THE TEASER showed promise of a stately movie about the “greatest hero of them all,” who “was real.” What we got was a three-hour exposition of how Alexander “the Great” was a very flawed god-king whose intense pride and passion for flesh put into question his efficiency as a ruler so often that it was a wonder his empire didn’t crumble earlier then when it did. Let’s face it: Alexander wasn’t the kind of portrayal everybody expected, especially not from Oliver Stone.
Stone, director of the critically acclaimed Born on the Fourth of July, delivered just a confusing interpretation of a complex storyline. Perhaps the hero’s life and exploits were too great to compress into a movie. Or perhaps, Stone just chose to highlight the wrong points.
Alexander (Colin Farrell), throughout the first third of the movie, is shown reared by his mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie), with a thirst for power and spite toward his father, the one-eyed King Philip of Macedonia (Val Kilmer). While he grows up, one of the flaws that would later contribute to his ill reputation as a ruler (and the failure of the movie as a whole, due to overemphasis) is revealed: narrator Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) tells the audience Alexander would remain unbeaten in wrestling except “between Hephaistion’s thighs”.
A conqueror conquered by his own demons
Throughout his journeys to conquer the known world and beyond, Alexander is followed by his most trusted league of men. Among them is Hephaistion, (Jared Leto), Alexander’s confidant and lover. His affair with Hephaistion adds greatly to his being emotional and indecisive. The latter, in turn, is a consenting adviser who seems to care more about being with his king to the end than peeling off some of Alexander’s pride.
Stone may have wanted to portray the legend as wholly as possible, and his attempt to explore the bisexual face of the hero is admirable. It was something less emphasized if not absent between Achilles and Patroclus in the earlier Troy.
But the homosexual tendencies of the scenes are far from the regally intimate relationship we would expect between ancient noblemen. Although it is said that it was a practice among the ancients to take fellow men or boys as lovers, Leto’s character and the rest of Alexander’s eye candies in the movie look more like drag queens—thick eyeliners and all—rather than dignified men with a different orientation.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s generals, whose volatile bickering among each other more than piles on the conundrum, agree that maybe Alexander is anxious to have an heir. Rosario Dawson plays Roxane, an Asian belly dancer Alexander takes as his wife. But aside from the naked, violent romp-turned-erotic play in bed with Farrell, Dawson has little else to do in the rest of the movie, as it is told she didn’t bear him a son for the next three years of the expanding empire. Alexander takes all his demons to the battlefield in the hope of crushing them out of him, not minding the welfare of his older soldiers, until he is finally humbled in the forests of India.
Stretched taut
Not only was the movie itself too stretched at 175 minutes. The plot, in trying to cover every tiny detail of Alexander’s life, is stretched too thin to be substantial in any single part.
Not even Academy winner Hopkins, as the narrator, could save the movie. His narration not only disrupted the flow of the story, for it also seemed like everything else that was not shown had to be explained, as if to compensate. The script had history as a fast-paced background to Alexander’s more mundane concerns and cravings. Aside from the all-important battle against the Persian king Darius, not much else could be gleaned from the screenplay, Ptolemy supplying the details.
Convincing performances, at least, were given by Jolie and Kilmer. Dawson, for all her naked glory, was at the most amusing for playing a barbarian-queen with a thick caveman accent that sounded uncannily like Hollywood trying desperately to make for an inter-racial discourse.
One undeniably major flaw was Farrell himself in the title role. His appeal has little to do with royalty and dictatorship. The charming, boy-next-door aura stuck with him, however passionately he played the part. His portrayal brought a subconscious form of weakness to the supposedly powerful conqueror, bringing his all-mighty standing down a notch.
All in all, Alexander bored and entertained in parts. The movie, however, could have done better with a major overhaul. A. N. C. Alina
