ALEXANDER
Hey Praxiteles, Redux: Alexander, directed and co-written by Oliver Stone.
Like death and taxes, the historical epic has ever been with us. One of my guiltier pleasures is the "sword and sandal" film of the Fifties and Sixties. The majority of these loopy turkeys were produced by Italy's Cinecitta Studio. Tales of gore from days of yore like Hercules Unchained (1959 traced the adventures of some mythic muscleman and his stalwart buddies in their quest for the Golden Fleece, the Medusa's Head, the Minotaur's tail, whatever.
The mise-en-scene of a typical sword-and-sandal cheapie was delightfully tatty. Acting was execrable -- the star often a Hollywood has-been or wannabee (Rory Calhoun, Steve Reeves, Gordon Scott). Cluunky lip-synched dialogue was abundant with howlers like "Hey, Praxiteles, we're goin' down tidda quarry. Ya wanna come wit' us?" Standard wardrobe consisted of skimpy loincloths, antique Birkenstocks, and oiled pecs. Although the hero was finally rewarded for his labors with the hand of a big-haired royal bimbette, it was evident he'd gladly exchange wedlock for another cruise with his boys.
At a cost of 140 million shekels, Oliver Stone's Alexander has reinvented the "Hey, Praxiteles" flick at twice its length, and with very few guilty pleasures (only two battle sequences, and little blood and gore in between. Bah!). Stone's curiously disjoined script is ridden with simplistic Freudianism. The wellspring of Alexander's enormous ambition may well have been a pathological rivalry with his father, Philip, stoked by his harpy mother, Olympia. But Alexanders' Oedipality would have been more convincing, or at least more interesting, had it been subtly embedded in the plot, not hamhandedly exposed. (Freud cautioned against such shallow reductionism in a 1904 paper on the theater).
Alexander pulls down the loincloth and blows the lid off the id of the sword and sandal flick's repressed homoeroticism. While Stone duly references the sanctioned manly eros of upper class ancient Greece, it's clear that his hero's yen for men stems neither from biological or cultural imperative, but Alexander's unconscious horror of his seductive mom's vagina dentata.
The film's mise-en-scene is often sumptuous (particularly a stunning reconstruction of Bablyon's fabled architecture), but acting and dialogue are disastrously up to Cinetta's risible low standards. For reasons known best to Stone, Colin Farrell's Alexander, as well as most of his intrepid crew possess Scots or Irish accents. (Ulysses [1967] meets Braveheart [1995]?.) When Farrell portentously intones: "I am the cracked mirror of my mother's ambition," you've entered "Hey Praxiteles" territory for sure.
Stone's muddled perception of his hero's ambitions reflects the ambivalent tension throughout much of his work between humanistic ideals and bloody deeds. Nasty violence pervades Scarface (1983), Natural Born Killers (1994), [Conan the Barbarian (1982)], and Year of the Dragon [1985]).
Stone's Alexander envisions himself as a one-man UN: when he authorizes terrible savagery, it's always perpetrated in aid of uniting disparate nations into an impossible fascist democracy under his benevolent rule. History presents a far more complex picture: of a brilliant, courageous often ruthless warrior-tyrant. Alexander was a summary colonialist: he plundered the East even as he sought to educate and enlighten. The Alexander plan for his vanguished enemies was squarely based on cunning rather than compassion. No matter how many libraries he built, philosophers he hired, schools he founded -- a General George C. Marshall he wasn't.