You know
those three-hour, action-filled
epics that appear every holiday season? The
ones that are so compelling, you don’t even notice time
passing?
Alexander
is not one of those movies.
Despite
uniformly negative national reviews, the film isn’t all bad. Several of the sets were visually stunning
blends of old-fashioned set construction and computer graphics. I was particularly impressed by the
visualization
of Babylon, although annoyed at the
movie’s
false suggestion that this city was the capital of the Persian Empire.
It
wasn’t – the Persian capital was Persepolis, and Babylon, while at that
time a
Persian possession, was located in present-day Iraq; historical Persia
is/was
today’s Iran.
Colin
Farrell was judged by one national critic as “too slight” for the title
role of
Alexander the Great, conqueror of the known world by the age of 33. I would say rather that the problem is his
performance is too spotty – sometimes decisively heroic, sometimes
tentatively
like a poorly cast Hamlet, sometimes detached from what is going on.
At
one point, Alexander and his lover/comrade Hephaestion state their love
for one
another and embrace. Farrell’s statement
is completely unconvincing – God forbid one of Hollywood’s current hunks should even
pretend
to same-sex tendencies, no matter what the role calls for.
In
contrast, Jared Leto as Hephaestion delivers a convincing and
multi-faceted
performance – one of the few actors who actually seems to care about
his
character as something other than a caricature.
There
are two interesting ways to go with the potentially fascinating story
of
Alexander. One would be to explore the
charismatic leader’s character, to understand how and why he came to
rule most
of the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia. The other is to indulge in blockbuster epic
conventions, with lots of battle scenes. Stone’s
direction tries for a mixture of the two and succeeds
at
neither.
In
a film lasting over three hours, there are only two battle scenes, more
than an
hour apart. Both feature lots of mass
action and confusion, but little more, and there is no sense of why
these two
battles were selected from all of Alexander’s victories for on-screen
depiction.
In
terms of character development, Stone and Farrell attempt to explain
Alexander’s character in terms of a psychodrama of reaction to his
manipulative
and poisonous mother, played by Angelina Jolie in yet another
confirmation that
her 2000 supporting actress Oscar was a fluke, and his abusive,
rejecting
father, Philip (Val Kilmer).
But
that’s it. Alexander embarks on one of
the most successful campaigns of conquest in world history to get away
from his
mother!
Motivations
for the other characters are even less developed, making the three-hour
film
far more boring than its subject matter would suggest.
When
the movie’s this uninteresting, one is tempted to review the coming
attractions
instead. Not much there, either – of
seven upcoming releases that were featured, three were sequels, one a
remake of
a not particularly interesting 1965 film, and one was a film version of
a
musical based on earlier movies (The Phantom of the Opera).
Only Spanglish, a sweet domestic
comedy starring Adam
Sandler, and The
Interpreter,
an international thriller featuring Sean Penn and
Nicole Kidman,
promise original film concepts in the coming months. I’ll be
watching for them.