Boy Troy

by Shari L. Rosenblum

The Illiad is a poem of war and of the human condition -- "a poem of force," as Simone Weil called it: "Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away." Virile and beautiful, inspirational and heartbreaking, Homer's tale of the Trojan War weaves a perpetual present into a lyrical history, creating a mirror of man's nature, and what it does to men's spirit. It tells a tale of youth's rashness and the wisdom of age, of brothers and lovers, of gods and men. It pulses with the inevitability of war, and trembles with the impossibility of victory. A man's tale, really, sparked by a woman's beauty, softened by women's tears, it is a song for our fathers and husbands and brothers and sons -- it begins with rage and ends with death.

Wolfgang Petersen's Troy, adapted from The Iliad (and more) by David Benioff, begins in hopeful peace: the Greeks and Trojans have come to terms after many years of battle, and Prince Hector (Eric Bana, imposingly moral, beautifully sculpted) and his brother, Paris (Orlando Bloom, eschewing elvin badass for effeteness), are celebrating with the Spartan King Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson, expertly vulgar and ineffectual), before setting sail for home with their men. But peace is not to be. Joining the men on their way to Troy is an unplanned for guest: Helen (Diane Kruger, playing vacuous beauty as vessel for men's wills), once of Sparta, wife of the king, now of Troy, captive and captor of the heart of young Paris. To avenge his dishonor, Menelaus appeals to his brother, Agamemnon (Brian Cox, effortlessly embodying the amorality of the sleazily grasping politico). Agamemnon has been gathering Greek forces under his command; his only opponent his most powerful soldier, Achilles (Brad Pitt, (near) invincibly heroic from golden head to heel -- Homer's portraiture in motion), who despises him for his rapacious ill will. And as the infernal machine grinds its gears, making for war, men moved by anger and greed push forward, while men moved by family and love push back.

No less than the men of Das Boot or The Perfect Storm , the Greeks and the Trojans are trapped in this sand-soaked history, and Petersen is at his strongest as he conveys their unflinching hopes and resigned hopelessness. The heart aches as father watches son fall, as brother loses brother, each helpless to stop, to direct, to change, to fix. The conflict in the human soul rages against its own desires as Hector and Achilles, men of strength and of character, glorious in their armor, magnificent in their skin, are swallowed up by fates they cannot escape.

The gods are acknowledged off-handedly in this adaptation, but they are nowhere to be heard or seen, their manipulations translated back into human motivations (a subversion of the original's subversiveness). Some characters die out of their Homeric or historic time; others seem oddly absent, or never to have been born at all (Hecuba, Cassandra, Diomedes).

Some portraits do not mesh with historical design -- Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund) for example, beloved friend and cousin of Achilles (yes, cousin -- forget the smirking critics; that's not an invention of this film), is here but a boy, more Hanson than Homer's "manful" description would allow; and Briseis (Rose Byrne), a slave girl prize in the original who was somehow to be Achilles' wife, has become in this an enhanced composite of the two captive women that split the Greeks apart, herself and Chryseis. There is also in the relationship between Achilles and Briseis an oddly inserted pre-echo of a young couple from Shakespeare's Verona --or Arthur Laurents' West Side of New York -- derived directly, one imagines, from the film's focus on cousins (Briseis to Hector, Patroclus to Achilles). But critics bemoaning Troy's lack of fidelity to Homer's text (so to speak) seem overzealous.

The story of the Trojan War from Homer to Virgil and beyond has lent itself to many literary and theoretical reworkings -- its tragedies symbolic, its characters iconic. If those work, the film works. We are meant to be awed by Achilles -- by his splendor, his rages, and his leonine pride; he awed Alexander the Great, after all. (My passion for him began from a description of his bloodied arm and savage appeal in Racine 's Iphigenia; this film re-inflamed it.) We are supposed to be inspired by Hector -- his sense of family, his will for peace. (I first fell in love with him arguing against battle, resplendent in magisterial white, at a performance of Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place; he moved me here with the depth of his doubts.) We are meant to suffer the ambivalences of man's condition: to be exhilarated by war, and saddened that there is no peace; to wish our heroes longlived glory, and thrill at their bloody battle to the death (Bana and Pitt are godly when they meet one on one -- the thrusts, the parries, the feline leaps -- Pitt sinks Achillles' sword like a wildcat tooth to the jugular.) We are meant to question Paris's selfishness, and wonder at Helen's worth. We are meant to be impressed by Odysseus's diplomacy and strategic gifts -- to get a taste for another tale that Sean Bean, in the good king's role, seems born to play. We are meant to cry with Andromache (played here by Saffron Burrows, given no dimension), and to shake at the nobility that allows King Priam, father to Hector and Paris, to humble himself to Achilles, beside himself in paternal loss. Peter O'Toole makes Priam the realest character of all, playing majestic and tired as the heart of an old man's wisdom, and piteous sorrow as the survivor parent's fate. We are meant to see the once impregnable Troy , destroyed from within, as emblem of the destiny that befalls every man who seeks shelter or victory within her walls.

If this latest film does not manage the resonance of Homer's vision, it does recognize and respect it. If it does not dig deep enough to reconstruct the whole, it does capture whole fragments of its truths -- the inner conflicts, the destinies of warriors -- and it serves them well. If it takes liberties with the timing of events and character details, it does so, for the most part, without betraying their essence. Even the film's well-oiled musculatures and the camera's delectation in arms both metallic and flesh are recognizable remnants of the original. Troy may not be a substitute for its sourcework, and could lead many a high schooler or college freshman wildly astray, but it treads the same ground as its predecessor, honorably, if not faithfully. Thoughtful, but never ponderous, it takes its task more seriously than it takes itself.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene