"Troy"

Sean Bean (who played Boromir in "The Fellowship of the Ring") makes a serviceable Odysseus, and Saffron Burrows, as Hector's wife, Andromache, captures at least some of the character's innate sorrowfulness. But the only actor who is both certain of the baloney around him and stands resolutely above it is Peter O'Toole as King Priam, the father of Hector and Paris. (If you're not familiar with the story, skip the next three paragraphs, which contain a spoiler -- though since it is 3,000 years old, what, exactly, have you been spending your time on?)

After Achilles has killed Hector and dragged his body through the dust -- retaliation for Hector's earlier killing of Patroclus -- he retreats to his tent to sulk and scowl. Priam strides into Achilles' quarters, not caring that the disgruntled warrior is likely to kill him, too. He sinks to his knees before Achilles and kisses each of his hands. Then he looks up, his eyes so blue and clear they seem like portals to another world, and begs Achilles to give Hector's body to him, so he can give his son a proper funeral.

Once you get past the notion of one of the great actors of the last half of the 20th century kneeling before someone as unworthy as Pitt, the scene is a revelation: O'Toole knows as well as anyone that good roles for an actor his age are few and far between. So in playing this one, he approaches it as if he were part of a prestigious stage production, and his line readings carve out an oasis of sanity in Petersen's stultifying desert. "I loved my boy from the moment he opened his eyes to the moment you closed them," Priam tells Achilles, the words soaked with so much raw feeling that Achilles barely knows how to respond to them. (Pitt, in return, adopts an air of simian confusion -- he looks like Roddy McDowell in "Planet of the Apes," although McDowell conveyed much more feeling, and channeled it through a lot more makeup.) O'Toole plays the moment as if "Troy" were a real Greek tragedy, and just briefly, the movie's ridiculousness melts around him. His small but intense speech is the closest thing to a heart this movie has.

You could -- and I'm sure people will -- write reams on the ways in which "Troy" differs from its source material. I confess freely that my own experience with "The Iliad" is limited to the portions I read years ago in school and to the vivid explication of it found in Edith Hamilton's "Mythology." But revisiting excerpts of "The Iliad" recently, I was struck not just by how beautiful it is, but how readable. As Hamilton wrote of "The Iliad," "it is written in a rich and subtle and beautiful language which must have had behind it centuries when men were striving to express themselves with clarity and beauty, an indisputable proof of civilization." She goes on to remind us that we're the descendants of the Greeks intellectually, artistically and politically. "The tales of Greek mythology ... throw an abundance of light on what early Greeks were like ... Nothing we learn about them is alien to ourselves."

So what does Petersen's retelling of "The Iliad" say about us as storytellers of the early 21st century -- particularly at a time when we're struggling with our own ideas of nobility in warfare, and perhaps questioning, as many have done before us, if there's any nobility in it at all? I think we could forgive "Troy" for straying far from Homer if it at least told a story that moved or engaged us, if it didn't seem so hell-bent on wowing us with its effects at the expense of its emotion, if its director, its writers and its actors had some sense of the tone of the original material, if not a line-by-line understanding of it. I'd be reasonably content if it even looked decent.

But "Troy" is just a booming extravagance with no lasting value. What will it look like to a civilization 3,000 years from now? It will tell them that American movies went through a dark period when all that mattered was to pack 'em in -- when expressing oneself with clarity and beauty mattered far, far less than filling seats. How long this dark period lasts depends on what we demand from our filmmakers. Maybe it's time to change the course of civilization as we know it.

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