One Last Batch Of Mostly Positive ALEXANDER Reviews!! Including Ghostboy And Capone!!

Howdy folks,

I know you've had a handful of mixed to negative Alexander reviews these past few days, but in case you were looking for a somewhat more in-depth look...well, you've found it (at least until critics more notable than myself dig into it in a few days). I'm sure a lot of the previous reviewers didn't feel like wasting their breath on the film, but this is Oliver Stone we're talking about - could he REALLY have bombed that badly? And if he did, what exactly went wrong? The answer to the first question, at least, is - well, here's the review....

ALEXANDER

Amongst the viewers who will see Alexander, there will be some who choose to view it because they like good old fashioned sword and sandal epics, and then there will be those who go simply because it is directed by Oliver Stone. I'm not sure if either audience denomination will walk away satisfied, but at least the latter will be able to recognize the film's attributes for what they are. These attributes may be the very elements of the film that make the other half of the theater wish they'd stayed home and rented Troy instead. Me, I'm an Oliver Stone fan, and I'm also the kind of filmgoer who will appreciate a misfire from a great filmmaker more than a perfectly competent effort from a by-the-numbers director. Alexander is not one of his Stone's best films; you may not even think it's one of his good films; but it's definitely one of his films.

This is the life story of the man who conquered most of the known world in the third century BC and paved the way for the Roman Empire. Stone's retrospective is meant to demythicize Alexander: he even opens the film with an obvious nod to Citizen Kane, as a dying breath is heard and a limp hand falls into frame, releasing a red signet ring (in place of the famous snowglobe) that falls in slow motion to the floor. Jumping forward a number of years to Egypt, we find an aged Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) narrating the story of Alexander while his faithful scribe puts his words down on paper. Guided by his narration, we traverse back to Macedonia (a series of rather annoying titles at the bottom of the screen let us know, all too frequently, where we are and what year it is), where the young boy Alexander is raised by his mother Olympia (Angelina Jolie), taught by Aristotle (Christopher Plummer) and chastened by his father Phillip (Val Kilmer), the king of Macedonia and would-be conqueror of Persia. The one legend about Alexander that everyone knows occurs with satisfactory bombast: as a boy, he tamed the wild horse Bucephalus, and in the film it is a scene of great personal triumph, in which he gains the respect of his hard-loving father.

Stone spends a good deal of time on Alexander's upbringing, particularly regarding his relationship with his Dionysus-worshipping mother. Olympia is not on good terms with King Phillip, and is afraid that her son will not be named as successor to the throne. Jolie, chomping up the scenery with a vampiric accent and eyes afire, seems to be playing the ancient, lusty antecedent of Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate, maneuvering her son into a position of power and being so sexy in the process that it's no wonder Alexander grows up with some Oedipal issues with her. Phillip, meanwhile, takes Alexander into ancient catacombs lined with paintings of the heroes of old in their most terrible moments: Hercules murdering his children, Prometheus being eaten by the vulture, Medea stabbing her babies in defiance of Jason. These cave murals will appear many times throughout the film, in a blatantly prophetic sense.

The film then abruptly leaps forward again; Phillip is dead, and Alexander, now fully grown and played by Colin Farrell, is leading the Macedonian armies against the Persian hordes. How did this happen, exactly? Ptolemy provides a narrative hinge so thrifty that you just have to accept the progression in the little time you have before the battle begins and the score (by eighties mainstay Vangelis) swells heroically and Alexander triumphs against great odds. We've seen our fair share of epic historical battles in the past few years, and while this one is fairly exciting, it's nothing terribly new. I don't think Stone is all that interested in it, either. He chooses some interesting angles, and films the action with suitable aplomb, but one senses that his heart and mind are elsewhere.

He does get one great touch in before the action. It's been a great cliche in drama, ever since Shakespeare wrote Henry V, that before every major battle, the commander has to give a rousing speech that will inspire his troops and hopefully the audience as well. That latter aspect is harder to do these days, and rather than succumb to cliche, Stone actually wanders away from Alexander's speech just as he's hitting his stride; his camera soars across the battlefield until it finds the Persian commander, doing exactly the same thing in his native tongue. It's a nice subversion of the expected. And then the fighting begins.

This triumph, which puts Alexander on the throne in Babylon, is the first of many in the eight years he spent conquering the East, establishing cities in his name wherever he went and extending the Kingdom of Macedonia so far beyond its own shores that it really ceased to be Macedonia at all. At the end of it all, he died, reportedly of high fever. But this is an Oliver Stone film, and according to him, no great and controversial leader ever dies simply of high fever. There are many factions that rise up against him from his own ranks, and by the time he leads his weary men towards India, mutiny and dissent is beginning to rum rampant. Many resent Alexander's adoption of Asian culture and his taking a Babylonian dancer, Roxane (Rosario Dawson) as his bride - his mother certainly frowns upon that, which gives Alexander some degree of satisfaction. An early assassination attempt fails; eventually, we learn that Phillip himself was murdered, purportedly (but not likely) by Easterners, and it seems that Alexander is destined to join him in the ranks of those whose great vision met their downfall at the hands of men with smaller minds.

In writing this summary of the film and recounting the events in my memory, I find myself getting caught up in and thrilled by the story more than I did when I actually was watching the film. Memory has an interesting process of distilling the ineffective and useless, and if I think back more carefully, I recall a film that lurches about and rarely communicates with precision. I don't expect subtlety from Stone, by any means, but he's usually more effective in combining his rambling hyperkinetics into a whole that's at least the equal of the sum of its parts. There are good parts here, and even more good intentions, but it isn't until the last act that Stone's vision catches up with his style and the film becomes his own. This occurs at a pivotal moment in the film's second major battle scene, which takes place in India and pits the Macedonians against an army of charging elephants. Again, it's something we've seen before (well, sort of - do the mythological elephants in The Return Of The King count?) but halfway through the conflict Stone radically alters the scene's color palette, sound design and system of montage, turning the battle into a breathtaking hallucinatory pink swirl, reminiscent of the nightmarish imagery he employed so well in Natural Born Killers. From this point on, the film remains firmly within its director's grasp, and it works. Unfortunately, it only has about forty minutes left.

Stone wants to uncover the man behind the legend with this film, take him down to a personal level, and perhaps part of the problem is that the legend is never clear. I mentioned the Citizen Kane reference at the beginning of the film; you will recall that in, in that film, Kane's death was followed by a newsreel recounting his entire life as the public knew it. This served as a template which the rest of the film could play against, explore and counter. I think Stone would have done well to include a similar device; it would have saved valuable time spent on exposition later on, and allowed Stone to develop Alexander's character more fully. His vision of the man is so unclear: Alexander's drive to conquer and reign is rooted in his conflict with his parents, but what is that conflict, exactly? Does he want to impress his father vicariously? Avenge him? Impress his mother? Wriggle out from under her influence? All of the above, probably, but that's just a guess.

In Farrell, this confluence of conflicts at least seems understandable; he brings Alexander to a human level far more effectively than the script does; what we understand about the character is largely due to his performance. And it's of course worth noting that this is the second film he's been in this year that has handled issues of sexuality in a refreshingly progressive sense: like his character in A Home At The End Of The World, Alexander does not differentiate between genders as objects of lust and love. It's stated from the very beginning that the love of his life is his boyhood friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto); this is presented not with fanfare or an eye for controversy but simply as fact; as it should be. Alexander is not a preening queen, but simply a man who loves another person who happens to be a man. It's true that their physical love, while often referred to, is never shown, but this is at least a step in a good direction. And while Roxane, whom Alexander marries so that he can have an heir, does get to be the subject of the film's one sex scene, it's Hephaistion who gets the tearful deathbed farewell scene.

Leto does most of his acting with his glassy eyes, but he does well when he needs to; Dawson, on the other hand, exists in the film purely as an object of lust (for Alexander and the audience, and I'm not exactly complaining here) and doesn't get much of a chance to impress with anything other than her supremely good looks. The rest of the cast fares more or less the same. Hopkins has the poor luck of delivering a good performance in a series of useless scenes. Jolie alternates between being seductively scary and so over the top that she might as well be playing one of the Greek gods in an old Harryhausen film; she's fun to watch, and I guess her presence works, but maybe she should have toned her hair down a bit. Other notable names like Brian Blessed, Plummer and Jonathan Rhys Meyers come and go in roles no more than cameos. Kilmer's role is only slightly greater than those, but he leaves perhaps the greatest impact; he gives Phillip a great blustery pathos, and in just a few scenes turns him into a real person, rather than a stereotypical gruff father figure; he's the precursor to his son's vision and passion, but not his drive.

Stone's own relationship with his parents was one of great tumult, and I imagine that worked its way into the movie as much as his political obsessions. Perhaps this would have worked better as a smaller, more intimate film; but then, how do you make an intimate film about a man who did the things Alexander did? Stone never quite manages to merge the epic and the intimate, and the result is an unwieldy bit of history that calls to mind another unsuccessful-yet-fascinating work from another great filmmaker: Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York. Like Scorsese and his history with that film, Stone has been wanting to make an Alexander film since the beginning of his career, and I think maybe the decades of preparation may have left him simply incapable of making a clear and concise picture (Scorsese, luckily, had the benefit of an actor of the magnitude of Daniel Day Lewis and a more immediate sense of historical relevance to buoy his equally sagging epic). It's not necessarily boring, but it only rarely springs to life. Those moments won't be enough for the majority of audiences, but admirers of Oliver Stone will eat them up. And because it is, after all, an Oliver Stone film, they will find the parts which are not successful just as fascinating, for an entirely different reason. One never wants to see a great filmmaker be unsuccessful in their efforts, but when they are, the results are worth watching just as much as their masterpieces. Alexander is no masterpiece, and I can only recommend it with reservations; but I know I'll remember it, and years from now, it'll probably occupy a space on my shelf next to Stone's other, better films.

That's it for now. I have a few looks at some vaguely similar films, dealing with assassination and political unrest, in the works...stay tuned for those. If you like reading long reviews, that is.

Until then, thanks for reading, and I'm outta here...

Ghostboy

Excellent review. And let’s wrap it up today with our man in Chicago, Capone.

Hey everyone.

Capone here with what will hopefully be the final word on this film (at least on this site).

At about the half-way point in the three-hour epic ALEXANDER, I finally realized what director-cowriter Oliver Stone was trying to do with this birth-to-death telling of the life of one of the greatest military leaders of all time. With his unusually simplistic directing style, bloated cast, and dense, sometimes indecipherable dialogue, Stone is trying to create a new Shakespeare play. The pieces are all there. The focus is on a great leader with mother and father issues. The gods (or at least the characters’ belief in the gods) drives much of the action. There is blood, treachery, warfare, rousing pre-battle speeches, male and female lover interests for our hero, and even a Greek chorus in the form of Anthony Hopkins as an old-age version one of Alexander’s closest friends Ptolemy, who serves as our storyteller as he relays the King of Macedonia’s life story to a scribe. Stone has set himself an formidable task, and he fails to create a decent movie on almost every level.

For all the jokes levelled at Stone’s expense over the years and all those who claim to despise his filmmaking, I’ll admit flat out that I’m a fan of his work. Even as I sit through his weaker efforts, I’m thankful that he is out there making movies. He is so passionate about his subjects and so insistent that his vision remain undisturbed by any outsiders that it sometimes makes his films confusing and visually layered to the point of being unwatchable. Still, when I watch films like SALVADOR, PLATOON, JFK, BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, NIXON, NATURAL BORN KILLERS, and to a lesser degree ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, I’m grateful that there still are a few risk takers left behind the camera that genuinely care about the films they’re making. I’d put Spike Lee and Lars von Trier in this category to. They don’t so much make a movie as they do give birth to it, and often it’s painful for both the filmmaker and the audience. But sometimes, the results are simply miraculous.

In some ways, ALEXANDER is a failure on a catastrophic scale. Almost nothing about it works. The performances all across-the-board over the top. Every line is delivered AT FULL VOLUME!!! Arms are sweeping as much speechifying is done; eyes are fiery; spit flies whenever someone opens their mouth to talk. I felt like I needed ear plugs, and the film wasn’t that loud. I’m tempted to say that Colin Farrell is miscast as Alexander, but I have a feeling he did as good a job as Oliver Stone allowed him to. Some of the film’s greatest failure come when Alexander has to deliver words of encouragement and valor to his great army. I just wasn’t feeling it the way I do when I watch Lawrence Olivier or even Kenneth Branagh play HENRY V.

Faring slightly better are Val Kilmer and Angelia Jolie as Alexander’s warring parents Philip and Olympia. Jolie has never looked more beautiful on screen, but rather than allowing her to act menacing, Stone simply covers her with snakes (literally) everytime we see her to “subtly” convey her slithery ways. Neither actor is really in the film for more than 15 minutes or so, but their characters’ influence on Alexander is substantial, even from beyond the grave. Also on hand to look pretty and flirt with Alexander is Jared Leto as his lifetime companion Hephaestion. After a while, the audience I saw this film with laughed everytime Leto came on screen, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s no secret that Alexander swung both ways in the bedroom. It may even be said that her preferred men to women, which is clear from the number of hunky men he surrounded himself with at all times. But Leto adds nothing to the proceedings. He does not provide much counsel to Alexander. They don’t talk about personal issue. They seem only to hug a lot and say how much they love each other. The relationship, which I’m sure in real life was a substantial one, amounts to nothing but wasted screen time for Leto. And then there’s the lovely Rosario Dawson as Alexander’s only bride Roxane, who was effectively captured along with the rest of her city in one of Alexander’s conquests of Asian lands. Her introduction to the story is pretty exciting (complete with a lengthy nude scene), but after that she to spends most of the time in the background.

The film’s strongest moments are its battle scenes. They are intensely bloody, loud, blurred, shocking events that struck me as wholly believable. But even they are marred by Stone’s direction because I could not figure out who was fighting who from what direction. And while I’m sure on some level that this may be an accurate portrait of war at the time, it left me confused as to who was winning these violent affairs. But Stone’s directing flaws go much deeper than simply kicking up too much dust during war scenes. Often, during crucial scenes, his camera drifts away from the action to an eagle or hawk in the sky or some other totally nonessential element of the story. When he pulled this sort of crap in THE DOORS, I knew what he was doing. Here, I’ve got no clue what he’s trying to convey. But perhaps the most disappointing thing about ALEXANDER is that it feels like Stone isn’t trying or he’s somehow being hindered from doing his best work. You see, I like the Oliver Stone that tries too hard to impress us, the one that uses 17 different types of film stock and edits like he’s shoving his footage into a food processor. With ALEXANDER, the camera is mostly static, the editing ordinary. The entire film feels clumsy and awkward. What happened to my sure-footed maverick I grew up admiring? Is it fair to come down so hard on a man because of just one bad movie? With most filmmakers, I’d say no. But here the failure is so utterly complete. There’s something wrong with every scene in this movie. Period. This film is one that goes in that special time capsule of colossal miscalculations by great filmmakers. Right next to Costner’s THE POSTMAN, Cimino’s HEAVEN’S GATE, and so on. And by the time we get to the battle scene in India involving dozens of charging elephants trampling over Alexander’s soldiers (by far the greatest sequence in the film), the damage has been done. And at the end of this part of the film, the sky turns pink, and I was quickly snapped back into the living, breathing agony that is ALEXANDER.

Capone

Great batch of reviews, guys. Thanks to all of you for your points of view, and I have a feeling this one’s going to remain divisive once it’s released. I hope to be taking a look at it myself in the next few.

"Moriarty" out.