As for Paris, he is someone you’d never expect to see in a movie this expensive: a sympathetic coward. He’s a lot more like the rest of us than anyone else in the movie, a man of mistakes and weakness, who knows the right thing to do but can’t do it, whether it’s for the love of a woman or simply the love of being alive. Helen defends his decision to back out of a fight by saying that he abandoned it for love, but he makes a minute downward glance that lets us know she was the last thing on his mind. Sean Bean’s Odysseus is the voice of moral relativism, fighting a dumb war for the sake of going with the flow of powerful Agamemnon, while Agamemnon and Menelaos themselves are wasted by being portrayed as one-dimensional heavies.
Helen is beautiful and forgettable, not a compelling force but a prize, and the other female characters are poorly handled, although Achilles’ kidnapped beauty delivers one of the movie’s most poignant, if clunky, lines (“I thought you were a dumb brute. I could have forgiven a dumb brute.”). But what do you expect? Wolfgang Petersen is a boys’ director; his splendid submarine movie-to-end-all-submarine-movies, “Das Boot,” features an entirely male cast, and even if his first-rate thriller “In the Line of Fire” gave third billing to actress Rene Russo, that movie’s key relationship is between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich.
Stylistically “Troy” is virtually identical to “Gladiator,” with almost the same costumes, sets, and sometimes murky color palate. Battles are vast, athletic, and as choreographed as any ballet, with hardly anyone ever tripping or stopping to catch his breath. The giant CG armies look good in a cheesy CG kind of way, which is to say not all that good in the grand scheme of things. Treasure movies that still employ hundreds, if not thousands of extras and live animals, like “Gangs of New York” and Oliver Stone’s forthcoming “Alexander,” and remind us of the days of “Spartacus,” De Mille, and David Lean. The famous horse is done in long shot, which is about as realistic as you can do a thing like that, and there are several zooms that would make Sergio Leone proud, assuming their very presence wouldn’t leave him baffled.
Like “Gladiator,” everything is very, very glossy, no shot lasts as long as it ought, the film editor drank too much coffee, some of the effects are blurry, and there is entirely too much music. I like that the music playing over the gathering of the Greek armada is not thrilling but melancholy, but the temptation to over-score the fight scenes was apparently too great for composer James Horner. Think of how much more potent and thematically consistent the bloodshed would be if there were no music to tell us what to think. Instead of being a pulse-pounding distraction, the battles would have given us a chance to wonder over whether the gods should side with those who do the dying or those who do the killing, which is what I think the movie wants us to do anyway.
No version of the sack of Troy can be considered definitive. When I first read “The Iliad” I couldn’t help imagining an army of boys, from 12 to 20, setting off for Troy and bickering like children (“He took my girl away so I won’t fight for him! I’m taking my ball and going home unless he says he’s sorry!”). Another film could be made in which the Trojans come across as dorks and the Spartans just. “Troy” stays true to its cynic’s view of warfare and ambition all the way to the end, although there is some fudging in the last act, and the movie is clunky and uneven in places. But after watching ten hours of “violence solves everything” in “Lord of the Rings,” it’s sobering to see a movie that knows that Trojans and Spartans all burn the same, and that no matter whose cause you follow, you still taste the same to the crows and the earthworms.
Finished May 17, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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