[home]

A review of Wolfgang Petersen's "Troy"

Classics Illuminated
by Marian Kester Coombs
Human Events, May 24, 2004

n the opening frame we are told that this film is "inspired" by Homer's Iliad, no more. It is at once a tremendous spectacle, a surrender to certain modernist temptations, and a work of artistic reinterpretation that is worthy of respect.

The film is so much better than it had to be that critics who declare themselves unimpressed really ought to check out another line of work and quit inflicting their jaded sophistication on the rest of us. The battles are breathtaking. The dialogue has been well crafted and carefully vetted for modernisms. The acting is for the most part as good as it gets. The thousand triremes arrayed across the blue Aegean is, like the resurrection of the Colosseum in "Gladiator," a history-lover's dream come true -- not simply Classics Illustrated, but illuminated.

More wonderful touches include an assault with Greek fire, the napalm of its day; a beached trireme rigged as a huge tent for the king; the creation of the Trojan Horse from the seasoned hulls of wrecked ships; the coins placed on slain heroes' eyes to "pay the boatman" for the crossing to Hades; the splendid sea blues and ornamentation of the clothing, the dressed hair, the Mycenaean statuary; the depiction of the joy of war, and of the killing frenzy necessary for a warrior to survive on the battlefields of antiquity.

The score suffers from the poverty of Middle Eastern music itself, which has so little variety and nuance that scores based on it, from "Gladiator" to "The Passion of the Christ," can't help but sound derivative and repetitive. Composer James Horner also recycles here a major motiv he employed for "Enemy at the Gates," a motiv which is itself a "borrowing" from Sergei Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky.

Orlando Bloom is a callow young actor -- much like the young prince Paris he plays. Rose Byrne as the captive Trojan priestess Briseis is really not enthralling enough to sustain the pivotal role in the tragedy that her character must. Andromache (Saffron Burrows) should be a lot more regal. And Eric Bana as Hector is not allowed to show off his fighting prowess before being matched against the Greek champion Achilles, thus suffering by comparison.

But Diane Kruger's Helen radiates pure feminine loveliness, a goddess in the flesh. Sean Bean portrays a warrior (Odysseus) far different from his Boromir in "The Lord of the Rings"; here he is a peacemaker and problem-solver, sympathetic to the anarchistic Achilles but nobly bound to serve Ithaca and thus the tyrannical unifier of the Greeks, Agamemnon.

Brad Pitt's Achilles is brutal and powerful, brooding, easily enraged and ever jealous of renown. Julie Christie as his mother has one mesmerizing, too-brief scene. Brian Cox and Brendan Gleeson are magnificently barbaric kings of kings. Peter O'Toole's tragic frailty as Priam is a testament to the ages of man: Once he himself would have played Achilles of the swift feet. What a pair, in their ruined grandeur, his Priam would have made with the Hecuba Katharine Hepburn created thirty-three years ago for "The Trojan Women."

This "Troy" has no Hecuba, and that brings us to the critics' questioning of Petersen's plot choices. Surprisingly little of the "whole story" of the 1250 B.C. war between Tory and the Greek city-states is recounted in the Iliad. So there is no point saying "That's not how it really happened" or "He left this part out." Petersen in fact has added in more than he's left out.

Homer's Iliad begins with Achilles fuming at Agamemnon and ends with the burning of Hector's retrieved body. Scores of poets and playwrights, not to mention tellers of nursery tales, elaborated the basic narrative in the centuries that followed: the ten-year siege, the horse stratagem of wily Odysseus, the sack of the city, the fates of Andromache and Hecuba and Helen, the escape of Aeneas, the murder of Agamemnon by his wife, and of course the wondrous voyage of Odysseus as vengeful gods buffeted him from shore to shore (or so he claimed).

Likewise the backstory of the Iliad, its "prequels," were fashioned and refashioned in later years: the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis, the origin of Achilles' imperfect immortality, Cassandra's affliction by vindictive Ares, the exposure of the infant Paris (sometimes called Alexander) at the behest of clairvoyant Cassandra, the "judgment" of Paris. Variations, transpositions, substitutions, conflations, confusions, reinventions -- the best minds of the ancient world were at work on this rich lode of the collective unconscious for a long, long time. Clearly it continues to inspire.

Killing off Menelaus and Agamemnon before their time was just too tempting an audience-pleaser for Petersen to forego, but his surgical removal of the tale's divine cast of characters is a more serious bit of revisionism. The gods are referred to on occasion, with reverence by elders such as Priam and Agamemnon, with dismissive impatience or eye-rolling by the younger heroes such as Odysseus and Hector.

But Aphrodite no longer walks next to Paris when he encounters Helen, causing her to be overcome by passion. Athena no longer strengthens Achilles' arm and speeds his feet. Ares no longer watches over the high walls of Troy.

Petersen probably regards ancient Greek religion the way Hollywood -- excuse me, the artistic community -- regards contemporary Christianity: as pious hypocrisy and credulous humbug. Since the Enlightenment, any role for the divine or supernatural has steadily given way to naturalistic explanations ("Gravity did it") and human causality ("My mean parents made me do it").

Yet mere convention or superstition fail to account for the leading role accorded the gods by the Iliad. The late Julian Jaynes of Princeton University, in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), argues that at the time the Iliad was composed, the two hemispheres of the human brain still functioned semi-autonomously, and that auditory "hallucinations" of the Gods, emanating from admonitory wisdom stored in the right hemisphere, were experienced as divine external voices advising and commanding, warning and encouraging.

"A coward in the Iliad is not someone who is afraid, but someone whose kradie [heart] beats loudly. The only remedy is for Athene to 'put' strength in the kradie (2:452), or for Apollo to 'put' boldness in it (21:547)" (book and line numbers of the Iliad in parentheses). In other words, there is no "I" in the Iliad, no "subjectification": Its men do not act, but are automata controlled by the gods.

By the time of the Odyssey, according to Jaynes, there has been such "a gigantic vault in mentality" that we are clearly no longer in the age of whoever composed the Iliad. The Odyssey is "a journey of deviousness. It is the very discovery of guile, its invention and celebration." Its gods are "like receding ghosts," hard to contact and quite possible to ignore. In the Odyssey, the muses are "narratizing their own downfall, their own fading away into subjective thought ... [T]he whole long song is an odyssey toward subjective identity and its triumphant acknowledgment out of the hallucinatory enslavements of the past."

Herodotus in his brilliantly analytical Histories provided an overview of what "Helen" represents that, like most of Greek culture, is still of immense interest. He began with Phoenician traders treacherously carrying off Io, daughter of the king of Argos. In retaliation, Cretan Greeks bore off Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king of Tyre. Then the Greeks went still further and abducted Medea, daughter of the king of Colchis. Later, "Alexander the son of Priam, bearing these events in mind, resolved to procure himself a wife out of Greece by violence ... Accordingly he made prize of Helen."

Herodotus' "inquiry" sought the origin of the long conflict between Greece and Persia. The Persians, he found, "trace to the attack upon Troy their ancient enmity toward the Greeks." Carrying off women, in Asiatic Persian opinion, was merely the "deed of a rogue," and "men of sense care nothing about such women, since it is plain that without their own consent they would never be forced away. ... [B]ut the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed [an Asian kingdom]."

Yes, the Greeks stood out in the ancient world, and they continue to stand out in the modern world: a civilization whose very gods were human, and which produced a wealth of truth and beauty to endure for all time.