Troy Movies

[Eunice Beady]

Beinglocked down in pandemic quarantine with a fourteen-year-old boy isn't easy. Fourteen-year-old boys sleep late. They eat a lot. They can be exuberant one moment and sullen the next. My son is all of those things. He also likes sports, especially basketball, which he played for countless hours during Covid. At first, he couldn't play together with other kids; but he could and did do extensive shooting and dribbling drills.

Since I'm not much of a basketball player, and since it looked in March of 2020 like we were going to be stuck in the house for the foreseeable future, I was determined to make the most of our time together. How? We would watch movies, that was how. I could give him an education in different cinematic styles and eras.

When those old movies were made, Hollywood was focused on plot and crisp writing. These elements made for real classics that remain strong even in our day. I was pleased to see that my son liked most of them. True, not all of them: The African Queen got a disappointing five out of ten, evidently reflecting his opinion that Katharine Hepburn's character was just so annoying. I had to give it to him on this one: She absolutely was. In fact, I still don't understand how Bogie's character, Charlie Allnutt, fell in love with her; but, then, the alcoholic Allnutt, one of Bogie's weaker creations, was no bargain himself.

Still, after the first fifteen or so movies, he wanted to see some newer films as well. We kept mixing it up when it came to time periods, but it became harder for me to sell him on black-and-white movies. Occasionally I overcame his resistance, with good results. After much convincing by me, we watched Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921). It was a terrific comedy. He made me rewind it so we could see the fight sequence again, the one in which Chaplin dodges multiple punches from a real bruiser. The big guy wore a shirt that was obviously padded. Today, the muscles would be real.

Another fantastic black-and-white movie he liked was Sunset Boulevard (1950), which scored another nine. It did, however, require explanation here and there, since Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond and William Holden's Joe Gillis were both complicated characters who didn't always behave rationally.

I am thrilled that my son and I engaged in this project. I was able to rewatch many movies I had not seen in decades and even see some gems that I had missed in the course of my original cinematic education. And I think my son now has a much better sense of what he likes, of movie history, and of people's careers in the movie industry. His face lights up when he sees secondary actors we have watched in another movie, and he delights in telling me which movie it was. I have also enjoyed watching a number of a specific director's movies in quick succession, and identifying some of his or her tendencies for him.

In addition to learning something about film history, my son also seemed to learn something about actual history. Many of the movies we watched were set in the past, and his sense of American history definitely improved over the course of our watching. When we did a family game night that required participants to compete in coming closest to the date of an iconic photograph (e.g., the moon landing or the planting of the flag on Iwo Jima), he did remarkably well; and he attributed his success to our movie-watching. We also developed a language between ourselves, the shared language of cinephiles everywhere. Anytime we heard two glasses clink together, we would both say, "Warriors, come out to play-ay-ay."

As much as I liked watching the films themselves, the teaching moments were my favorite part of our year and a half at the movies. Covid may soon recede in the rearview mirror, and I am likely to have fewer nights at home. So will my son, who is entering high school. But I hope the urge to watch movies together will remain with us for a long time, along with the memories of watching (for him) and rewatching (for me) old classics across decades of movie history.

"Troy" is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue. The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies. Better a couple of hundred sweaty warriors than two masses of 50,000 men marching toward one another across a sea of special effects.

The movie recounts the legend of the Trojan War, as the fortress city is attacked by a Greek army led by Menelaus of Sparta and Agamemnon of Mycenae. The war has become necessary because of the lust of the young Trojan prince named Paris (Orlando Bloom), who while during a peace mission to Sparta, seduces the city-state's queen, Helen (Diane Kruger).

This action understandably annoys Helen's husband, Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), not to mention Paris' brother Hector (Eric Bana), who points out, quite correctly, that when you visit a king on a peace mission, it is counterproductive to leave with his wife.

What the movie doesn't explain is why Helen would leave with Paris after an acquaintanceship of a few nights. Is it because her loins throb with passion for a hero? No, because she tells him: "I don't want a hero. I want a man I can grow old with." Not in Greek myth, you don't. If you believe Helen of Troy could actually tell Paris anything remotely like that, you will probably also agree that the second night he slipped into her boudoir, she told him, "Last night was a mistake."

The seduction of Helen is the curtain-raiser for the main story, which involves vast Greek armies laying siege to the impenetrable city. Chief among their leaders is Achilles, said to be the greatest warrior of all time, but played by Brad Pitt as if he doesn't believe it. If Achilles was anything, he was a man who believed his own press releases. Heroes are not introspective in Greek drama, they do not have second thoughts, and they are not conflicted.

Achilles is all of these things. He mopes on the flanks of the Greek army with his own independent band of fighters, carrying out a separate diplomatic policy, kind of like Ollie North. He thinks Agamemnon is a poor leader with bad strategy and doesn't really get worked up until his beloved cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund) is killed in battle.

Patroclus, who looks a little like Achilles, wears his helmet and armor to fool the enemy, and until the helmet is removed everyone thinks that Achilles has been slain. So dramatic is that development that the movie shows perhaps 100,000 men in hand-to-hand combat, and then completely forgets them in order to focus on the Patroclus battle scene, with everybody standing around like during a fight on the playground.

Pitt is a good actor and a handsome man, and he worked out for six months to get buff for the role, but Achilles is not a character he inhabits comfortably. Say what you will about Charlton Heston and Victor Mature, but one good way to carry off a sword-and-sandal epic is to be filmed by a camera down around your knees, while you intone quasi-formal prose in a heroic baritone. Pitt is modern, nuanced, introspective; he brings complexity to a role where it is not required.

By treating Achilles and the other characters as if they were human, instead of the larger-than-life creations of Greek myth, director Wolfgang Petersen miscalculates. What happens in Greek myth cannot happen between psychologically plausible characters. That's the whole point of myth. Great films like Michael Cacoyannis' "Elektra," about the murder of Agamemnon after the Trojan War, know that and use a stark dramatic approach that is deliberately stylized. Of course, "Elektra" wouldn't work for a multiplex audience, but then maybe it shouldn't.

The best scene in the movie has Peter O'Toole creating an island of drama and emotion in the middle of all that plodding dialogue. He plays old King Priam of Troy, who at night ventures outside his walls and into the enemy camp, surprising Achilles in his tent. Achilles has defeated Priam's son Hector in hand-to-hand combat before the walls of Troy, and dragged his body back to camp behind his chariot. Now Priam asks that the body be returned for proper preparation and burial. This scene is given the time and attention it needs to build its mood, and we believe it when Achilles tells Priam, "You're a far better king than the one who leads this army." O'Toole's presence is a reminder of "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), which I saw again two weeks ago, and which proved that patience with dialogue and character is more important than action in making war movies work.

As for the Greek cities themselves, a cliche from the old Hollywood epics has remained intact. This is the convention that whenever a battle of great drama takes place, all the important characters have box seats for it. When Achilles battles Hector before the walls of Troy, for example, Priam and his family have a sort of viewing stand right at the front of the palace, and we get the usual crowd reaction shots, some of them awkward closeups of actresses told to look grieved.

In a way, "Troy" resembles "The Alamo." Both are about fortresses under siege. Both are defeated because of faulty night watchmen. The Mexicans sneak up on the Alamo undetected, and absolutely nobody is awake to see the Greeks climbing out of the Trojan Horse. One difference between the two movies is that Billy Bob Thornton and the other "Alamo" actors are given evocative dialogue, and deliver it well, while "Troy" provides dialogue that probably cannot be delivered well because it would sound even sillier that way.

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He is the cruel and tyrannical supreme king of Mycenae, who desired to conquer the entire Greece and take over the city of Troy. He was also the former master and archenemy of Achilles, the movie's main protagonist.

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