And Farrell’s hair is indeed a key part of the failure of Alexander. It has been bleached, to fit in with a tradition that gave Alexander the Great blond hair, but appallingly so — it doesn’t look natural for a split second.
And, presumably in line with historical records that say Alexander increasingly took on the fashions of the Persians, it gets longer and longer as the movie progresses, like Charlton Heston’s beard in The Ten Commandments. This is useful in keeping track of where we are in the plot, but it still looks awful.
Too many hairdos in Alexander, in fact, look as though they belong to 1970s rock stars rather than Macedonians of the fourth century BC. Generally, the hair is so bad that you can’t keep your eyes off it, which is rather distracting. And if you can’t get your main character’s hair right, what hope for the rest of the movie?
Still, Alexander has bigger problems than Farrell’s hair. Farrell, for instance. He is playing someone who by his late 20s had conquered most of the “known world” and was starting on the unknown. He led a huge army and all its hangers-on over the Hindu Kush mountains; he repeatedly defeated forces much larger than his own.
And yet there is absolutely nothing in Farrell’s performance (or in the clumsy script) to tell us how he did it, let alone why. The real Alexander must have had considerable charisma; Farrell transmits none. His rousing speeches to the troops are simply embarrassing, and all the windy rhetoric about “freedom” is anachronistic by several millennia. Most of the time Alexander comes across as a petulant child trying to whine his way to world dominance.
As for the “why”, Stone and his co-scriptwriters cannot convey the driving force of Alexander’s vision. They are far more interested in providing some domestic psychodrama to try to explain the enigmatic character of Alexander, but such moments are so Freud-for-dummies, and so ploddingly scripted, that they illuminate nothing.
To Stone’s credit, he has not heterosexualised Alexander like Hollywood did to Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy or Cole Porter in Night and Day — or, indeed, the Alexander played by Richard Burton in 1956. But Stone’s treatment of Alexander’s different loves is significant.
What happens between Alexander and his life-long companion and boyfriend, Hephaistion (Jared Leto), is mostly misty-eyed hugging. (And you’d never have thought, from the presentation of Hephaistion here, that he was a general almost Alexander’s equal. He seems like a drugged-out hippie surprised to find himself wandering about an army camp.)
By contrast with his touchy-feely relationship with Hephaistion, when Alexander picks a bride (Rosario Dawson) with a remarkable resemblance to his mother (Angelina Jolie), suddenly we have a fully fledged sex scene with sado-masochistic head-games thrown in.
This would simply be preposterous decoration if Stone had succeeded in constructing a real, sweeping epic. But he hasn’t. To get the story told, he has to leap over vast tracts of the Alexander story and use voice-over narration to fill in the gaps.
Anthony Hopkins pompously intones: “No tyrant ever gave back so much” — or lapses into cod-biblical locutions such as “And thus it came to pass… “. The result is that the movie’s form feels closer to that of a bad documentary with a bit of historical recreation than a story with its own inner momentum. For a tale of military conquest, Alexander has very little storytelling muscle.
The battles as staged by Stone (and only two are presented) are poor compared to what we’ve seen in, say, The Lord of the Rings, while the art direction is all too often reminiscent of Cecil B de Mille. The music, by Vangelis, is all showy banality. And it never shuts up.
Then, just to dispense with any last shred of believability, there are the accents. Farrell retains his Irish brogue, and soon enough his generals, including Hephaestion, all start sounding Irish too. His father, Philip (Val Kilmer) is plain American, but Jolie as his mother, Olympias, seems to be a native of Transylvania.
Perhaps that’s what all the psychodrama, pointing to Alexander’s childhood trauma of being caught between his warring parents, was trying to tell us — mixed marriages never work. Your child could turn out to be a tormented bisexual megalomaniac with very bad hair.