May 13, 2004

So let me get this straight… Troy is a movie about a selfish arrogant wartime superstar who is needed by the selfish arrogant ruler of most of the known world to conquer the kingdom of a selfish foolishly God-trusting King of Troy because his selfish arrogant horny son stole the silent arrogant kinda-good-looking wife of the selfish arrogant brother of the selfish arrogant ruler of most of the known world and then was not stopped in this effort by his faux-unselfish faux-unarrogant brother who sees all the mistakes being made but fails to have the balls to actually do anything about it… is that right?

It's shocking that this was how the adaptation of The Iliad and parts of The Odyssey went, given that screenwriter David Benioff's only other movie, adapted from his book, is about a selfish arrogant drug dealer who spends the 25 hours before he goes to jail for his crimes with his selfish arrogant stock broker friend, his selfish horny schoolteacher friend, his silent long suffering once-underage piece of ass girlfriend, and a selfish arrogant teenage girl who comes along for the ride.

I can't wait to see what this guy does with a big screen adaptation of Guys & Dolls!

There have been some great movies about wars that no one really wins. In fact, perhaps all of the greatest war movies have understood and emphasized the human loss that all wars create on a micro level and the necessary, if inhuman, emotional distance of leadership on the macro level. But Troy is not one of these movies.

Wolfgang Petersen has assembled all the critical elements to make a movie that would work… except the script. There are lots of small pains that one can point out along the way here. Petersen's central stylistic conceit, taking his camera from massive, sweeping landscapes of battle to really tight, intimate close-ups, is one of the problems. Somehow, the goal is left unclear to the audience and ends up lacking emotional punch on either the epic or intimate scale.

Brad Pitt is so muscled up here that when one shot comes within millimeters of the root of his penis, you almost expect that the shot will keep going and the penis will act like a Disney-style talking snake villain. "Achillessssssssss… you are magnificcccccccent… yessssss, I have been doing that boy in the next tent while you were assssssleeeeeeep… if you can just get that virgin in your tent, I will rewire her brain from the inside while she thinks you are having sex with herrrrrrrrrr…

Eric Bana, who has gotten every Hollywood job on his resume off his performance playing the violent, horrible and very charming Chopper, has become a brooding bore on screen, which is really a shame. If the Farrellys can't get Russell Crowe to bowl-cut for Moe, Bana should chase opportunity. If you saw this guy on Leno last week, you'd see just how funny and charming he can be. And when he finally does a comedy and "revives his career," you will know that he should have started right there and gone to drama later. As for his character here… he broods a lot and everyone tells him what to do, even though he is one of the planet's greatest warriors. Perhaps he is the embodiment of honorable duty, but he seems to show up to fill that roll and not to be a full, breathing character.

Orlando Bloom's Paris is, as he was called by two different women at two different screenings, a pussy. The passion of his character, who is willing to endanger his entire nation for the love of Helen, is as shallow as the Osmond family gene pool.

O'Toole…. Well, he's O'Toole. But you can forget any of this Oscar buzz. The movie will not carry that water. And even here, the core of what makes O'Toole a movie god, his magnificent sense of irony - whether in drama or comedy - is gone. What does King Priam think of the circumstance that he has found his country in? He doesn't. He just leaves it to the gods (who are otehrwise missing from the film) and kind of rolls along with the occasional grimace. Where is the vision of a great king… a king who understands the power of playing a defensive game with a great big wall? The scene with Achilles near the end of the film is good. But imagine how much better it could have been had we, as an audience, really felt that he was a strong man lowering himself and not just a great actor doing a scene.

All of the women in the movie are given short shrift. That may be a defining characteristic of the whole film. When I was on set, they showed us where Achilles would be, watching the hand-to-hand battle of the Greeks and Trojans, suffering a bit, as he sees all of the carnage which me might have been able to help stop. The scene exists, but the emotion isn't there. Somehow, in all the action, we have lost a sense of anyone exercising any choice that isn't set in stone.

It is hard to really get a feel for it in the movie, though you can, but the battlefield that the vast majority of the movie plays out on is about a mile and a half from the gates of Troy to the sea and about a quarter mile wide. Therein lies the movie that Troy could have been. Like the field of Paths of Glory or the urban warfare in the second half of Full Metal Jacket or the camp of Bridge Over the River Kwai or Normandy Beach in Saving Private Ryan or even the camp in Stalag 17… the intimate is more than enough to make a movie work with the agony of war in the hearts of men. When Achilles makes a commitment to a 10 day cease fire by the Greeks, what does that mean to an army of tens of thousands stuck on a beach? We never know because the movie is too busy burning dramatic pyres to bring the audience into the reality of the moment.

So far, with Van Helsing and Troy, the very strong theme of the summer seems to be "More is Less." No one has delivered on that premise yet - but The Terminal, Harry Potter (with a darker tone via Cuaron), The Village and The Bourne Supremacy seem poised to take advantage of less.

E ME: Will you march into Trojan theaters this weekend?