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Russell
Crowe as Maximus Decimus Meridius
Oliver
Reed as Proximo
Connie
Nielsen as Lucilla
Djimon
Hounsou as Juba
Joaquin
Phoenix as Commodus
Photos
courtesy of Dreamworks SKG
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SAN FRANCISCO, 25
January 2001 "There was once a dream
that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a
whisper, and it would vanish - it was that fragile. And I fear that it
will not survive the winter.".
- Emperor Marcus
Aurelius Caesar, in Ridley Scott's Gladiator
Winter settles
over "the light of the world," and a nation teeters on the
knife-edge - republic? or empire? Wisdom, justice, decency, and the
voice of the people are smothered in secret; a self-serving coward
usurps power for himself. Black-clad praetorians secure the triumph of
blood over merit, bread and circuses over strength and honor. A
ruler's unworthy son assumes his father's mantle, mouthing pious
platitudes of family and country; behind his noble-seeming face lurk
ambition, fear, willful stupidity. A people crave - and deserve - a
better ruler; their champion falls - for a time, at least - into an
obscurity whence few return.
But the modern praetorians have
spoken, and America's election is long since over. The republic will
survive the winter, and the three more that will surely follow - it
has seen darker days than these, though not in some time. Some
champion will surely rise and set things right. And in the meantime,
with the Oscar season and Super Bowl Sunday upon us, we can turn our
attention to our own bread (or nachos), Hollywood media circuses, and
modern gladiatorial games.
Which brings us to the action
blockbuster Gladiator - a film perhaps destined to chop its
opponents to bits in the coming awards-show combat, but whose one
profundity, it seems, we have already heard. Ultimately, Gladiator is
much less than the great film that the hype machine would have us
believe - in many respects, it's not even a particularly good film.
But for meaning well, and for doing quite a few things well (and for
providing an opportunity for a neat political allegory), it deserves a
fair look.
The plot, in broadest terms, is straightforward.
Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), emperor of Rome, is dying on the
Germanian frontier of the Empire. Upon his death, he means to install
his loyal general, Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe), as
reluctant emperor, with the charter to restore Rome to the republic it
once was. Maximus wants no part of power, preferring to return to the
farm where his wife and son await him in golden fields of grain, ripe
for harvest. Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), the power-hungry, degenerate
scion of the imperial line, has long seethed against Maximus for
winning an affection from his father that he himself never enjoyed;
desparate, he kills his father in secret, claims the throne for
himself, and orders Maximus and his family in Spain slain. Maximus,
wounded, escapes from his would-be assassins, and tries to ride to his
family's rescue. Too late, he collapses from his exhaustion and his
wounds, and is captured by slavers. Sold to
gladiator-turned-impresario Proximo and made to fight as a gladiator,
he quickly makes a name for himself; when the new emperor Commodus
calls for gladiatorial games to honor his father's memory, Maximus
returns to Rome, where he schemes with the Senate (led by Derek
Jacobi's Gracchus) and Commodus's sister, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), to
avenge his family's death and realize his emperor's republican dream.
In many respects, the execution in Gladiator is
impressive. The battle scenes are for the most part terrifically
well-staged - especially a "re-enactment" of the fall of
Carthage in which a group of gladiators on foot face off against
chariot-mounted archers and make it believable that they should win
through superior tactics and discipline. (Unfortunately, excessively
busy editing at times distracts from the flow of the fighting.)
Killing machine Russell Crowe shows off his unstoppable action-hero
form in battle after battle, giving full rein to the lurking capacity
for explosive physical violence he showed flashes of in L.A.
Confidential. The computer-generated ersatz Rome is quite an
eyeful, the costumes are suitably lavish (the black-armored Commodus
and his Praetorian imperial guard looking particularly terrific), the
sound is impressively vivid for the requisite visceral impact. No
expense, no effort was spared in these aspects of realizing the film;
if Gladiator eventually takes awards for these technical achievements,
it will probably have deserved them. There are clever cinematic
touches as well - for instance, Commodus' "triumphal" entry
into Rome is cleverly shot in muted colors that reverse history,
recalling black-and-white footage of a fascist Italy itself striving
to echo Roman imperial pomp. (The film is clearly meant to draw a
political allegory about the importance of and fragility of democracy
in the face of such imperial power.).
Unfortunately,
technical skill and occasional cleverness are about all the movie has
going for it. Frankly, it's impossible to care what happens to
Maximus, or Commodus, or anyone else in this thing, when they're not
actually in the arena. It's not that the actors themselves aren't up
to the task-- for the most part, they get done what they have to, and
Harris, Phoenix and Nielsen all do well with their roles. Ultimately,
though, shortcomings in the writing and the direction that hack this
movie off at the legs. In places the script strains credibility: a
wounded man, even a paragon of Roman strength and honor, with no
provisions, no money, and no support along the way, would be
hard-pressed to ride on horseback all the way to Spain from the
Germanian frontier, even with love of family as his motive. And
gratuitous sentimental gestures set the viewer's teeth on edge - how
many times can we see Maximus' wife and son waiting for him in the
fields, in Spain or Elysium? Was it really necessary to give our hero
a black (okay , Numidian) gladiator sidekick (Juba, played by male
model Djimon Hounsou)? And then there's the cliched American tic of
giving all 'imperial' types British or faux-British accents,
presumably the product of Britain occupying the place of Rome in the
American imaginary. (When this was done for I, Claudius, it made sense
- after all, what's the B in BBC for? But here? Why? And America being
the closest thing the 21st century has to an imperial power, perhaps
American accents all around would have made more sense.).
What
makes it so hard to work up an interest in Maximus? It's more likely
Ridley Scott's direction and the script than Crowe's execution, but
however noble Maximus may be, however many golden-hued glimpes of his
family in the afterlife we get, however Hans Zimmer's relentless score
may throb, Maximus just doesn't engage viewers' sentiments. Maximus is
so virtuous from start to finish-strength, honor, family, grim
efficiency, that's about it--that all of his obstacles are external.
Maximus is boring, a psychological one-trick pony. Oddly, much the
same could be said of Virgil's Aeneid-pious Aeneas is surely the weak
link in a virtuoso poem; but it's hard to imagine that Scott is
deliberately reproducing this element of Virgil's style.
Commodus
is the other major psychological false note in the movie. Cowardly,
paranoid, ruthless, and driven by incestuous yearnings, he seems at
first suitably perverse and degenerate, and he looks terrific in black
armor. Joaquin Phoenix does deserve credit for bringing to the screen
what the director and writer seem to have had in mind. But Commodus
seems to have been imagined as a petulant overgrown adolescent, whose
craving for the throne springs from the all-too-visible neediness of
his inner child, spurned by a disapproving father in favor of Maximus
as surrogate son. Does the twenty-first century need to reduce the
degeneracy of the Roman emperors to this shallow pop-psych
rationalization? Even Nielsen's Lucilla, forced to humor her brother
to preserve her own life and her son's, is utterly unchanged by the
events of the film; her agony is palpable, but her motives, impulses,
inclinations scarcely waver. Only Harris' Marcus Aurelius seems to
really undergo any interior agony, any growth, as he questions his
life - what, really, has he done for Rome? What kind of children has
he inflicted upon the world? Is imperial rule a plague upon the people
of Rome? - and his psychological evolution is essentially over before
the film begins. Is it anachronistic to expect well-rounded psychology
from the characters of this modern epic? No more so than the pat
little speech on freedom (by our Numidian sidekick) that rounds out
the film.
So there are neither solid ideas nor real
characters to anchor all the spectacular technical goings on and even
the skilled performances. And the political gesture is iffy-are we to
conclude that democracy is better than empire? Or that "democratic"
republican rule at home and empire abroad is somehow better than
empire at home? What's left after all that is summer
blockbuster-cum-circus, and for bread a box of popcorn, puffed as full
of hot air as the movie. The strategy seems to be working - Gladiator
has taken major awards at the Golden Globes and threatens to do so at
the Academy Awards. From here, though the judgement can be summed up
in two words: Thumbs Down.
Best moment: Carthage
routs Rome, in an unexpected rewrite of history.
Two
stars
C. Antonio Romero
is a writer and engineer based in Silicon Valley. He is the Nouveau
editor of Culturekiosque.com.
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Cinema Reviews
