Troy
dir. Wolfgang Petersen
Warner Bros.

Despite the received wisdom, the book is not always better than the movie … but often it really helps if the producers start with an unpretentious or even mediocre book. That way, interesting cinematic liberties may be taken without fear of high-toned academic outrage or comparison to the text's richness. The many successful Elmore Leonard and Nick Hornby adaptations come to mind. Conversely, the more "literary" the book, the harder it can be to make a good movie out of it. For instance, there's a 1959 adaptation of "The Sound and the Fury" (with Yul Brynner as a Mississippi patriarch!) that is almost completely unwatchable. And "Ulysses" didn't film so well in the days before movie nudity. Then again, Swann in Love is an astonishingly good reduction of Proust, and Jane Austen's novels dream onto the screen with Oscar-worthy grace.

Still, there's some hubris involved in filming "The Iliad," and in particular in handing the writing chores to David Benioff, whose adapted screenplay for 25th Hour was nearly incoherent — and that's when he was adapting his own novel. And why did they have Wolfgang Petersen direct something so expansive when he's clearly at his best in the claustrophobic, narrow tubes of Das Boot and Air Force One? Troy is definitely big, and it retains the general contours of "The Iliad," but it's strangely flat. It seems like a lot of committees had to certify all its major elements inoffensive — or maybe they just tested and tweaked it to death.

Brad Pitt is surprisingly good as the lethal Achilles, running up huge body counts in a sort of controlled berserking. There's a bit of the deadly prizefighter Pitt played in Snatch here; he truly suggests a flow, that zone a great athlete or genius hypnotizes himself into when transcending mere mortals' abilities. Even harder, Pitt makes understandable Achilles' corrosive despair, his sourness when the killing machine must idle among the scheming and grasping humans. Pitt gets many worthwhile little moments and spends a lot of time in the spectacular buff for the benefit of his ardent fans. But he also has to wade through a lot of treacle.

Benioff seems to have been reading his Robert McKee, to diminshed effect. When Achilles' captive temple virgin Briseis enters the scene, there's practically a flashing supertitle: "Character arc starts here." You can tell that the love of a good woman is going to change Achilles — he's going to grow, to learn something, to become human. Sure enough, he does — he comes to "choose life" rather than the high of combat. Of course, the whole point of Homer's Achilles is that he chooses death, or rather life on his own fatally limited terms, so this is a fairly egregious liberty. And in Homer, Briseis means nothing to Achilles after the death of his beloved Patroclus, which recapitulates the reductive metaphor for the whole war: vast slaughter over a woman not worth having. But not in Troy; surely the idea of man/boy love between Brad and Garrett Hedlund's Patroclus was nuked as quickly as it was suggested. So, we get romance between Briseis and Achilles.

Benioff's script also modernizes Paris and Helen oddly. They seem to have come from a UPN domestic drama — they're all contrition and no passion almost immediately. (It's like, "Oops, we started a war.") Diane Kruger's Helen doesn't have the requisite deranging hotness; she looks more like the queen of the Kappa Sig dance than a destroyer of nations. And Orlando Bloom's Paris doesn't exude the princeling's psychopathic entitlement. His theft of Helen is more a momentary weakness than a Faustian presumption. He seems just back from a New Age boarding school. It's not at all clear why Helen would want this Paris — will they do each other's hair?

The story's patriarchs likewise have modern resonance. Peter O'Toole's Priam is a doddering Bushite, going into war wide-eyed and with the desperate delusion that God is on his side. Brian Cox's Agamemnon is his perfect Rove-like foil, a sardonic megalomaniac practicing a realpolitik of bottomless cynicism.

The decision not to have the gods watching it all through cottony clouds works, but most of the other liberties Benioff and company take with the myths don't make the movie better, just more domestic. Troy is not, overall, awful. It's interesting, but almost suspense-free, and for an epic, it's strangely pedestrian. Maybe the whole thing was just too big (at a cost of $200 million) for the director, and that accounts for its prefabricated quality. And maybe it's just hangover from the Ring things, but Troy's CGI lavishness seemed to draw little ooh and awe. It didn't go anywhere new.

And as for the rest of the spectacle, the R rating is a total fraud. There's more eroticism in a "Friends" rerun and more shocking violence in "The Itchy and Scratchy Show." Troy conjures thousands of men hacking at one another with dull cutlery, yet it excludes almost all savagery. The battles showcase a generalized blur of blood within much frenetic camerawork, but we get very few startling evocations of real mayhem or horror. Sanitizing "The Iliad" totally makes about as much sense as making Lolita 18. Homer rubs our noses in hundreds of killings, described in anatomical detail worthy of a coroner's report, but also the victim's appalling subjectivity: "… he reached out both hands to his own beloved companions, gasping life out … and a mist of darkness closed over his eyes." Most importantly, Homer also counterposes tiny, breathtaking moments which hallow the lives thrown away. Quintessential is Hector's leave-taking (here rendered by Richmond Lattimore):

… glorious Hector held out his arms to his baby,/ who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse's bosom/ screaming, and frightened by the aspect of his own father,/ terrified as he saw the bronze and crest with its horse-hair/ nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet./ Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honoured mother ….

Three thousand years ago somebody, some "Homer," ran this scene in a cinematic imagination: medium shot of smiling Hector holding out his arms; wide out as baby flees to kneeling nurse; close-up on screaming baby, transfixed by … something; BABY'S POV — horse-hair crest, nodding eerily; then, Hector and Andromache laughing. Hector removes his helmet.

In these few moments we get tenderness, heartbreak, horror, humor. Homer packed in a thousand such concentrated vignettes. It seems there should have been a way to extract more of their power and put it on the screen.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)