Brad Pitt, Tamer of Horses

Went to see Wolfgang Petersen's "inspired by the Iliad" adventure...and now I'm wishing I put off watching this film a little longer---say, until Charon the Boatman carries me over the black waters of the Styx. The Simpsons' 8-minute rendition of the Odyssey was a truer homage to the blind epic poet.

Where to begin? Roeper, of Ebert & Roeper fame, gave the film a thumb's up. For the record, he has now given the old thumb's up to The Passion, F9/11, and Troy, while giving a thumb's down to The Fellowship of the Ring because he felt it left too many problems unresolved. This is what passes for a replacement for Gene Siskel?

There are two good things to be said for Troy. One of them is that the costume design, scenery, and cinematography are quite good. The other is that Eric Bana and Peter O'Toole give solid if not breathtaking performances, as Hector and Priam, respectively.

On the other hand, the film does violence to the story of the Iliad, and therefore does violence to the whole corpus of classical Greek literature. The entire Trojan War---which in the legend lasted through ten blood-soaked years, the basis of Simone Weil's notion that modern industrial war could be read allegorically into the poem---seems to take place in the film over two weeks, perhaps three at the most. At once, the sense of waste and desolation that Homer so movingly conveyed is destroyed. The desperation experienced by both sides, their urgency in the war's final climactic stages, the doom hanging over Hector and Achilles that is heightened by the slow passage of time---all of them are lost. Doom indeed, i.e. the inexorable fate of which the combatants are all aware and against which they tragically strive, is palpably missing from the film, a "present absence," to borrow a phrase from Derrida. Fate is missing because the gods are missing; instead of inhabiting a pagan milieu in which the will of the gods slowly pushes men towards their ultimate downfall, Petersen has created a world utterly bereft of divinity, a kind of pre-historic deism. The effect of his decision to remove all the episodes of divine intervention---presumably to enhance the film's "realism" (which is exceedingly odd considering the demi-godlike abilities of Achilles)---has the immediate effect of opening up a diverse modal space for the film's characters to inhabit; thus the message conveyed by Odysseus's speech at the film's end is one of "it didn't have to happen this way." But in the real Iliad, Homer's Iliad, the tragedy and greatness of the epic lie precisely in the fact that it did have to happen, in the way that it happened.

There are other, more specific departures from Homer's tale, which were similarly misguided and injurious to the poem. I feel it a duty to reveal all of them, even if it spoils certain plot points for those who haven't seen it yet, because A) those who have already read the Iliad already know the story, B) those who haven't need not labor under any misconceptions. In the film, Hector kills Menelaus after Paris crawls back to his brother's feet when Menelaus defeats Paris in their duel. In the poem, Paris is whisked to safety by Aphrodite (rather than fleeing out of cowardice), Menelaus and Hector never fight, and Menelaus survives the war, indeed appearing in a book in the Odyssey. In the film, Agamemnon and Menelaus covertly decide that they will attack Troy after promising that the duel between Menelaus and Paris will decide the conflict. In the poem, there is no reason to believe that Agamemnon will not abide by the outcome of the duel, and indeed the point is that so many lives would have been spared but for Aphrodite's intervention---while at the same time, it was never the fate of Paris and Menelaus to pre-empt the war.

In the film, Agamemnon is killed by Achilles' captive/consort, Briseus. Although the poem only extends to the death of Hector, Agamemnon survives the war according to the mythological tradition, only to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra upon returning home, an act of revenge for his slaying of their daughter Iphigenia (an event that the film leaves out, even though it adds a completely novel prequel sequence involving a war in Thessaly). Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon, by the way, is the basis for Aeschylus's Oresteia, not only the second greatest Greek tragedy sequence of all time (only Sophocles' Theban trilogy is greater), but also the first written and the indirect inspiration of all the tragedies that succeeded it---so in a sense, the film is a negation of the whole tragic tradition in Western literature.

In the film, Patroclus surreptitiously takes Achilles' weapons and armor. After Hector kills him, he leaves the body and armor alone so that the Greeks can take it back. In the poem, Achilles permits Patroclus to don his armor and fight on his behalf; when Patroclus dies, Hector in an act pregnant with all sorts of symbolism, takes Achilles' armor and claims it as his own. Pregnant with what, you say? Hector is simultaneously taunting the Greeks and claiming a victory over Achilles, unaware that the armor itself marks him out for death; Patroclus wears it, and he is killed by Hector. Hector wears it, and he is killed by Achilles, who thus metaphorically kills himself, and does indeed confirm the inevitability of his death at Troy. Thus, Achilles' rage at Hector, now wearing the armor of Achilles, is rage partly against himself: it was Achilles who put Patroclus in danger, and he shares responsibility for Patroclus's death. So Achilles' slaying of Hector is revenge partly against himself. [Funny, isn't it, how Homer is better at creating tragic ironies than Wolfgang Petersen?--ed.]

In the film, Helen, Andromache, her and Hector's son, and also, it seems, Paris, escape with the surviving Trojans led by Aeneas (although if Paris makes it out, he and not Aeneas would be their leader). In the mythology, Helen is taken back to Sparta, Andromache is made a slave, her son is thrown off of a parapet, and Paris dies with the rest of the Trojan royal family. Thus the film flirts with negating the plot of the Aeneid, the single greatest work of Roman literature, and the inspiration of Dante's Divine Comedy.

I think you can see where this is going. Troy the movie is a bitch-slap to the source material of Western civilization. Lots of bad movies have been made since Edison invented the medium, but I can't think of another that could make that claim.

Oh, and it's also a pretty stale movie judged apart from its sacking of the myth of Troy. With the exceptions of Bana and O'Toole noted above, the characters are consistently flat and one-dimensional. Agamemnon is portrayed as a pompous buffoon, Menelaus is a blustering saber-rattler, Andromache is constantly in tears, Helen is an emotional cipher, Odysseus---who conducts the bloody midnight raids with (the absent) Diomedes in the poem---is a basic good guy serving under an evil king, etc. The one exception to this rule is Achilles---who is supposed to be the only one-dimensional figure in the epic, an exceedingly skilled and unsympathetic killer. Instead, Pitt's Achilles is a mirror image of Hector---fighting for glory rather than defense of homeland, yes, but still conflicted, philosophically aware, and actually capable of love. (And oh yeah, it's with a woman. While the only way to understand Achilles' reason for finally agreeing to fight for Agamemnon in the poem is that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, in the film Achilles and Patroclus are cousins, and Achilles is completely heterosexual.)

Here's the shorter review. Spare yourself the cost of a ticket or rental fee. Go read the Iliad.