Give me little drink
After imbibing the fall of Troy from the front row of the movie theater, I can honestly say I wish I had been there. Such is the power of the epic that has survived in the film. Sure, I wouldn't have lasted a day on either side (The Trojan Times, "Man dies in gate accident," or The Greek Gazette, "Man dies in tent accident"), but to have even briefly seen the scope of the war would have been enough.
Watching Troy for two-and-a-half hours Saturday night, I got the similar urge to want to see a longer version. Much longer. I wouldn't have minded. One with the long trip across the sea and the longer push across the beach and the flailing at the walls for 10 years and change before breaking them with a trick. And then to see the city burn! The movie misses the mayhem, instead conducting war at the modern and euphemistic 20,000 feet.
But where the movie does succeed, at least in spurring the imagination, is to put faces on the heroes and on Troy itself. As rich as they are, the Iliad (of which I've only read parts) and the Aeneid (the Romans' Exile in Guyville, of which I've read too much) need storytelling to bring enough light to the situations — someone to fill the cultural gaps and mythological ellipses. And while one person alone could bring that much to the text, chances are enough time has passed since the first writings that most will need the storyteller's guide, at least to get them off and running. Is it a shame not to be the one alone? Maybe only a little. We've got our own civilization to worry about.
So I give Troy major points for attempting to tell the story. There's too much cano'ing of arma and not enough of virumque, but Hollywood's done many worse retellings. Peter O'Toole's Priam and the expanse of the beach itself make up for Brad Pitt's uneven Achilles and Orlando Bloom's Bad haircut. In a movie scored like James Cameron goosing Annie Lennox, it's the unforced moments that win out. Take the solemnity given to the coins on the eyes of the dead. The ritual is unexplained. The foreignness comes across as far more singular than the Cliffs Notes funeral pyres that Star Wars already covered.
I'd recommend the movie on those levels; you could take away much more. If D'Angelo-like croppings of Pitt are also your bag, then your local Loewsodeon has the waist to launch a thousand things that rhyme loosely with "ships."
Me, I've gone back to the Aeneid this morning to reread Book II and fill gaps on the Trojan side of the final fire. The only translation online seems to be old school Dryden, but the lines where Aeneas wakes to find Troy burning come through as clearly as any:
Now peals of shouts come thund'ring from afar,
Cries, threats, and loud laments, and mingled war:
The noise approaches, tho' our palace stood
Aloof from streets, encompass'd with a wood.
Louder, and yet more loud, I hear th' alarms
Of human cries distinct, and clashing arms.
We see Aeneas in one brief scene in Troy as the rising hero hustles his father out of town. We don't see his wife or his son, and as cast he appears too young to have either. But no matter. The movie invents an exchange with Paris where the prince passes him the also-invented lucky sword.
Vergil wouldn't have liked it, but I was happy just to see the father show up. They tried, you know? This essence was probably better put in the mistitle of an IMDB comment on the film last week.
Said the reviewer: "Quite possibly the movie ever made."
October 15th, 2011 at 9:50 AM
[...] Max has a nice post quoting old-school Aeneid translator Johnny Dryden (last seen in this blog seven and a half years ago). "A poet cannot speak too plainly on the stage; for volat irrevocabile verbum [in a Horace [...]