Troy Story

TROY DIRECTED BY WOLFGANG PETERSEN

THREE KINDS OF heroism are put up for admiration in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. Brad Pitt plays the godlike Mycenaean warrior Achilles, Eric Bana plays Hector, the eldest son of Troy's King Priam, and Orlando Bloom plays Paris, the younger son whose theft of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, sets the Trojan War in motion. Concentrating on the young men abbreviates the story we learned in school from Homer's The Illiad, but it also gives the movie a Teen People gloss. Each of these guys bears the medals of past action movies, respectively Fight Club, Hulk and The Lord of the Rings. Pared down to the stars' celebrity, this epic isn't about the anxieties of courage in battle or the conflicts of country, family and love. It's about fame.

Working from a script adapted by David Benioff, Petersen emphasizes Achilles' antagonism with Agamemnon (Brian Cox), the brother of Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), who goes to war to avenge his cuckolded brother but mainly to further control Greece and the Aegean region. Studly Achilles abhors Agamemnon's flabbiness, wrinkles and greed. When he decides to fight, his own narcissistic obsession overtakes the film.

"They'll be talking about this war for a thousand years," he boasts.

Odysseus (Sean Bean) answers, "We'll be dirt."

But Achilles comes back, "Yes, but our names will remain."

Brad Pitt's a good-enough choice to portray such egomania. Though slightly built and lacking the skills of conventional heroic portrayals where character is shaped by stature and projection, he is, of course, ready for the runway. Cinematographer Roger Pratt lights Pitt all-blond to resemble the gold statue of Apollo that Achilles smashes in a fit of frustrated vainglory.

Not the first pretty-boy movie star, Pitt seems consciously unconscious of his allure—which might indeed be a first. His Achilles appears to suffer the burden of half-divinity; thus, he's a reluctant star as well as a killing machine. This is an interesting meta-movie conceit that ties in with Pitt's most commanding characterization as the s&m apparition Tyler Durden in David Fincher's smirkathon Fight Club. Ad-man Fincher kept selling Pitt's lean physique and rough-trade buzz-cut. It was Pitt's best comic performance, because every dumb line out of his mouth, disguising insecurity with macho playacting, was spoken as ironic seduction. And who knew he could swagger? Pitt created a modern fantasy archetype in Tyler Durden (one that thankfully only persists in memory); it doesn't translate to the classics.

When Achilles visits his mother Thetis (Julie Christie), both Pitt and Christie match up as family. But Christie's blue eyes have a difference: intensity. She not only looks upon her son with loving pain but shows the force of experience and prescience. "Your glory walks hand in hand with your doom, and I will never see you again." Petersen's cut from Christie's anguished face to a close-up of Pitt arrogantly going off to war feels disjointed. Pitt's profile doesn't match Christie's heroic agony. That's when you realize, Pitt's a bit old for the petulant act. Perhaps like Tyler Durden, he can't shake the inadequacy of a spoiled American scamp.

Brat Pitt soldiers on like a pin-up would, eventually falling in love with the virgin Briseis (Rose Byrne), who tells him, "If killing is your only talent, that's your curse." But the actor doesn't seem conversant with the issues of Achilles' dissatisfaction and ethical turmoil. Achilles' challenge to his warriors, the black-leather-clad Myrmidons—"Immortality! Take it, it's yours!"—seems hollow. His lament, "I've seen men dying, there's nothing glorious about it, nothing poetic," seems all too true. In the final combat between Achilles and Hector, Pitt stands outside the gates of Troy shouting for his opponent—but for some reasons, he's looking down. Pointlessly internalizing Brandoisms (not the Method), he lacks an epic hero's expansive emotion.

Yet all of Pitt's incongruous traits fit into Troy's conceit. Wolfgang Petersen shows the equal influence of The Lord of the Rings and Gladiator. It's a shrewd balance of spectacle and vigor, box-office calculation and romanticism. The names Hector, Lysander, Nestor and Ajax (played by Tyler Mane with his big, heavy, hairy slabs of chest) evoke grade-school nostalgia and gladiator movies on Saturday afternoon tv. This material doesn't inspire scholarly responses, but the opposite. That's why Petersen can conflate Achilles' unexplained mortality with the myth of St. Sebastian as part of a sober-minded fantasy.

You would expect by now that a Hollywood epic set in antiquity would go all out with special effects, seeking to overwhelm rather than impress, like The Return of the King and the Matrix sequels. It's surprising how non-kitschy Troy is. Petersen's depiction of the thousand ships that Agamemnon sent to recapture Helen is credible. It's not a million dots extended to infinity as Peter Jackson would perpetrate; Petersen's vision is a detailed and misty f/x in the classic Albert Whitlock manner. Even the swift narrative seems derived from John Boorman's standard-setting Excalibur (Nigel Terry, who played King Arthur, is here as Archeptolemus). Boorman reworked mythology with lyricism tied to intelligence. Petersen's approach is not so philological, just plain logical.

Troy reinterprets The Illiad in commercial terms that are not insulting only because Petersen's style is proficient—and expedient. Heroism is now open to question. Having been trivialized in The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Kill Bill and confounded by the current war, heroism is sustained by the examples of celebrity offered by Pitt and the like, more so than by Homer's exposition—or the psychology of melodramatic behavior explained to students by Edith Hamilton.

Petersen's clear storytelling recalls the meaning of hegemony (Greek for "the rule of kings") in the way that wars sacrifice soldiers for leaders' whims. It's a forgotten truth that well-practiced genre filmmaking can restore to modern consciousness. To revisit this aspect of the Trojan War—of all wars—is almost radical. But aside from offering currently useful political lessons, there's still hegemony in Troy's capitulation to Western ideology. Pitt heads a cast of mostly British and Australian performers—another example of the Hollywood conventions we take for granted. It's what made the American Civil War story of Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain ridiculous. Co-stars Bloom, Bana, Christie, Peter O'Toole as King Priam, Brendan Gleeson, Brian Cox and the rest are so solid they impart a false legitimacy to Troy. (O'Toole, Gleeson and Cox as the huffing and wheezing old kings all waver between magnificent and hammy. It's too bad O'Toole doesn't howl Priam's great grief to appropriately balance the film's other lusty war cries.)

Caught up in the tradition of implicit cultural supremacy where actors with British accents are accepted as classy and ideal, Petersen pays little attention to Homer's insight on the miasma and weariness of war—which might have helped Troy succeed as a tragedy as well as an action movie. The emphasis on action isn't simply a prerequisite of the genre; it's also a sign of commercial hegemony. That Hollywood continues to take its exploitation cues from Hong Kong is apparent in Achilles' fighting style: He leaps into the air and plunges his sword into his enemies. (Give Petersen credit that this dance of death is curt and avoids the spatial disorientation that is rampant in The Lord of the Rings and Van Helsing.)

Celebrity itself sums up Troy's imperialist manner. Australians Bloom and Bana represent Hollywood's desperate importation of white, Western types. The film begins by asking, "Will strangers remember our names? How bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?" So Petersen lavishes heroic portraiture on Bloom and Bana that sometimes recalls Sebastiane, Derek Jarman's modernist experiment with the classics. Bloom is a sweet and lightweight hero, but Bana pulls it off. Hector is the story's everyman whose loyalty is admirable and steadfast, the spiritual counterpart to his physical courage. Bana is as rough-hewn as Russell Crowe in Gladiator but with a heart-shaped face and a confiding look that makes him seem much more passionate. (All that's missing is the humor Bana showed in Chopper.) As Hector goes to face his destiny, Petersen shows the gold rings adorning the long black curls down Bana's strong, thick neck. He's a hero for a movie you can take seriously. When his knees hit the ground at death, Troy crumbles.