"Troy" — The Grouchiness of Achilles

Saw this movie on TV, full body press — no interruptions — and as it's come round again in this medium, I thought it might not be too late for a review.

The "story" is largely nonsense as many critics noted at initial release time, primarily because of the ridiculous insistence that Achilles was aggressively heterosexual, when he was (according to Homer and the Greek mores of Achilles' own time) bisexual at best. Moreover, the film obliterates some of our most powerful, germinal stories at a stroke by giving the death of Agamemnon to a pissed-off Trojan priestess (an amalgam of the otherwise absent Cassandra, and Hector's wife). With one or two exceptions, anything having to do with this witless, extraneous "plotting" (which means pretty much anything carried in the dialog) is rubbish.

The usual Hollywood conventions about the Ancient World are on parade: clumsy-looking monumental architecture, garish costume jewelry, clothes of colors never seen until the invention of aniline dyes, generic feast-music played by invisible musicians so that the slave girls have something to dance to, everybody speaking Generic Ancient so that no translators are needed no matter how far you travel, etc.

The battle scenes, however, were as fine as I'd been led to believe they would be (they were the reason I decided to watch this bloated monster of a movie in the first place), not just for clarity of action (there wasn't much opportunity for confusion, given sea, walled city, and beach in between as your field of operations). There did seem to be astronomical numbers of warriors on both sides for any clash in the Ancient world — too many ships, too many foot soldiers in uniform gear (but different helmets so we could tell the armies apart). According to my reading, most of these guys would be farmers who go to war now and then, with whatever armor and weapons they've acquired from and for such occasions. But what worked, really worked, was the sense of grim ferocity in the fighting: masculine energy, focused on murder, unleashed in tremendous and sustained outbursts.

These clashes flew by, exciting demonstrations of sheer animal fury of the sort that still fascinates people, as spectators anyway (witness the success of its counterfeit in tv wrestling shows). "Troy", I think, presents what that might have looked like in reality. I was reminded of the Nordic legends of the "berserker", the unstoppable fighter whose battle-rage is like the remorseless attack of a maddened bear, untrammeled by the faintest flash of intellect. The effect was an absorbing illusion of an older time, one when war was largely hand-to-hand among relatively small numbers of fighters, so that strategy took second place to the stamina of sheer ferocity (hence the outstanding sagacity of Ulysses, who stopped to think, and think inventively, in order to come up with ideas other than just to hit first, hit hard, and keep hitting until somebody dies).

Best of all, though, was the unexpectedly impressive performance of Brad Pitt as Achilles (at least when he wasn't mouthing the worst bits of balderdash generated by the screenwriting committee). With his pouty lower lip and thick jaw that always looks clenched, his dirty, neglected-looking hair, and his head-down, trudging gait, he gave us not just another hard-bitten soldier but a silently raging man who feels trapped in a deeply limiting world without even fully knowing why.

This Achilles is a man of gifted physicality, made for great achievements — but his world offers him literally nothing to do with his gifts but fight and kill other men in the service of the greedy Great. And he hates that this is so; it makes him feel cheated, demeaned, and wasted. He refuses to be a nonentity — but he can't see any possible significance for a man's life anywhere but on the filthy, bloody battlefield, now and forever.

Perhaps he even has glimmerings that men like Homer or Aristotle or Socrates or Aeschylus will create immense and far-reaching achievements of art and thought. Something like that might occur to him, when he thinks about in what manner his name will be conveyed to the future to be remembered there (although this movie offers no glimpse of the actual remembering that he would be familiar with and aim for — no poet singing the tales of previous heroes, no admiring table conversation about such men). But he's just himself, stuck here in his narrow present, where what men of ability, men of note, do with their lives is to spend them killing each other and looting each other's possessions.

He does it all brilliantly, but a persistent sullenness, a glowering, dogged dissatisfaction informs every movement of Pitt's body, telling us that this Achilles is infuriated, quietly and all the time, but the limitations of his life. This makes him that sympathetic and appealing character, a simple man straining toward complexity. He's evolution trying to happen, too early and so doomed to fail. Pitt's warrior is a tragic figure — not Homer's Achilles, who's a vain, sulky, shallow, swaggering bully, but an Achilles who's kin to every man who, having been out of his parents' house and at large in the world for a bit, pauses to look around him and whispers to himself in disbelief and the beginnings of despair, "Is this IT? Is this all there is?" Whatever "it" and "this" happen to be, in a given man's time.

I don't know how much of Pitt's embodiment of this idea was his own, how much due to inspired direction, but I'm damned glad not to have missed his performance. If you're going to tell a war story that is centrally about men, in fact almost exclusively about them, it should be a good, strong story that really is about men — how they live, and how they feel about their lives.

This movie, overstuffed and manipulated as it is in the interests of commercial success, at least makes a stab at it, and for that, Bravo.

--SMC
July 2005

Copyright © 2005 by Suzy McKee Charnas