's a bit dangerous concerning a person like Alexander. I do get the idea that his energy and drive were remarkable. But all in all, his energy was mainly focused on exploration and conquest, not on good governance, justice and taking care of his men. If Nixon is portrayed as utterly flawed and sometimes even monstrous, I cannot quite understand Stone's hero-worship regarding Alexander.

But leaving that aside, and trying to accept that this is not a film about taking a position (which, again, I would not deem necessary, not necessarily), but that it's a narrative about Alexander through the eyes of the aging Ptolemy, to whom Alexander, of course, was a hero, and that we don't necessarily need to connect the director with the position of the picture, still, there's an emptiness and a feeling of "is there nothing more".

I guess I have to say it. It's not a terribly bad film, for that, there's just too many good things going on. But that doesn't make it a good film either. Not by a long shot.

January 26th, 2005