FIRE BRINGER
Oliver Stone's Alexander

"It was pretty good, but it doesn't need a sequel."

I had laughed (if kindly) at the fellow's expectations because I knew enough about the subject that such an idea would not even have crossed my mind.  In fact, some would say I know too much to properly assess how the average film-goer will react to Alexander . . . and that is why I began with the average film-goer -- a young white man of the 18-24 age bracket . . . THE demographic at whom many film-makers aim movies these days (rightly or wrongly).

This isn't Troy.  It isn't Gladiator.  Nor is it a popcorn summer feature, chick-flick, date movie, gay film, or action blockbuster.  It's not about the war(s) in Iraq.  It's not a moral fable about George Bush (either of them).  And if there are several myths referenced (including that of Alexander himself), it isn't mythic in the way of Star Wars.  The parallels I've seen many reviewers draw to modern events say more about them than about the movie.

Given the many and varied pans of this film in newspapers, blogs, and message groups, it may come as a shock that I am willing to say that I liked it.  Yet if I compared this movie to Lawrence of Arabia, it isn't Lawrence of Arabia, and Colin Farrell isn't Peter O'Toole.  He's not in O'Toole's class.  Of course, most actors aren't, yet that caliber of actor was what this film required.  It is SO strongly focused on one person that the lead actor must have sufficient magnetism and breadth to carry the film alone.  Colin Farrell does not, quite -- particularly in grand scenes that call for 'speechifying.'  Farrell is better in scenes of smaller scope and high emotion; I never believed that he believed his exhortations, or dreamy flights into ideological fantasy.  At those points, I found myself thinking, 'This is an actor reciting lines, not Alexander.'

Nonetheless, and in the language of reviewers everywhere, I would give it three stars out of five.  It may not succeed in everything, but I think it succeeds more than it fails.

Meta History and Other Matters

There are actually three levels to historical authenticity in any film (or book).  First are the details of set design and costuming -- the 'what did it look like' aspect.  In general, Stone's film handled these exceptionally well.  There were problems, but I was impressed overall, and there are a large number of small accuracies and tributes.  Whatever else one thinks of the film, it was lush with particular attention to detail (even if things occasionally showed up in unexpected places).

One cardinal rule of novel writing or film making is never to let a scene do only one thing when it might do two or three.  This is called creative conflation, and what it means is that one not only cannot, but should not expect an historical movie or novel to reflect the exact order of historical events in the time frame they occurred.  In fact, Stone's film may have suffered from too much historical accuracy -- although I think it not half so bad as some film critics have complained.  There were points, however, where it became plodding, and other points where small details were tossed in without explanation.  One only recognized them if one already knew the story.

Yet the events Stone chose to show, those he cut, and those he combined mostly made sense for the goal I believe he was after.  A different goal would, naturally, have yielded a different set of choices.  One does not begin an historical novel or movie by deciding, "I want to show this, and this, and this . . ."  It would be a mishmash of events with no guiding theme.  One begins with the theme one is trying to illustrate, then selects the events and encounters (and characters) that will allow one to tell that story.  This is something that Stone (mostly) understood, and although some have complained that Stone's film did not have a theme, actually, I believe that it did.  It simply was not the theme that we expected -- like Prometheus, Stone tricked us, as I will attempt to show.

As a corollary to this comes a tougher question and perhaps the one place where it is hardest to separate our own views from that of the creator.  Do we think the story being told, in the way it's told, deserves to be told?  Or put in simpler terms, this is the, "Why should I care?" question.  It goes beyond set accuracy, costume accuracy, event accuracy, or the artistic elements of good writing or good filming.  It involves why anyone not already interested in the topic should become interested.  Unfortunately, this is the level at which Stone's Alexander fell flattest, in my own estimation.  I find much of the criticism leveled against it to be overly strident; it is not nearly as bad a movie as some would make it sound, but the reasons for the spiteful hostility are not easy to isolate because they range from critics' (perhaps American) fondness for hyperbole, to preconceived notions of what an epic (especially an epic about a world conqueror) should be, to homophobia, to problems in length and repetitive dialogue, to simple dislike for Oliver Stone.  Thus, a flawed film stumbled over multiple pre-existing cracks in the pavement.  The result was an embarrassing sprawl.

Yet psychological questions are wonderful for fiction.  In fact, THE novelist's question is, Why does X character behave in the way that s/he does?  Novel writing is about character exploration as opposed to 'what happened' (plot).  So it is not for asking "Why did Alexander do what he did?" that I fault Stone.  No, I question some of Stone's answers.  They were, in my opinion, the most ahistorical aspects of the movie.  If Stone does not quite cross the line to present us with a twentieth-century man in Macedonian clothing, he does dance at the edge.

Thus, exploring Alexander's hubris is an historically accurate theme, but not presented in a way that resonated well with modern audiences.  We prefer the underdog, the common-man hero, the one without pretensions . . . not the man who thinks himself the son of a god.  So it is no surprise if Gladiator's Maximus made us cheer, or Frodo from The Lord of the Rings.  We admire reluctant heroes who just want to live a quiet life, but rise to the occasion when called upon.

"Dreamers exhaust us."  Yes, they do.  And that makes Alexander a hard sell.

Can one make Alexander's story pertinent to modern audiences?  Is it even possible?  Or have we become too content with mythic heros -- the Luke Skywalkers and Captain Kirks and Supermans -- so that we no longer accept anything else?  Some would point to the success of The Incredibles against Alexander and say that North Americans want fantasy, not reality.  There may be some truth to that, though perhaps not so negatively phrased.  The same young lady quoted above who called the movie "just sad," went on to add, "I get enough of that in real life.  I don't go to the movies for it."  We want a hero, and Stone's Alexander was not.

The love story between Alexander and Hephaistion might have offered the emotionally evocative aspect necessary, if viewers had been less uncomfortable with it, or less unprepared to accept it as either valid or admirable.  Yet to be fair, I believe homophobia applied to only some cases of audience indifference.  I did not find the relationship especially compelling, either, though it is one I have studied in depth and written about in detail (“An atypical affair? Alexander the Great, Hephaistion Amyntoros and the nature of their relationship,” The Ancient History Bulletin, 13.3 (1999) 81-96).  I was hardly unprepared to accept it.  In fact, a compelling love story can challenge cultural assumptions, but in Alexander, there was both too much emphasis on it, and not enough.  Hephaistion never crystalized as a character outside his attachment to Alexander.  That they loved each other was clear -- less clear was why.  And the 'why' must be answered before preconceptions can be overturned.  Audiences have to care about both characters, and Stone never let us get that close to Hephaistion.

First, let's consider the family relationships.  Stone gives Alexander's love-hate relationship with his mother and emulation and resentment of his father a distinctively oedipal twist.  The opening scene after Ptolemy's introduction involves Olympias playing games with her son and talking about her pet snakes, only to be interrupted by a drunken and violent Philip who practically rapes then tries to kill her in front of the (hiding) child.  Anyone familiar with Mary Renault's novels will immediately recognize a homage to the opening scene from Fire From Heaven.  This is not an event recorded in our histories and points, I thought, to just how deep a debt Stone owed to Ms. Renault in shaping his own views of the conqueror.  Although Stone's movie is in no way a copy of Renault's novels even when it echoes them (as here), nonetheless, Stone's Alexander is Renault's Alexander in some very fundamental perceptions . . . family dynamics not least.

Three other myths are named in this same scene.  One, predictably, is Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother without knowing it.  A second is Medea, who murdered her own children in order to revenge herself on her husband Jason when he replaced her with a younger queen.  Obviously, both reference Alexander's relationship with his parents, and movie-Philip says, "All your life, beware of women.  They are far more dangerous than men."  It is typical Greek misogyny, an attitude we find throughout the movie, and which is never much challenged.  That should be disturbing.  Stone is not a feminist, at least not in this film.  In any case, the fifth myth touched on is that of Prometheus -- who, we should remember, was named also by Ptolemy at the film's opening.  Philip says that Prometheus tried to help men, but suffered for it, and this motif recurs throughout.  It is clear that Stone's Alexander is Prometheus, and if Stone never goes into it, Alexander's name -- Alex-andros -- meant 'protector of men.' Yet I will suggest that, in the end, the assimilation of Alexander to Prometheus has two edges, and only one is positive.

One might argue that such a presentation is necessary, as trying to explain the complexities of Macedonian marriage practices -- not to mention five other wives (and siblings and half-siblings) -- would have been too much to ask of a non-specialist audience in a two hour and forty-five minute film.  Certainly true, and I had no arguments with weeding down the field to Philip's two most significant wives.  Yet sexual jealousy was not really a motivator in polygamous situations.  Instead, quarrels erupted over status -- and the power that went with it.  This status depended on the successful production of viable male heirs to the throne, and this is why Olympias (in reality, wife #4) was regarded as Philip's chief wife.  She was herself royal by birth (a princess of Epiros), and of Philip's five children -- two boys and three daughters (not counting the last child, whose gender is uncertain) -- Olympias gave him two (Alexander and Kleopatra).  So she ruled the roost.  Why, then, be threatened by Eurydike?  Because Eurydike's uncle had power in Pieria, the old heartland of the Macedonian kingdom.  Olympias was not considered quite the 'barbarian' that the film presented, but she was -- compared to Eurydike -- foreign.  And if Eurydike could produce a healthy male child, she might displace Olympias as chief wife.  In polygamous situations, the status of a wife depended on the status of her son, and the only way to be certain of one's place was to become queen mother.

Yet if one removed that oedipal tension, one would kick out a key prop from Stone's movie.  I may have personally wished he had done without the long shadow of Freud, but he would hardly be the first Alexander enthusiast to read the Philip-Olympias-Alexander triangle in that fashion.  It does work for the use to which he put it.  The real question is simply whether he should have used it at all.  My own opinion is that he should not.  It was historically out of place.

Among Tarn's legacies to Alexander Studies was the notion that Alexander's conquests were a civilizing mission to bring Greek (European) culture to the benighted barbarians of Asia, and that he wanted to establish a 'Brotherhood of Mankind' between the two ruling classes, Macedonians and Persians.  Note that this was not a 'one-world' idea of ethnic equality; only Macedonians and Persians were involved, not Egyptians, Greeks, or anyone else.  Stone took Tarn's idea (mediated via Mary Renault) and tuned it for a modern audience, but the result is even less reflective of historical reality.  At least Tarn could point to Alexander's speech at Opis, even if historians since have shown that speech to be pure propaganda, not reflecting actual appointments.  But there is no evidence at all that Alexander believed in anything we would recognize as 'one world' politics.  In truth, he was not much of a political theorist period.  He was a conqueror, an explorer with an army, and in Alexander studies, Tarn's Brotherhood of Mankind has been on the way out since Ernst Badian's article "The Eunuch Bagoas" appeared in Classical Quarterly in 1956 (the article was actually about source criticism, not Bagoas).  One will find few Alexander specialists today who still buy into it.

There is good reason to think, however, that Stone himself questioned this romantic Alexander.

If scenes should never do only one thing if they can do three, scenes can also become too busy -- and that problem plagued this film.  Too many scenes go on too long or try to accomplish too much, resulting in confused points and diffused tension.  If I think few scenes could have been done without entirely, Stone's script needed a ruthless editor.  In my first viewing, while struggling to scribble down quotes, I frequently found myself writing a line, only to have the same sentiment repeated a sentence or two later in different words.  Such unnecessary repetition signifies a need for editing.  If the dialogue had been weeded at the outset, there would been more time for some of the scenes that Stone had to cut from his longer (3+ hour!) version -- which in turn might have resulted in less overall jerkiness.

But first, let us consider events between the two battles.  It is in this part of the film that we find the greatest number of serious alterations to actual historical events, but all of them were changed to suit Stone's thematic point.  Alexander's last years mark an increasing divide between the king and his Macedonians, and it is this conflict on which Stone wanted to focus.  To my own mind, it is the most interesting era -- but also the most complicated and very hard to portray without sufficient foundation.  Stone tried to utilize Alexander's early years in order to give viewers enough background to understand his latter years, and thus, focused on the beginning of Alexander's life, and the end -- but not the 'successful' middle because Alexander's success was not, ultimately, his interest.  Audiences expecting "Alexander the Great" did not get him.  They got "Alexander the Haunted," perhaps even "Alexander the Deluded."  The problem with that picture is that audiences could not understand why this man had managed to convince his army to follow him so far in the first place.

In an attempt to simplify Alexander's final four years, Stone conflated two conspiracies against Alexander into one, two mutinies into one, shifted about such events as the murder of Kleitos, and made Alexander's marriage to Roxane an oedipally driven love affair (following Plutarch, perhaps), rather than the political tool scholars such as Frank Holt consider it to have been.  Alexander spent two years in Baktria and Sogdiana, unsuccessfully trying to quell rebellion.  Then he married Roxane, the daughter of an important local chieftain, and was able to depart the area within months.  Like his father before him, Alexander had recognized that marriage could be a political tool.  I do realize Stone wished to make the marriage part of his oedipal subplot -- to the point of casting Rosario Dawson as Roxane because she resembled Angelina Jolie -- but as noted, I question that theme in the first place.

Matters came to a head at a banquet in India, which ended with Kleitos dead.  If displaced in time somewhat (Kleitos was murdered before India), the switch still worked and the scene was cast to show how "oriental" Alexander had become, surrounded by exotic Indians, lounging in Persian robes, and watching a eunuch dance.  In sharp contrast is Kleitos, dressed in Macedonian black wool and sitting upright in his chair, arms crossed.  It is clear that he is growing increasingly sullen and irritated, and finally, he speaks out, mocking Alexander and challenging his arrogance, and thus beginning the fateful verbal battle between them.

Instead, in the film, the trigger event was the eunuch's dance (also displaced from its original Carmanian context).  This was no doubt easier to show, but I felt it trivialized the conflict.  Still, the kernal of the fight remains as Alexander is unfavorably compared to his father and accused of taking all the glory for victories that his men bought with their blood.  Much of what Kleitos and Alexander bellow does paraphrase the histories, but in the film, Alexander hallucinates his father standing in Kleitos's place for a moment, and warns Kleitos to shut up.  When Kleitos barrels on anyway, Alexander's oedipal resentment reaches a boiling point and he runs Kleitos-Philip through with a spear, then collapses in horrified mourning that continues for three days.

I believe Stone meant to show that Alexander's fundamental reason for pressing onward was connected to his oedipal need to kill Philip's fame, if not to kill him literally.  Yet if the need to surpass his father (and Achilles, Herakles, and Dionysos, too) may indeed have been part of his 'pothos' -- his unquenchable yearning to see beyond the next hill -- another part owed to his own culture's expectations about what a Macedonian king should be.  And this is something I am not sure Stone understood, and which then led him to look in anachronistic places for an answer to his question, "Why did Alexander do what he did?"

Alexander was a product of Macedonia's gift-exchange culture, not only followed by his army, but made by them.  He became the king they wanted and needed and idolized.  And thus, in India on the banks of the Hyphasis, they found themselves facing a monster of their own creation.  They had wanted power, wealth, and victory -- the expected rewards in a gift-exchange society -- and Alexander had given it to them beyond their wildest dreams.  Alexander's theatrical outrage and purported sense of betrayal at their 'mutiny' is, thus, not without justification.  The problem wasn't that Alexander had failed to live up to the mythos of a Macedonian king, but that he didn't know when to stop.  He gave them more than they had ever hoped for and, in the end, more than they wanted.  This is something that Stone does not seem quite to grasp, and so some of Alexander's real motivations eluded his narrative, forcing him to substitute motivations that fit less well, and felt too modern.

They want to go home, but Alexander is clearly not listening, and the movie mutiny does not end like the first historical one, wherein Alexander was forced by his troops to turn back.  Instead, Alexander drives them into yet another battle, the second of the movie.  Ostensibly, this is the Battle of the Hydaspes where Alexander defeated Porus and his elephants.  But the Hydaspes came before the Indian mutiny, and was arguably among Alexander's more strategically elegant battles, not the messy near-defeat with which we are presented on the screen.  (And Porus' famous after-battle reply to Alexander's 'How would you like to be treated?' -- 'As a king,' was given in the film to Statiera instead because, of course, it could not be used here.)

In Stone's combined battle, Alexander's infantry are being trounced, making them reluctant to face the walking "walls" of the elephants, not to mention that the calvary horses are balking.  In desperation, Alexander charges forward on Bucephalas, meeting the king's elephant head-on, and echoing his direct attack on Darius at Gaugamela.  Except this time, his opposition is not cowed.  Porus simply raises his spear and skewers Alexander's faithful mount while Alexander himself is shot in the chest by an arrow, just as happened at Malli.

Attacking an elephant on horseback armed only with a sword when your opponent has a long-spear goes beyond foolish into downright moronic.  And this is one place in the movie where I thought Stone's choice to conflate things not only didn't work, but made Alexander look anything but the military genius he was.  At Malli, Alexander's initial choice to climb the ladder may have been fueled by anger, but when things went wrong, he was still thinking.  At Stone's "Malli," Alexander did not seem to have any plan besides desperation.  It was not a heroic act, and so when he was shot, it seemed earned.  My sympathies were with the horse!

This is not a great leader.  This is a foolish, selfish man.  And to make sure that we understand this is an epiphany moment for Alexander, Stone washes the film in (blood) red, turns up the music to overwhelm the sounds of battle, and slows down the speed.  Alexander is carried off the field on a shield (presumably the shield of Achilles, but one would have to know the history to make that connection).  In any case, and just as at the battle of Gaugamela, we are left weeping, not cheering.

So -- after all this explication, readers may be wondering why I still gave this film three stars out of five, despite all the problems named?

Alexander's campaign killed a lot of people to little concrete purpose.

He was Prometheus, indeed -- but we must remember that while Prometheus brought fire so we could cook our food and warm ourselves, fire unchecked can also burn down our house.