Alexander: Director's Cut

Oliver Stone makes epic historical films, but they are rarely satisfying as history. Take his greatest film, JFK, one of the best movies of the 90's. It's a stunning impressionistic work of paranoid imagination, a penetrating insight into the fevered fears that gripped America in the wake of the JFK assassination and the looming Vietnam War.

Platoon, as well, says more about the psyche of Oliver Stone when he was a soldier than it does about the realities of the Vietnam War. And The Doors deconstructs nearly everything about the 1960's better than it does the inner life of Jim Morrison.

These are great films not because they explore the past in an informative and accurate way than because they show us a perspective on history, and use recent events to examine the relationship between human weakness and the movement of civilizations.

Now he gives us Alexander, a large-scale retelling of the life of one of history's great conquerers, and again the film fails as education or historiography. Unfortunately, it's also one of Stone's least compelling personal narratives, a thinly-sketched portrait of an unknowable man, cluttered with incident but surprisingly short on insights.



The material would seem to suit Stone perfectly. Alexander's story calls into question traditional ideas about masculinity, about the will to power, about cultural domination and Manifest Destiny and about mythmaking, the transformation of verifiable reality into legend.

Yet, as he often does when taking on an ambitious, oversized project, Stone gets easily distracted. Rather than find a focal point for his story, he drifts around Alexander's life, cherry-picking specific moments without giving the film any sort of framework.

Take the film's opening. We start with an odd opening credits sequence, filled with animated hawks (used throughout the film to represent the pull of Alexander's destiny). Then we get an overlong monologue from Anthony Hopkins as Alexander's confidant and historian Ptolmey, explaining to us Alexander's family life and importance in history. Then we get young Alexander under the tutelage of Aristotle (Christopher Plummer), and playing with his mysterious and beautiful mother Olympia (Angelina Jolie).

This brings us to about 20 minutes into the movie, and we're provided with almost no context or narrative. We're told a lot of information about Alexander, but without seeing anything for ourselves or experiencing his world in any way, they remain disconnected factoids. Worse, Stone seems to want to push boundaries but without offending anyone.

He said that with this DVD Director's Cut, he wanted to make the film more accessible to American audiences. I did not watch the movie theatrically, so I have no point of comparison, but it's possible he has trimmed too much sensationalistic material, making the relationships vague and ambiguous.

Alexander appears to be gay, sharing his love only with his lifelong friend Hephaistion, and yet they don't seem to share any sort of real phsyical intimacy. It's as if Stone wants us to hold out some belief that these two may in fact just be close friends, even though he constantly refers back to Alexander's failure to impregnate the barbarian he took as a bride (Rosario Dawson).

Likewise, Stone implies that King Phillip (Val Kilmer) was prone to rape Olympia, which may have led to her telling Alexander he was fathered by Zeus, but he never makes any of this material explicit. Could this help explain Alexander's coldness towards his mother, even before he learns of her possible role in Phillip's assassination? Who knows?

For such a long and involved film, a movie with so many ideas floating around (and indeed, so much talking), there just isn't much to grab on to in Alexander. It's a few set pieces and basic themes in search of a movie.

That isn't to say it doesn't look spectacular. Like most Stone films, it's well-shot, a robust visual experience highlighted by the kind of expansive, elaborate sets and costumes that once were the norm in big Hollywood historical epics. The battle scenes wear far better than comparable sequences in Gladiator or Troy. There's none of the shaky, indistinct camerawork of Ridley Scott's bloated blockbuster, nor the cartoonish CGI of Wolfgang Peterson's comic book "Iliad" adaptation.

But still, the film doesn't feel very consequential, and it's a film about the overtaking of the entire known world. After nearly 3 hours, I couldn't tell you Stone's core theory about Alexander. Was he a noble conquerer, trying to unite the world under a just and fair central government, or a savage colonialist? Was he a neurotic gay man, threatened from outside and tormented within by his inability to produce an heir, or was he a brave bisexual unwilling to accept the roles placed on him by an uncaring world? Was he a sensitive ruler with the best interests of his people in mind or a crass opportunist after only plunder and his own glory?

I have my own theories, but I honestly don't know what Stone thinks. And shouldn't that be the point of a 3 hour Alexander the Great movie? It certainly isn't to give the audience a clear idea about Alexander's campaign, because none of that is made evident by the movie. In fact, after Persia has been conquered, Stone provides us no real reason at all for Alexander's continued ventures across the globe.

Part of the problem is Colin Farrell, who is woefully miscast in this role. Farrell's just a really boring actor. I know the girls like him because he's cute and kind of dangerous or something, I guess (although how anyone who appeared in Daredevil could be considered dangerous is beyond me). The guy can get by in films like Minority Report. It's an important but not too large role that relies on him being businesslike and a bit weasely. Okay, done.

But here, playing one of history's greatest icons, a larger-than-life figure capable of leading an army into uncharted territory and decimating several world empires, he's out of place. It doesn't help that he keeps his Irish accent intact for no good reason, that he's not believable for one moment as a blond, and that he seems embarrassed whenever he's called upon to share a tender moment with another man.

So he talks occsaionally about his oversized dreams of uniting the world, but there just isn't really any passion in his words. When Kevin Costner risks his family, his job and his reputation to put Clay Shaw on trial, we believe that he cares about the truth. When Tom Cruise gets behind that microphone to share his experiences, we believe that he needs his voice to be heard. But when Colin Farrell has his William Wallace moment in front of the troops, telling them to go kill a bunch of Persians, the moment has nothing behind it and the actor has no real presence.

Alexander is a flat movie and a dull movie, and though he's had some misfires before, I've never really thought those things about Oliver Stone's work before.