More Hollywood than Homer

It takes one a lot of gumption to tell the sprawling tale of Troy in this or any other age. Homer himself only sings of "the wrath of Achilles," a story that covers only four days of the 10-year war. Director Wolfgang Petersen obviously understands the difficulty of having so much material for only so small a space, and for his film Troy opts to re-imagine a few key events and characters. He manages to squeeze the entire war in two and a half entertaining hours but has had to commit such violations as stretch what artistic license warrants. In the end, Troy comes across more as hurrah for Hollywood than as homage to Homer.

Anyone who has ever read Homer would easily spot the liberties Petersen took. Consider:

• Paris and Hector regard each other fraternally.

• Paris and Helen are mutually in love.

• So are Achilles and Briseïs.

• Patroclus is safely demoted as Achilles’ pupil.

• Menelaus dies 30 minutes into the movie.

• Ajax dies five minutes later.

• Achilles doesn’t die sooner.

All those and many, many more in a film that is avowed to be "inspired by Homer’s Iliad." A number of departures are for narrative economy (one cannot have Priam’s 48 other sons in the film), but the major ones appear solely to pander to popular taste. Troy gives us romance, action, and spectacle all neatly mounted in the fashion of a Hollywood summer flick but at the expense of Homer’s tragic vision and transgressive sexual politics.

To cite just one example: in Homer, Hector (Eric Bana) is tricked by Athena into facing Achilles (Brad Pitt). The goddess, disguised as Hector’s brother, promises to help him, but she betrays him. The battle itself consists of a "flyting" and a brief exchange of spears–pretty boring stuff compared to the swishes and swoops that we are given in the movie. What Homer offers is a grim reflection on how we are playthings to the gods. Hector’s final realization is that Zeus has shielded him from death only because the god wants to give him over to his enemy. "Even so," says Hector, "let me not die ingloriously, without a fight, without some great deed done that future men will hear of." In the godless world of the movie, the scene turns into a confrontation between two values (public honor versus private grief)–a subject matter of comparable import, surely, to the cosmological questions in the epic–but it is rendered like the main event of an installment of Rocky or the showdown between sheriff and gangster in an old spaghetti Western.

The dialogue leaves much to be desired. It is a wonder why in some scenes lines had to be invented when Homer would have sufficed. The poetry is all but gone, replaced by banalities. After the many rousing speeches in The Lord of the Rings (e.g., "Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield shall be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!"), Hector’s pep talk ("Troy is your mother. Fight for her!") is simply limp. In the ransom scene, one line is lifted directly from Homer, Priam’s "I have endured to do what no other mortal man on earth has done–I have brought to my lips the hands of the man who killed my child" (Martin Hammond’s translation). But the high rhetoric eventually peters out to finger pointing ("He killed my cousin!" "How many cousins of Trojans have you killed?" etc.). It is a pity that the film did not exploit the venerable Peter O’Toole’s powers of oratory.

To be sure, the movie has things to recommend it, and if one bracketed away the film’s literary pedigree, it makes for a lavish visual treat, indeed. The production is handsomely mounted. The sweep of the camera in the battle scenes captures the grandeur and magnitude of the epic. We see what Homer describes in his similes and catalogs: "Like the great flocks of flying birds–geese, or cranes, or long-necked swans–in an Asian water-meadow, by the stream of Kaÿstrios, which wheel this way and that in their wings’ glory, and the meadow echoes to their cries as they settle in tumult: so the many companies of men poured out from their ships and their huts on to the plain of Skamandros, and beneath them the earth rang fearfully, under the feet of the men and the horses." The shower of fire in the movie brilliantly conflates two episodes in the Iliad: the burning of the ships and the smashing of the palisades. With effects such as these we cannot forget that we are watching an epic movie.

Petersen must also be given credit for successfully secularizing an epic filled with gods and goddesses. The rape of Leda, the golden apple, the influence of Aphrodite, the prophecies of Cassandra, and so on, are either absent or rendered plausible in human terms. There is Achilles’ mother, for example: is she the goddess Thetis or just someone who frequents the sea? The movie also manages to explain the war in sociopolitical terms and thus indirectly holds the mirror up to the state of contemporary geopolitics. Surely, Agamemnon lives in today’s headlines as he did 3,200 years ago in Mycenae.

The accomplishment finally is that Petersen makes you feel for all the three leads: Achilles, Hector, and even Paris (Orlando Bloom), who is not the contemptible peacock he is in Homer. The ending will have you see the validity of what each of them holds dear, without necessarily condoning what each does to uphold it. This is perhaps Petersen at his most Homeric, for the epic is never one-sided in its treatment of the war or of human failings.

Troy, then, is an uneven movie, torn between the loftiness of its inspiration and the banal realities of commercial filmmaking. That Petersen should succumb to spectacle and schmaltz at the expense of Homer only proves that despite one’s best intentions, the business of making movies is primarily that–a business. Few directors would have dared to do otherwise. Troy may at least encourage viewers to be readers. If it does, it would have done Homer service enough.