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On Alexander: Did the Critics Blow it?

By Mark Grueter

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The only truly heroic presence in the picture is Angelina Jolie, improbably but delightfully cast as Alexander's imperious mother, Olympias…Jolie is the real deal: a gorgeous, epic-scaled actress who can transform herself from the inside out. She could eat Colin Farrell for breakfast and pick her teeth with Jared Leto. Forget Alexander: The film is a pedestal to Angelina the great. - David Edelstein of Slate

Then there's Angelina Jolie as Mom. Really, words fail me here. But let's try: Give this young woman the hands-down award for best impression of Bela Lugosi while hampered by a 38-inch bust line…She represents the spirit of kitsch that fills the movie, and with all her crazed posturing and slinking, it's more of a silent movie performance than one from the sound era. Theda Bara, call your agent. – Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post

I first became suspicious of all the negative commentary toward Oliver Stone’s latest flick, Alexander, when Slate’s David Edelstein confessed contempt for Stone the man while going on to brand the fine film Natural Born Killers “hands down, the worst movie ever made.”

Edelstein didn’t like Alexander either. But I’m wondering why anyone should care. He doesn’t like Stone. Fine. So what happens if I watch Alexander - as I did after reading several of its bilious reviews - and enjoy it? Do I need to re-read Edelstein to tell me that I shouldn’t have enjoyed it? That I’m a moron for finding value in it?

Hatred of Stone is fairly common. Neva Chonin of the San Francisco Chronicle starts her review thus: “Look, I knew Alexander would be a bad film -- it's an Oliver Stone joint, after all.”

I picked the two quotes at the beginning of this essay as one example of how many of the criticisms of Alexander do nothing more than cancel each other out. Since there appears to be no objective way of critiquing anything anymore, the purveyors of film criticism - those who claim a heightened aesthetic sense - issue a wildly diverse and aggressive series of interpretations.

The following summary from Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post is quite simply spurious:

The movie lacks any convincing ideas about Alexander. Stone advances but one, the notion that Alexander was an early multiculturalist, who wanted to “unify” the globe. He seems not to recognize this as a standard agitprop of the totalitarian mind-set, always repulsive, but more so here in a movie that glosses over the boy-king’s frequent massacres. Conquerors always want “unity,” Stalin a unity of Russia without kulaks, Hitler a Europe without Jews, Mao a China without deviationists and wreckers. All of these boys loved to wax lyrical about unity while they were breaking human eggs in the millions, and so it was with Alexander, who wanted world unity without Persians, Egyptians, Sumerians, Turks and Indians.

Now, regardless of what one thinks of the real-life Alexander, Stone’s film does not stress the “unity” theme as Hunter insists, which renders his blustering rebuke meaningless. And Stone certainly does not depict an Alexander who foresaw a world without Persians, Egyptians, etc. etc. Stone’s contention, on the contrary, is that Alexander was an early egalitarian and democrat who didn’t subscribe to any hierarchical understandings of race and/or civilization. For if Alexander imagined a world without Persians, why, pray tell, did he marry one for the express purpose of promoting the ideal that all groups should be able to co-exist? It makes me wonder if Stephen Hunter even watched the film.

Next, we read a nearly endless stream of nitpicks, where Stone is censured for not doing enough hither or with doing too much thither. For instance, Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press wrote,

The film never sorts out…the complex relationship between the adult Alexander and Philip. In one scene, the son scolds his father at a drunken bacchanal after Philip takes a new and younger wife; in the next, Alexander works to please Philip by commanding a legion of his exceptionally oiled army and distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Nor does the movie adequately explain the concept of the Greek city-states, or why Alexander's half-Greek, half-Macedonian heritage is problematic.

How can Lawson expect Stone to cover everything in three hours? This is a movie folks, not the end all biography of Alexander the Great and the era in which he lived. It isn’t enough for Stone to make an ambitious film that almost nobody else would try; he has to appease all the individual appetites of the critics also?

Rambling rants such as this one from Edelstein pervade much of the criticism of the film:

Much is made of Alexander's tactical genius in overcoming long odds, but Stone has no similar gift. Despite the eagle's-eye view of battle—and I mean, folks, the literal eagle's-eye view, owing to Alexander's spiritual bond with a ubiquitous bird of prey—it's impossible to tell where one army is in relation to another, or just how Alexander gets the best of his impassive Persian counterpart. Alexander is packed with hundreds of thousands of warriors wielding long spears, with kinetic body smashings and face smushings, with intricately choreographed mano-a-mano stabbings and furious horse-, camel-, and elephant-back riding, but the editors must have had a stroke trying to make it all flow together.

So sloppy, it’s hard to decide where to begin. First, the witless cheap shot (‘Stone has no gift at overcoming long odds’), followed by an attempt to ridicule Stone for daring to show the war from the perspective of a passing eagle (an actual bird’s eye view!). Well, I think the eagle bit is neat, not hokey, and I think it’s easy to “tell where one army was in relation to another” and that Stone went to great lengths to demonstrate how Alexander out-strategized his Persian counterpart in that scene. Edelstein’s Slate screed is the sort of review written – at least mentally - before the movie was ever viewed.

Stephen Hunter complains that the real Alexander didn’t sob, sniffle, weep, cry as much as Stone suggests:

In Stone's view, this is a highly neurotic young man whose emotions, far from being repressed or disciplined as one would expect of a great soldier of the 4th century B.C., are worn on his sleeve, except, of course, that he doesn't have sleeves, the shirt still being two millennia down the road. So he wears them on his wrist -- and it's a limp one.

I never would’ve noticed that Stone’s Alexander sobbed a few times had I not read Hunter’s review before seeing the movie. Hunter made such a big deal of the supposed sob show he titled his hit piece “A Crying Shame” and concludes an opening salvo with the fatuous: “Teri Hatcher could kick this twerp’s butt.”

Hunter makes no effort to do anything except taunt Stone. He completely abandons the notion of even pretending to write a work of criticism: “Loved the one-eyed thing, which appears to be a Stone fetish. The movie is full to brimming with one-eyed men, which demonstrates two things: The Greek battle helmets had eye slots, and there was extra money in the makeup budget for putty.” Or that it was not uncommon to encounter one-eyed men, the consequence of war and disease, back then. One or the other, no matter.

James Berardinelli lacerates Stone for allegedly not making an attempt to appeal to the masses: “Unlike Troy, however, which tried unsuccessfully to please crowds, Alexander doesn't bother to make the attempt. Never has Stone’s predilection for maverick cinema been more evident and more damaging to the end product.” Edelstein agrees: “He seems to have forgotten how to put an audience on the rack.”

Or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore. Maybe Stone’s more interested in making a complicated, ambiguous film in which questions are asked, but not necessarily answered. Alexander might be one of those films that gets better with age. It has baffled the critics. The fact that it has been called “muddled,” “unstructured,” a “mess” and “lacking in strategy,” suggests that it is perhaps difficult to completely process in one sitting.

When Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered, it bombed with most of the critics. They didn’t quite get it. Today, the film is considered a masterpiece by elite critics. I don’t need to predict that the same thing will happen with Stone’s Alexander, but it is possible that the critical tendency to make quick judgments may have gotten the best of our reviewers in this case too. And that maybe the same people who bash Stone now will one day learn to appreciate his latest film and its complications. Or maybe the film will just take the increasingly popular route of ignoring America while triumphing internationally.

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Mark Grueter is a writer living in New York City. He can be contacted at grueter@methree.net.

© 2004 Me Three