Beowulf (2007)

For about thirty minutes, Beowulf is exactly what you secretly hope it to be: swaggering, absurd, atmospheric, over the top, a burly big budget macho cover of just about every horror and sword and sandal cliche in the playbook. The pleasures are fleeting though, and soon give way to a schizophrenic film that seems to be aiming for about ten different things at once, and missing on all ten counts. Is the film an exploration of the dark heart that lies in every man, particularly great men? Is it a political intrigue film, detailing the jostling of power and ruffling of feathers that occur when an outsider is brought in? Is the film about the sexual hypocrisy of the time? Or the religious hypocrisy? Sadly, Beowulf is all of those things, and none of those things.

The film does have moments, and the reason that you should maybe see Beowulf despite my reservations is Grendel. Let’s talk about Grendel. Grendel, as performed by professional hipster curiosity Crispin Glover, is a legitimately memorable movie monster. Tortured, charred, cancerous, with a hyper sensitive ear drum that beats like a tell-tale tumor, Grendel is the broken heart of Beowulf. Some have compared this take on Grendel to the Gollum of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, and that comparison isn’t entirely unfair to either party, though to me Grendel bears a greater resemblance to the Frankenstein monster: both born of self-absorption, both just as flippantly discarded, and both denied the kind of basic understanding of their existence that we take for granted. This lack of understanding is channeled, rather inconveniently for the citizens of Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) kingdom, into destructive, all consuming rage. Cue Beowulf (Ray Winstone), the only warrior who can stop the beast.

So, yes, Beowulf is a mishmash, but it does have moments of true fly by the seat of your pants kineticism, the kind of stuff that hasn’t graced a Zemeckis film since his underrated Death Becomes Her. The film also has Angelina Jolie in the first film since Pushing Tin (not kidding) that has any idea what to do with her. After killing Grendel (disappointingly soon), Beowulf must confront the creature’s mother, a water demon (it’s true form is seen in eerily elusive reflections) who morphs into Jolie at her fleshiest for both Beowulf’s and our benefit. Their big scene is largely one absurd phallic double entendre after another, but it underlines what’s right about this movie when it isn’t suffocating under all the the extraneous hugger mugger: it’s GLORIOUSLY absurd. GLORIOUSLY reveling in big, grand emotions like self-loathing or, in this sequence, the kind of pure, overheated lust that you probably haven’t felt since you were thirteen and looking at your English teacher in a certain way.

Oh, what the big directors of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s could’ve done with this creature. Picture Angelina Jolie in a Kim Novak role in a (good) Hitchcock movie. Or working with Otto Preminger in his down and dirty noir period, or with Nicolas Roeg, or with the Godard of Contempt, or anything from the French New Wave. Jolie has the presence, and even the talent, for such a filmography, but she’s been ridiculously squandered so far. Are there no American directors with even the slightest hint of erotic imagination? The answer is apparently no, which leaves Jolie stranded in either bloodless sell out B pictures, or pompous Oscar prestige films. Her entrance here, a golden carmel kissed siren with cloved feet and a snake’s tail, seemingly floating out of the water, leaves one hoping that other directors will get the idea.

Unfortunately, Ms. Jolie returns to the sidelines after a too short sequence with Beowulf, and it’s back to the half-formed subplots. A character who looks and sounds a lot like John Malkovich doubts Beowulf then makes peace and gives him his sword (this is actually before the Jolie scene but who cares). Beowulf inherits bedly rights to the Queen who looks and sounds a little like Robin Wright Penn. Beowulf trades a few “what is it to be a moral, manly man” pensees with his second in command Brendan Gleeson, etc. Another problem with Zemeckis’s aim here is the technology. No matter how much Zemeckis may insist to the contrary, the animation here is weird, and I have a hard time giving a damn whether a marionette who looks a little like Ray Winstone gives in to his inner bad boy or not.

Eventually a dragon, another bastard child of sexual gluttony, arrives, and the film unleashes another hellfire sequence that can best be appreciated on a big screen with those nifty 3-D goggles. The film then calms down for an ending that briefly connects all of the other half baked dots that made the second act so slow to begin with. I did like the final image, a number that recalls Polanski’s Macbeth in its implication of continued bloodshed, but it’s too little too late.

★★½

Posted on November 19th, 2007 in 2007, Reviews, Action, Drama |

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