When Ridley Scott’s Gladiator proved to be a big commercial success, and even got the Oscar for best movie in 2001, many a commentator noted that it had revived a genre dead in Hollywood for a quarter of a century. The ”swords and sandals” epic seemed to have peaked with Ben-Hur in 1959 and Spartacus in 1960, before blowing itself up with the colossal bomb of Cleopatra in 1963. The Fall of the Roman Empire limpingly brought up the rear in 1964.
Gladiator‘s triumph got others thinking. Soon Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (opening this month) was on the cards, and two directors, Baz Luhrmann and Oliver Stone, had announced projects based on the life of Alexander the Great. Okay, that’s ancient Greece, as opposed to Rome, and the Troy story is an older, largely mythological one, but the link is there.
Those two civilisations were inextricably linked by history — Rome both modelled itself on Greece and rather disparaged those clever people who had somehow never managed to get it together in terms of serious empire-building. Alexander the Great, a Macedonian, had to do it for them, and in the centuries since his death his empire had fallen apart. The imperial destiny, it seemed to the Romans, now devolved to them.
But that’s not what Hollywood was thinking. The differences between ancient Greece and the Roman empire may be negligible in the minds of forward-thinking producers, like the difference between fact and fiction. What they were thinking was not ”How do we reinvent the sword-and-sandals epic?” but ”How do we put a new spin on the action picture?”
Gladiator put a Roman spin on the action picture; Troy will use ancient Greece. Homer’s Iliad, on which Troy is nominally based, carries the intellectual clout of one of the founding texts of Western civilisation. Make no mistake, though: Troy will be an action picture. Which is fine — we want some sword play. Hopefully, though, it will fit into a compelling storyline.
The Iliad itself omits the two things most people remember about the legendary siege of Troy: Paris running away with someone else’s wife, Helen, which set the whole thing off; and the Trojan horse, which concluded it. In the Iliad, Achilles is its central figure — he is a prototype of the tragic hero of Greek drama, but also the last in a line of mythological demigods such as Hercules (from whom Alexander the Great believed he was descended).
At the beginning of the Iliad, the war has been going on for some time. Achilles has withdrawn from the fray because he’s peeved with his nominal commander Agamemnon after a dispute about a slave girl. While Achilles sulks in his tent, the Greeks lose battle after battle against the Trojans, who are led by Hector, prince of Troy and Paris’s brother.
After a particularly bad defeat for the Greeks (the ships get burned), Achilles receives a petition from Patroclus, his lifelong friend and lover. Patroclus knows Achilles won’t fight, so he begs Achilles to let him wear his famous golden armour and lead the Greeks back into battle. It’s their only chance. Sorry if I sound like I’m pitching a script here.
What happens is this: Patroclus goes into battle in Achilles’s armour, gets killed by Hector, who exults. Achilles, mad with grief, rejoins the battle and slays Hector. In revenge for the loss of Patroclus, Achilles drags Hector’s body behind his chariot, seven times around the walls of Troy. Or is it 12?
The point is that here, embedded in this really ancient text, is a riveting storyline. At its centre is a tragic love story between two men. But has Petersen, making Troy, been brave enough to develop it? There are already raging arguments on the Net, among people who have been to sneak previews and others, about the issue. Patroclus is referred to in the movie as Achilles’s ”cousin”. If there is any indication that the two are lovers, it must be slight. We’ll see when the movie opens here on May 14.
And it will be interesting to see what Luhrmann and Stone make of Alexander the Great, who took Achilles as his own great role model and hero (presuming him to be entirely real and the Iliad a factual record), going on to conquer the known world from Greece to India with a copy of Homer’s text under his pillow.
Alexander, too, had a lifelong boyfriend, Hephaestion, who died just before he did (both in their early 30s). He regarded Hephaestion as his Patroclus. The famous story is that when the dowager queen of Persia, whose son’s vast empire had just been shattered and subsumed by Alexander, first encountered him she made a terrible faux pas. She presumed Hephaestion was Alexander, because he was taller and more richly armoured. She prostrated herself before him. When she discovered her error, she practically committed suicide on the spot. ”No, matter, mother,” said Alexander coolly. ”He is Alexander too.”
It is not clear how Stone will present Alexander’s love life, though at least he has cute Jared Leto as Hephaestion. Stone made so much noise about trying to discover the truth under the lies and misinformation around the Kennedy assassination in JFK that, in his Alexander movie, he may try to follow the unambiguous historical record and give Alexander a boyfriend alongside the wife he barely got around to impregnating before he died.
Luhrmann’s Alexander project seems to be taking longer than Stone’s, which is due for release late this year. With the notoriously skittish Leonardo DiCaprio as his lead, Luhrmann could have bigger problems than Alexander’s sexuality.
In the meantime, we’ll see if Petersen and Pitt can make of Troy something that’s a little more than just an action picture with swords and sandals.