How the West Lost
ALEXANDER
NOTRE MUSIQUE
DIRECTED BY JEAN-LUC GODARD
YOU CAN'T MEASURE the huge ambition of Oliver Stone's Alexander by its cost or scale. Scale is what ultimately ruins such strictly commercial epics as House of Flying Daggers, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix sequels and Gladiator-all grandiose yet trivial. Alexander's substance is greater than mere spectacle. Through the story of Alexander the Great, the Hellenic warrior who conquered Persia in 323 B.C., Stone expresses the same political curiosity evidenced in his recent documentaries on Fidel Castro. He wants to elucidate the psychology and cultural customs that those other frivolous entertainment movies avoided through the low ambition to simply wow naive audiences.
Although Alexander is not American history, Stone uses the subject to reflect on our historical legacy. Going back to ancient times, he's specifically concerned with the history we are currently making. This production, filmed during the last calendar year, tilts awareness toward the ongoing war in Iraq. Perceiving the audacity of global conquest in this modern-day instance of military incursion, Stone suggests that what some people argue as modern policy is, if properly understood, classical. He rewrites biography to illustrate Western heritage-as did John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930). His risky, courageous ambition is to get audiences to think. Fully aware that getting caught up in the historical derring-do can be a form of self-deception, Stone uses the enticements of the warrior genre to more serious purpose: He uses that genre to examine the basis of manifest destiny.
Alexander starts out like a PBS-reenacted history lesson. In Egypt, the aged King Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) recalls his adventures on the expansionist campaign with the dead hero, relating the story to a group of hieroglyphers. This is how history was set down, Stone proposes, before launching into his elaborate, cgi-extravagant imagining of that history.
Stone's reliance on myth echoes what Ford and Griffith knew about the political imagination: that Americans are drawn to charismatic figures, expecting to have their political consciousness reinforced by stories and legends. Alexander's first scenes resemble stylized Greek tragedy, complete with a great tragic heroine embodied with mythological stature by Angelina Jolie playing Olympias, the witch-like wife of King Philip (Val Kilmer), who claims that her son Alexander was actually fathered by the god Zeus. This mixture of the mythic, the historic and the maniacal not only conveys the typical romanticism of nationalist history, it's Stone getting to the roots of Western vainglory. Once the story shifts from Alexander's boyhood to his confusion as a young adult (portrayed by Colin Farrell), Stone confronts the mystifying complexity of Alexander's egoism. ("Fortune favors the bold," Alexander quotes Virgil.)
This is not just a story of aggression; Stone makes it about Alexander's individual conflicted drive (past sex and fear) that determined the course of the Western world even before Christianity. Dramatizing the inherent arrogance in mankind, Stone shows it as the foundation of civilization as well as war. (Alexander is seen as both an extraordinary battle tactician and the originator of tax codes.) Stone's view here is as ambivalent as it was in his tortured modern-day biographical epic Nixon. Unlike Ford and Griffith, Stone doesn't feel the need to pay homage to our forebears; he's from the cynical 60s generation that automatically questioned established political assumptions. Though it is plain weird to see this skeptical approach applied to antiquity, it also redeems a genre that might otherwise just be noisy.
In a great action/historical film like Zhang Yimou's Hero, romanticism did not override political issues. Despite oafish critics dismissing Hero as "fascist," it is not fascist to attempt to understand the forces that propel individuals to make the history we live by. Hero's exultant emotional metaphors were also the stuff of psychological insight. The man who directed Nixon and the shadow hagiography JFK understands this very well; Stone observes Alexander's fallibility as a template for the behavior of today's leaders-and masses.
"All men reach and fall," Alexander muses. Thus does this movie put filmgoers' typical need to adore and emulate screen icons to the test. It is about failure as much as it is about triumph, including the psychological torment and cultural depression that ensued in the aftermath of Alexander's inability to capture India and Asia. (The fearsome battle between Alexander's army and Indians riding elephants is tinted psychedelic red, recalling Zhang's chromatic devices in Hero.) Stone acknowledges Alexander's boldness as the source of colonialism, the globe-conquering folly that continues in our present day. During the era of Desert Storm and Phantom Thunder, no filmmaker could be more urgently responsive.
Jean-Luc Godard's latest film Notre Musique shares Stone's concern with the effects of history on the big-L liberal imagination. Set during an academic conference (for European Literary Encounters) in Sarajevo, Notre Musique critiques warfare through an examination of intellectual conscience and the documentary genre. It opens with an astonishing assemblage of actual and fictional war footage. By degrading the fictional clips in this casualties-of-war montage so that they match the harshness of newsreels, Godard shows what memory does to perception, what time does to the eye and mind, plus what visual technology has done to our emotional sensitivity.
Notre Musique addresses the millennial fascination with history. Godard braves the rare intellectual's confession that images and literature simultaneously distance us from truth and confound our empathy. This concept parallels Stone's reworking of the warrior genre. Ptolemy's narration, pronounced from the Library of Alexandria, reflects Godard's modern image of a disused library in Sarajevo that is full of cast-off books (discarded thoughts)-the irrelevant works and dreams of a detached privileged class that is no longer directly in touch with war and ambition.
Not aiming for the art house, Stone's great ambition is to awaken the popular audience's appreciation of history. It shows an almost Godardian perversity to deliberately complicate a usually simplistic genre. But why not? Today, the very mention of Persia and Mesopotamia call up both fable and unavoidable modern tension. Ironically, because Godard specifies his counterpoint of text and image, viewers are not likely to be bewildered by Notre Musique. Yet Stone's juxtaposing of text and image (beautiful mosaic-tile maps of the old world introduce each scene in contrast to the colorful realistic recreations of ancient splendors) is likely to disappoint people who only want to get off on spectacle. They're used to stifling their political reflexes with fantasy. They need the analysis of art experience that Godard provides. He announces "a cinema of images and ideas not just stories, but rather the building blocks of stories." It's a crucial theory for appreciating Stone's Alexander. Both directors answer the contemporary need for cinema to do more than offer dreams but to also account for the world's political difficulties.
Admittedly, Notre Musique is rarefied (Godard cites Dante as the influence for his film's Hell/Purgatory/Heaven structure), but in Alexander Stone's attempt at populist filmmaking also becomes cryptic through his reliance on no-longer-common references to Prometheus, Virgil, even a Citizen Kane trope where a dying Alexander drops the ruby ring given to him by his beloved friend Hephaestion (Jared Leto). Each richly designed battle scene rouses Gladiator-style excitement, yet Stone insists on turning these into cosmic ruminations (an eagle soaring above, offers godlike objectivity).
Striving to both achieve and understand greatness accounts for Stone's uneven handling of myth and reconsideration of history. As Alexander moves further east into Asia, Stone takes on the sinister exoticism of Apocalypse Now. When Alexander's troops are defeated in India (where he receives a fatal wound and his soldiers begin to dissent), the young Ptolemy cautions "You left your king!" It paraphrases the JFK line, "Do not forget your dying king." The complex pageantry of Alexander's legend gives way to Stone's obsession with the miasma of Vietnam and the trauma of the Kennedy assassination. In fact, his most brilliantly staged segment flashes back to Philip's assassination where Alexander first assumed his destiny. The moment is both ecstatic and disturbing.
But rather than ridicule Alexander as an overambitious action flick, it's best to recognize it as a feat of personal filmmaking. More so than the unexpectedly visionary Any Given Sunday (the exploration of American machismo that may be Stone's masterpiece), Alexander responds to America's political confusion of the past three years. Going beyond Michael Moore's power envy and nation-hatred, Stone searches for the source of racism and imperialism in Western ideology. It's such a personal endeavor that Colin Farrell cannot live up to the legendary image in the filmmaker's head. (Stone needed the miracle David Lean was blessed with when casting Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia.) Farrell is left doing hollow exhortation like a trifling Braveheart. Only Angelina Jolie offers a towering characterization, even overcoming the Freudian Mom phobia that Stone imputes to Alexander. She's the truest spectacle in a movie that is more privately obsessive than even The Passion of the Christ.
"We are most alone when we are with the myths," Old Ptolemy says to his scribes. The lonely grand gesture of Alexander proves that Stone clearly desires a myth to cling to, yet as a contemporary thinking American, he must contend with political conflict and dubious historical figures-the ambiguous legacies of JFK, Nixon and Alexander. Lucky to be so smart, does he wish to be dumb (a silly patriot, a foolish protestor)? Or be like Ford, an ambivalent American who always inquired into the confused motives and humbling humanity that lies behind the Great Man myths?
Stone lacks Godard's gift for poetic abstraction (the title Notre Musique refers to the hubbub of history and the self-examination of art), but the final sequence in Alexander is plenty self-reflexive: As Old Ptolemy contemplates a marble bust of Alexander, weighing the symbol against the life, Stone knowingly evokes Hopkins' summary oration in Spielberg's Amistad, Hollywood's most sophisticated historical film, which also called for a fresh connection to our political inheritance. Alexander is complex and unsatisfying but valiant. In its consideration of our present ventures in the Middle East, it offers a cautionary epic about how the West won and lost history.