All Over the Map

alexander rag time: Colin Farrell stars in the scattershot epic.

Alexander tries to be all things to all people.

Alexander

by Cindy Fuchs

Americans are building another empire in the East. It seems to me an oil-driven empire out of Afghanistan, Iraq and maybe Iran, southern Russian. This is a big deal, and a lot's going to happen and a lot's in play right now, and who knows where it's going to come out? -Oliver Stone, Chicago Tribune

"Are you med!?" So hisses the fiery and oddly accented Roxane (Rosario Dawson), on discovering that her husband is gay. To be fair, her husband is not precisely mad, but only Alexander the Great, the 4th-century conqueror reimagined for Oliver Stone's $155 million wannabe epic. That is, he's burdened by the brilliant ambitions, spastic insecurities and grand delusions that tend to beset Stone's heroes. Not to mention silly dialogue, a snake-obsessed mom (Olympias, played by Angelina Jolie) and Colin Farrell's evidently intractable Irish accent and bad blond wig.

Still, this Alexander might have survived all these excesses and details, if he weren't also asked to navigate a tangle of current political and cultural expectations. And it's this dodgy pressure that, in the end, makes Alexander indeed look quite "med."

While The New York Times' Sharon Waxman asserts that Alexander offers, at long last, a "gay hero," that's not taking into account the ways that sexuality, desire and identity worked in ancient Macedonia. Alexander's lifelong devotion to his boyhood friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto, looking especially beautiful in mascara and long hair) was neither explicitly "gay" nor particularly unusual, a fact the film acknowledges; members of the young king's inner circle share homo-desirous glances, even a couple of embraces. At the same time, Alexander here shares his bed with assorted other men, including the pretty Persian eunuch Bagoas (Francisco Bosch), whose introduction parallels Roxane's—both seduce the king with elaborately sinuous dances.

The similarity ends there, however. The film takes great care to insinuate Alexander's homosexual liaisons via poignant embraces, soulful gazes, and dialogue you can misunderstand if so inclined—according to awkwardly inserted narrator Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins), "It was said later that Alexander was never defeated, except by Hephaistion's thighs." While Alexander doesn't show male-on-male action, it does offer a graphic (and already infamous) sex scene between the son-desiring Alexander and the naked, knife-wielding Roxane.

This being the scene that features prominently in the film's promotional campaign, it's not exactly surprising that violent hetero sex would be more visible than any homoerotic physicality. Stone comes with a reputation, of course, for awesomely bloody and disturbing violence, deployed to make clear the terrible costs of war (his Vietnam war trilogy), sports (Any Given Sunday) and media sensationalism (Natural Born Killers). Perhaps Alexander's strangest aspect is that its battles are so ambiguously staged: The spearings and dismemberings are appropriately hideous, but Alexander's aggressive destiny is quite glorious. The narrative disorder is less a function of Rodrigo Prieto's vivid cinematography than their lawnmowerlike editing.

In fact, Alexander's rationale for creating multiple Alexandrias and "ruling the world" sounds incongruously progressive—namely, if only the populations would mix, their differences might be abandoned. To that end, his reasoning goes, his marriage to the "barbarian" commoner Roxane will lead to a consolidation of loyalties and territories. It doesn't quite work out this way, as she doesn't deliver him a son and his men start to resent their years-long campaign through Persia, where, at Gaugamela, they defeat the much larger force assembled by King Darius (Raz Degan, whose repeated close-ups underline his stereotypically "Arabic" appearance and his cowardice; he doesn't fight while Alexander's all over the battlefield) and India (where they face a very scary military, outfitted with elephants, the tanks of their day).

For all the fighting he does, the young warrior (who died at age 32, in 323 B.C., here depicted in dire grief over Hephaistion's murder) is most beleaguered throughout his life by his warring parents. Introduced in midblow-out, Olympias and one-eyed King Philip II (Val Kilmer) establish and embody the conflict that will plague Alexander (played as a boy by Connor Paolo). A devotee of Dionysus, she plays with snakes and vigorously urges her son to pursue his destiny as the son of Zeus (Philip being so loathsome that she prefers not to even imagine that she carried his child). The film takes a typically Stonian approach to the evil woman, and Jolie delivers a ferocious performance, heavily accented (Slavo-Greek?) and deliriously Norma Desmondish. She even appears, with snake erect on her lovely shoulder, following Alexander's sexual conquest of Roxane. She's so overtly malicious that even her son has to admit, wearily, "It's a high rent she charges for nine months in the womb."

At the same time, Philip urges his son to distrust women as a class and appreciate the intimacy he might share with men. While he wants his son to be a great soldier (and equestrian, astride the rowdy black stallion Bucephalas), he denies the boy's mother, essentially calling him a bastard. Though he teaches his son that women are bad-bad-bad, Philip does remarry, to have a child with the properly Macedonian Eurydice (Marie Meyer). At this point, Alexander only gets the throne when his father is assassinated, in a scene that occurs early, before all Alexander's campaigning, but only appears late, perhaps to underline its trauma for the son (though Farrell's wailing here, like most of his performance, is less than convincing).

Eventually, all this psychologizing over Alexander's motives turns tedious. The film does complicate his "greatness," suggesting that his understanding of warfare is at least partly cynical ("Fear makes men fight better") and his ambitiousness the result of serious personal "issues." At the same time, Alexander wants to make its hero heroic, a man of vision and passion. Here, rather than seeming both and all, he seems distracted and unfocused, undone by too many expectations.

Alexander Directed by Oliver Stone A Warner Bros. release Now playing at area theaters