Stone's approach to Alexander's sexual orientation manages to be both ham-fisted and insultingly timid. It's a shame, because Farrell is at his best in his scenes with Leto. The two don't kiss, or even caress -- mostly, they just speak to each other with warm regard and lock their arms around each other in a manly clench. But Farrell is such a sensual presence (and such a hardworking actor, although as yet an untested one) that he makes the tenderness between the two men seem far more natural than the idiotic dialogue Stone and his co-writers have embroidered around it. When he looks at Leto, you see something very real inside him, a mix of romance and carnality that doesn't exactly have a name.

But Stone sabotages any depth of feeling Farrell tries to put across. In the dramatic wedding-night sequence, Hephaistion appears in Alexander's bedchamber, bearing a ring for his beloved. Dressed in a scraggly fur vest, his eyes ringed with smudgy kohl, Leto looks like a wronged hippie chick, ready at any moment to fling himself down, tearfully, on his Indian bedpread while Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" plays over and over again on the turntable. (Leto tries hard, but trust me, no actor can survive that eyeliner.)

In an exceedingly dorky, roundabout way, the movie works hard to "explain" why Alexander is -- well, you know. His dad is domineering, demanding and withholds love. (He also likes to throw Olympias down, caveman-style, when her heaping helping of good looks become more than his one good eye can resist; she gets rid of him by vengefully pressing her thumb into it. Jolie is the only actor here who gives the movie the shot of unvarnished camp glamour it needs.) Olympias, on the other hand, adores her son. Wrapping one of her beloved snakes around the very young Alexander, still small enough to share her bed, she purrs, "Her skin is water, her tongue is fire -- she is your friend."

With a mom like that, a kid is guaranteed to grow up into one messed-up warrior, and his father's warnings ("All your life, beware of women. They're far more dangerous than men") sure don't help. No wonder the lad prefers tussling in the sun with Hephaistion.

The point Stone is crabwalking toward, maybe, is that leadership qualities are complicated, and that they can't be strictly defined by conventional notions of masculinity. But even though that impulse is admirable, Stone squelches it at every turn -- he's too conventional a director (and one with too grand a sense of his own capabilities) to ever deny his own machismo. The real Alexander may have been a complex man of many appetites. But Stone is still just a big dumb guy.

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