Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) gathered about it the whiff of a tremendous turkey long before it hit the screens. Initially, the fact that it was an Oliver Stone film divided opinion. You can either get the good Oliver Stone (Talk Radio, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July) or the crap Oliver Stone (The Doors, Natural Born Killers, U Turn). And I don't think many people can come to a complete agreement on which of his films should be on which of those lists, anyway.
Then the first photos of Colin Farrell looking very uncomfortable in a blonde wig and a toga hit the rags. It was around this time the general consensus of public opinion was that the film was going to be this year's Big Turkey. Previous Big Turkeys have included Hudson Hawk, Ishtar, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. They are the films that the industry press and the tabloids gather around like vultures for months before their release, keeping the public informed of what a disaster the production was, how the star and the director were fighting, how the studio was going to pull the plug, etcetera...
Big Turkey press doesn't always result in a Big Turkey, although the exceptions are rare. Titanic (1997) had several months of Big Turkey press. Of course, then people actually saw the film: critical raves, record breaking box office, and a slew of Academy Awards followed. There seems to have been a bit of a backlash against Titanic of late, but when it was first released, it was really like the whole world went 'wow!'. I loved it, you loved it. Admit it. And we now all think it's a piece of over-romaticised pap with all the usual James Cameron script issues (no less than three endings for me, please) and astonishing production values, particularly in the groundbreaking effects work. Don't we?
But enough of Titanic. It's reputation has not sunk low enough to be the subject of discussion here. Those shots of Colin Farrell got this film some big time Big Turkey press. Also, Oliver Stone was going be including details of Alexander's bisexuality, which made the film controversial in some circles. The circles that weren't rolling their eyes at how predictably gauche and button pushing Stone was being, anyway. And then we learned some more details of the rest of the cast - Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Anthony Hopkins - performers who had all shown themselves capable of alarming shifts from award calibre subtlety to outrageous scenery chewing. The film was starting to look like a dodgy proposition indeed, even before you add in world class hams like Christopher Plummer and Brian Blessed.
The box office failure of the film was perhaps not as gleefully crowed over as is usual for a Big Turkey. This could be partly attributed to the fact that, malarkey though it is, Alexander is not legendarily bad, just kind of dull bad, and ultimately pretty inoffensive. Stone himself blamed the poor U.S. box office on a 'raging fundamentalism in morality', but it really seemed out in the real world as though the response was more indifferent than that.
I was surprised at how tame the approach to Alexander's sexuality was - I'd come to expect Oliver Stone to tear into any subject matter with a certain bulldog ferocity, and so a couple of hugs and lots of longing looks between Farrell and the feminised Jared Leto just didn't cut it. And in any case, Hephaestion probably should have been played by someone like Ray Stevenson, and without the mascara.
Elsewhere the film is kind of interesting. The Oliver Stone who makes 'serious' films like Born on the Fourth of July was here having to share screen time with the Oliver Stone who wrote Conan the Barbarian. So lectures on the political and social climate of the times are constantly at war with blood-splattered violence, bursts of testosterone, and lurid sex. A scene where Alexander's father Philip explains the legends of ancient Greece to the boy, showing him painted murals depicting the gods, could have come straight out of Conan. Philip is played by Val Kilmer, and his performance can only be described as bonkers - it's his Lizard King, twenty years later, in a toga.
It may have been too much to expect Oliver Stone to make a film about ancient Greece that could be taken seriously. After all, this type of goal has proven elusive for many other films makers more restrained than Stone. Films on the period more often than not recall Old Hollywood playing dress-ups, or the sort of film that's always being made in an old film about Hollywood, or a new film about Old Hollywood. And who can blame them? If you put a bunch of hot actors of varying ages in togas and asked me to make a film with them, I'd get a bit over-excited too.
Maybe I should have reserved 'bonkers' for Angelina Jolie. She hisses, purrs, and spits her way through the role of Olympias, Alexander's mother. Rosario Dawson tries to be the wildest cat in the film, but she doesn't have as many snakes as Angelina. Nor the kinky twist of playing seductive mother to a handsome man played by an actor one year her junior. Jolie knows that the film is more Caligula than I, Claudius.
Colin Farrell's wig comes up surprisingly well in the actual film, much better than in all the paparazzo shots. The actor may be hopelessly miscast, nevertheless it's not a negligible role for Farrell, who is still struggling to live up to the promise he showed in his early films. He has a natural magnetic screen presence and intensity which go quite someway to creating a decent Alexander, and is not shy of striking sparks off his on screen mother, getting off his face at a Babylonian party, or any other type of madness Oliver Stone was trying to create on that day. The crazed narrative Stone has concocted keeps preventing him from creating a real character, however.
The version of Alexander which screened theatrically randomly jumped between time periods, haphazardly patching together a narrative. The acting was committed but mesmerisingly inconsistent. Ultimately, the film was spectacular but never truly gripping.
Buoyed by strong DVD sales, Stone was able to re-visit the film for a second DVD release. This release, subtitled The Director's Cut, was nine minutes shorter than the 175 minute theatrical version. The narrative had been re-structured, and although still jumping between 323 BC and 356 BC, stronger story threads emerged. And Angelina Jolie's character and performance, though still crazed, seemed to have more of a genuine progression. The film was not strikingly different in detail from the version seen at the cinema, but was nevertheless markedly improved.
But Stone was not finished. He went on to produce another version. This one was called Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut (now there's a promising title). And yes, I've seen it. There's so much to enjoy in Alexander - it's so opulent and rich and beserk. It's three terrific films from mismatched genres patched together. Sadly, this final version of the film - which re-introduces a lot of pieces which are good in themselves, but do not strengthen the story - is the poorest, in my opinion. It's a bit more confident with the bisexual stuff, but the storyline straggles across 214 minutes. And there are extended periods where it seems that every scene opens with a subtitle telling us where we are, even when cross cutting between two well established locations. Tedious.
So go for the Director's Cut, I reckon. Because when an Oliver Stone screenplay says...
CUT TO...
EXT DAY: BLOOD-SOAKED BATTLEFIELD
The mist clears to reveal Alexander, sword aloft, on his rearing horse, facing off against a rearing elephant, it's tusk bloody from battle.
...you know that he's going to get a horse and get an elephant and get them to rear up together in front of the camera, and shoot it. He's that kind of batshit. And you gotta have at least a little respect for that.
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