director
Oliver Stone
screenwriters
Oliver
Stone
Christopher Kyle
Laeta Kalogridis
producers
Moritz Borman
Jon Kilik
Thomas Schühly
Iain Smith
Oliver Stone
cinematographer
Rodrigo Prieto
music
Vangelis
editor
Yann Hervé
Alex Marquez
Thomas J. Nordberg
cast
Colin Farrell (Alexander)
Angelina Jolie (Olympias)
Val Kilmer (Philip)
Jared Leto (Hephaistion)
Rosario Dawson (Roxane)
Anthony Hopkins (Old Ptolemy)
Connor Paolo (Young Alexander)
Brian Blessed (Wrestling Trainer)
Christopher Plummer (Aristotle)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 175m
u.s.
release: 11/25/04
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other oliver
stone films
reviewed on this website:
- any
given sunday
- natural born killers
- nixon
- u-turn
- world trade center
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"Men of Macedonia,"
says the great conqueror Alexander (Colin Farrell) to his exhausted
troops in the final half hour of Alexander, "we're
going home." His men respond with loud cheering and much
throwing of petals, and if the movie audience had some petals,
they might throw some too: You mean this is almost over?
The first film in five years by the once-electrifying director
Oliver Stone, Alexander is a large, confused and confusing,
and sprawling mess -- sometimes a glorious mess, but the few
shining moments and images seem hardly worth the almost-three-hour
investment. Here, Stone has crafted nothing so much as a densely
allusive, emotionally unreadable hymn to his own potency and
feelings of martyrdom, a trait that has bedevilled his work in
the last decade.
Stone seems almost arrogantly
disinterested in the actual Alexander the Great, whose extraordinary
story has fuelled countless books (including Mary Stewart's acclaimed
trilogy of novels) and even an anime series (Reign: The Conqueror,
whose trippy-futuristic handling of the legend is probably truer
to the source than all of Alexander). After a perfunctory
first half hour, in which we're introduced to Alexander as the
textbook result of a dysfunctional family -- his father is the
oafish King Philip (Val Kilmer), his mother the snake-fondling
Olympias (Angelina Jolie) -- we skip past Alexander's early campaigns
and pick him up in Persia, with no dramatization of his brilliant
strategies or his way of compelling thousands of men to ride
behind him towards almost certain death. We see him name-check
a few soldiers before battle, and we're supposed to think, "Cool,
he knows their names. They don't make imperialists like
they used to."
When the hero of a long epic
has his big-dog moment -- here, it's when Alexander, on horseback,
faces down an elephant in the battle of India -- and you feel
more of a swell of pride in the horse than in the hero,
that epic is in serious trouble. Colin Farrell tries hard, but
it's probably an unplayable role even if well-written, which
it isn't; the dialogue (what little you can make out over the
muddled, overactive sound mix) is your standard sword-and-sandal
pomp. Farrell is the classic cocky little Irish guy, perfect
in something like Phone Booth,
but all wrong for a colossus like Alexander. What's more, the
script never lets Farrell gain emotional purchase on any of the
people -- his lover Hephaistion (Jared Leto), his wife Roxana
(Rosario Dawson) -- Alexander is supposed to hold most dear.
We're meant to believe in the great love between Alexander and
Hephaistion, but all I could tell was that (A) Hephaistion once
beat Alexander at wrestling and (B) they have matching eyeliner.
Stone does make good use of
sets and costumes, when we can see them; the two major battles
in the film are shot in the same herky-jerky, extreme-close-up
style as the football head-slams in Stone's Any
Given Sunday. ("All I can see is sand and horses'
knees!" my companion exclaimed.) Angelina Jolie, thankfully,
plays her scenes as femme-fatale camp and creates intermittent
pockets of interest. Her sly performance in this mostly leaden
affair made me wish she and Stone would work together on something
that would challenge them both -- maybe Medea,
which gets dutifully referenced here.
In Alexander,
though, Oliver Stone is deeply into deifying the Great White
Male, as he was in his previous historical shambles (though more
enjoyable and not nearly as long), The Doors. I don't
think Stone has turned into a Bush supporter overnight, but what
are we to make of a movie in which the well-meaning (or so he
says) conqueror bends nations of swarthy-skinned opponents to
his will, under the rationalization of bringing them higher civilization?
Stone touches lightly on that; he reveres Alexander more as a
man, a risk-taker, a bestraddler of worlds. But this oracular
piece of hero-worship is perhaps the squarest film yet from this
once-hip director. Stone may elevate men who take risks, but
Stone the risk-taker -- the one who seemed so ferociously purposeful,
so heedless of political blowback, in such polarizing works as
JFK, Natural Born Killers,
and Nixon -- now seems as dead
as Alexandria.
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