Site Presented By
Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
We who are about to be bored salute you! Russell Crowe stars in Ridley Scott's Roman bloodfest.
May 5, 2000 | For all practical purposes, Ridley Scott's reputation as one of the most important mainstream directors of his era rests on just two movies, but what movies they are! "Alien" and "Blade Runner" didn't just imagine the future, they helped create it. Grumpy critics like me often claim that style has become substance in Hollywood filmmaking, and in Scott's case it's all too true. For better or worse, design is the point of his films; it is his narrative mode, his central character and his subject matter. As my significant other suggested the other night, now that Scott has lived to see the designers of midtown Manhattan self-consciously emulate "Blade Runner," perhaps the ancient world is all he has left to exploit.
With the lone exception of "Thelma and Louise," which is atypical of his work in many ways, Scott's post-1982 films have failed to capture filmgoers' imaginations or to strike the sparks of cold genius that seemed so evident in his early, visionary masterpieces. Yeah, I know that "Legend" and "Someone to Watch Over Me" have their defenders (myself included), but that's not the point. As for "1492: Conquest of Paradise," "White Squall" and "G.I. Jane," well, please. We're talking expensive candy -- really expensive candy -- with no chewy center.
So the answer to your question about "Gladiator" is that the lights are blazing and the music's playing nice and loud, but as far as I can tell nobody's home. Its re-creation of the Roman world, from the gladiatorial games of the Colosseum to a hill town in North Africa to the barbarian front in Germania, offers in equal parts computer graphics and old-fashioned moviemaking spectacle -- and is suitably impressive throughout. It even has a few sneaky moments of emotional power, as when the general turned slave turned gladiator Maximus (Russell Crowe) dreams of meeting his family in the afterlife, or in his stoical friendship with an African gladiator named Juba (Djimon Hounsou).
But for all its grandeur, "Gladiator" is a canned experience, a film that flails around awkwardly trying to find a reason to exist, or at least a compelling story to tell. (Those who claim to see it as an Allegory for Our Time are desperately reaching, if you ask me.) Creating entertainment on an epic scale is not the same thing as creating an epic, and "Gladiator" suggests an elaborate, fancy-dress version of the video game Mortal Kombat. Sure, it has plot elements -- a murdered emperor, his wicked son and sultry daughter, the hero's longing for his dead wife and child -- but they mostly seem like exotic window dressing arranged around repetitious scenes of violence.
In the words of film historian David Thomson, Scott is a decorator, a borrower and a synthesist who absorbs and reprocesses many different elements and influences. His borrowings here result in an undigested mash more redolent of his own youth in postwar England than of the second century: Chop up the plots from various Hollywood sword-and-toga epics of the 1950s and mix in the conspiratorial atmosphere of "I, Claudius" and some warmed-over Shakespearean acting. Add the beefy, brooding Crowe for a hint of contemporary angst and stir in some World Wrestling Federation-level mayhem. Serve tepid.
Crowe's Jeffrey Wigand in "The Insider" was a man who could hardly begin to understand his own complexities; part of the appeal of that movie was watching the amazement with which he viewed his own courage and principle. Maximus is meant to be a man of simple tastes whose pain is all on the surface, and it's a credit to Crowe that the dullest and simplest character of his career still seems to have clouds and shadows swimming behind his eyes.
The film begins with Maximus leading his legions to a glorious victory over the German barbarians in a stunningly successful mud 'n' blood 'n' arrows battle sequence. We learn that he was once in love with Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), witchy daughter of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). But like the barbarian battle itself, the Lucilla romance doesn't really go anywhere or mean anything; I think it's there only as a plot device, so Lucilla will have a reason to help the enslaved Maximus later in the film.
