Not so great
Alexander, dir. Oliver Stone.
When the director himself has conducted the post-mortem and declared the body not just dead but mutilated, what’s left for a mere reviewer? To question Oliver Stone’s judgment? Tempting—though not about this film.
Audiences clearly agree with him. On the night I went, the suburban multiplex had the beached atmosphere of Apocalypse Now, complete with bad music piped out of Limbo. Of the audience of five, one left after half an hour.
Yes, Alexander is a dud. Fifty years on from Robert Rossen’s Alexander the Great (with Richard Burton, Fredric March and Claire Bloom), Oliver Stone has learned nothing from the earlier director’s mistakes. Some he simply repeats, even while he squanders money enough to rebuild Babylon. The script is as bad, the direction and casting worse. Burton could handle rhetoric, but even he couldn’t do much with the likes of ‘It’s a lovely thing to live with courage and die leaving behind an everlasting renown’. Colin Farrell repeats those lines (and many worse ones) with all the élan of George W. Bush.
Perhaps it is as an index to 21st-century pathologies and informed ignorance that the film is most interesting. Darius, the Persian leader, has Osama bin Laden’s pointed beard and full frontal stare. Why? Coincidence? Alexander’s bisexuality (ignored in Rossen’s film) is here alternately mawkish and witlessly violent. Christopher Plummer as Aristotle gives us a tutorial on virtuous manly affection so we can cope when Alexander hugs his smudgy-eyed Hephaistion (did Macedonian men wear kohl?) but why are we subjected to a knife-wielding quasi rape scene when Alexander beds Roxana? Which focus group was that directed to? The credits have transliterated Greek behind them. Oliver Stone is Greek? The Macedonian warriors sound like IRA veterans or leftovers from Braveheart. Why? Can’t America do war?
And why let Freud in? Some of the script could seam effortlessly into a bad Woody Allen movie so anxious is Stone to explain Alexander’s psyche. Oh for the dynamic understatement of a Norse saga! Or an actor with Peter O’Toole’s range so we might see both bloodlust and remorse embodied, not merely gestured at, talked into being or got up with red filters.
Some good things: Angelina Jolie has a wild time as Alexander’s snakey mum, Olympias, though you do wonder why she bothers. Val Kilmer is a lusty Philip but he is killed off too early and flashbacked