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Achilles! Heel!
Troy presents a true Pyrrhic victory
by Lee Gardner
Troy’s credits unfurl across the mists of time as eerie, ethnically ambiguous females wail—two of the most egregious cliches in post-Gladiator filmmaking. An onscreen legend attempts to fill in the basics of Grecian history circa 3,200 years ago and a ponderous voice-over attempts to...we’re not sure exactly what that was all about, actually. As the action begins, Greek king Agamemnon (Brian Cox) and his soldiers face off with the Thessalonian army, but the scene has all the drama and pageantry of two family reunions squabbling over a barbecue grill in a lakeside park. And then, all of a sudden, there’s Brad Pitt, sexy movie star, bare-ass naked among the sweat-slicked remains of a threesome. As Greek warrior Achilles, he’s burnished and buff and imperious, treating everyone around him—including Agamemnon—like autograph seekers. He rejoins the soldiers, throws off his sulk, and streaks toward the hulking Thessalonian champion like a bronze-clad cruise missile and, like that, war’s over. And, like that, director Wolfgang Petersen’s summer-Cineplex adaptation of one of the oldest stories in the world is off on its shaky way.
The fall of Troy was a generations-old legend when Homer first sang his Iliad some 2,700 years ago, but dip into The Iliad now and Agamemnon’s ego, Achilles’ rage, Trojan prince Hector’s decency, and the gruesome violence that plays out at the hands of those characters remains vivid. Petersen is an action director (Das Boot, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm), not a literary type, and accordingly he and screenwriter David Beninoff (25th Hour) take this material and run with it, affording it no more reverence than they would if adapting Tom Clancy. Although they manage to get around some of the problems inherent in the ancient tale—the Trojan War of Troy lasts about three weeks, not 10 years—they can’t get around some of the foibles inherent to contemporary Hollywood filmmaking.
For example, Orlando Bloom is well-cast as Paris, the callow young Trojan prince who charms away the beautiful young wife of Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), Agamemnon’s brother, but Diane Kruger, the newcomer who plays Helen, looks more like the princess of the Galleria than the Face That Launched a Thousand Ships. When Hector (Eric Bana, making up for Hulk) realizes what his younger brother has done and that all-out war with the Greeks will follow, the scene plays like a half-speed dress rehearsal, with Bana delivering a grumpy shove instead of a brotherly beatdown. And Pitt, charismatic as a sheer specimen, is also convincing as a brooding hand-to-hand-combat dynamo, at least until he opens his mouth to deliver lines like “Immortality is yours—take it!”
The Greek armies swarm the beaches of Ilium, putting Petersen firmly on his chosen ground, but even the battle scenes prove a hit-or-miss affair. Little computer-generated mists of arterial spray rising from the massive battles are a memorable innovation, but the clashes only really excite when the marquee players take the field. Since Achilles sits out much of the fighting in a sulk after Agamemnon snatches from him royal Trojan captive/love interest Briseis (Rose Byrne, another underwhelming newcomer), that means a lot of massed spears and shields shoving this way and that to little end. Achilles finally faces Hector in a memorable showdown, but the Greeks soon roll out the Trojan Horse, and Petersen rushes through his endgame, compulsively tidying up loose ends in over-the-top big-budget actioner style.
In short, Troy embodies the glib pomp of neo sword-and-sandalry—a bit of epic grandeur, a little tepid romance, a lot of carnage, a host of competing inexplicable accents, and a shortage of new ideas. But at the same time, Petersen deploys a formidable supporting cast of appealing veterans, including Cox, Gleeson, Sean Bean as a sly Odysseus, Julie Christie in a glorified cameo as Achilles’ divine mother, and Peter O’Toole as sage Trojan ruler Priam. When O’Toole’s elderly king peers over a balcony in horror as his city goes up in flames and his people scream, it makes up for a lot of lame dialogue. But there is definitely something for contemporary audiences in a film that takes time to examine the dilemmas of two foes locked in an unwisely joined war that will cost them much more than they bargained for—on one side, the loss of life and home and autonomy, on the other the loss of soul.
Pitt’s Achilles fights so that history will remember his name, and the star’s character is treated with suitable deference, even lent a certain complexity. But it’s the quiet moments Petersen steals with the Trojans that resonate: Bana’s Hector cradling his son or briefing his wife Andromache (Saffron Burrows) on what to do if he falls, since the city will soon follow; Bloom’s Paris struggling with his cowardice and the bloodshed he sowed with his wild oats. The Greeks win, of course, but it doesn’t seem like a victory. And that’s not very Hollywood at all.
May 13, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 20
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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