Two historical epics open this week, and both offer sterling entertainment, though in rather different ways.
Taiwan-born director Ang Lee has been widely acclaimed for movies such as The Wedding Banquet (1993) and an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1995). The Ice Storm (1997) was less warmly comic than either of those movies, but it was still about love and family. So the fact that his latest release is an American Civil War drama, Ride with the Devil, is somewhat unexpected.
But Lee carries it off without the merest hint that he hasn’t been directing historical epics for ages already. Yet it is an epic that tends again and again toward the intimate, taking us away from the long-shot sweep of history and into the close-ups of individuals and their stories.
Every good epic must have a preamble, a bit of text on screen to set the scene, to serve notice that we’re starting with historical fact, or at least painting on a broad historical canvas. Ride with the Devil is set in Missouri, where the war is being fought guerrilla-style, between – as the preamble has it – neighbours rather than armies. Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) is a young Southerner who joins a band of “bushwhackers” harassing the Union forces.
Lee has plenty of shooting and galloping, but the fighting is ragged and haphazard, a matter of ambushes and burning homesteads. There is no grandeur or glory to be had here, and Jake is more than a little lost in the turmoil, though he maintains his basic decency, which others lose. The big issues of the war – slavery, secession – are barely mentioned; more pressing are the personal vendettas, the personal losses, and the forming of new, personal bonds that don’t entirely fit with the usual paradigms of Southern society.
In the vendettas category is the renegade Pitt Mackeson (a girlishly beautiful Jonathan Rhys Meyers); in the new bonds category Jakob finds himself linked with the former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright, wonderfully contained), ironically fighting for the slave-owners, and the young widow Sue Lee (singer Jewel, very self-possessed). These intimate
dramas, taking place in the relatively quiet patches between the shooting and galloping, are the film’s real subject, and Lee elicits performances of great sensitivity from his cast.
Among the film’s other strengths are Lee’s marvellous feel for landscape – for water, snow, foliage – and scriptwriter James Schamus’s elegant play with the heightened, courtly quality of polite Southern speech, an ironic echo of the aristocratic lifestyle these ragtag bands are trying to defend. In some ways, and for all its meticulous attention to a turbulent historical era, Ride with the Devil seems like an epic that doesn’t really want to be an epic.
The same cannot be said of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Here is a movie that is determinedly and triumphantly epic in every way (though it manages to keep its length down to a mere 155 minutes). It has pitched battles on the barbarian frontier and in the arena; it has hand-to-hand combat and political intrigue; it has a computer-enhanced Colosseum to make one gasp. It even has tigers. Three or four decades since Hollywood’s last excursion to ancient Rome, Scott has made a swords-and-sandals epic that delivers as many thrills as a Die Hard or an End of Days.
Gladiator starts at much the same point as the 1964 Fall of the Roman Empire, quickly abandoning all but the vaguest outlines of historical fact – I won’t go into detail, or we’ll be here all day. Wise old emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) is succeeded in shady circumstances by his profligate, decadent son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who promptly tries to get rid of his late father’s most trusted and successful general, Maximus (Russell Crowe, somewhat butched up since his role in The Insider). Maximus ends up fighting for his life as a gladiator in the circus after which he appears to be named.
As one might expect from the man who made Blade Runner, Gladiator looks magnificent. This is big-screen spectacle to rival the gory exhibitions of the Roman circus in all their wasteful extravagance (though one does worry about the tigers). The battles are breathtaking; the recreation of ancient Rome is amazing. There is no love interest to hold up the action, though a little sex would have gone a long way. The whole is hugely enjoyable, in the way that only a movie existing purely in the realm of myth rather than reality could be.
The characters are no more complex than they need to be. They are not much more than cartoons – likeable rogue Proximo (Oliver Reed, who died during filming and had to be computer-enhanced, like the sets); Derek Jacobi, bringing some I, Claudius magic to the senator Gracchus; Djimon Hounsou as Juba, Maximus’s faithful black buddy and fellow gladiator; vengeful, honorable, rather stolid Maximus himself. Perhaps most divertingly, at least for any connoisseur of evil Roman emperors since Peter Ustinov played Nero, there is wicked Commodus, whose eyes seem perpetually drowned in pools of shadow or, when visible, rimmed with conjunctivital pink. This is a sure sign that he is unstable.