BV Reviews: 'Alexander'
By Armond White, Special to AOL BlackVoices
Oliver Stone’s ‘Alexander’ is an antiquity epic like no other. Although set in the past, when Hellenic warrior Alexander the Great stormed into the Middle East and Asia, it is actually about the present day. Stone has proven himself to be Hollywood’s most politically minded film director with such controversial and topical films as ‘JFK,’ ‘Natural Born Killers,’ ‘Nixon,’ ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Platoon’ to his credit. Like those movies, ‘Alexander’ combines flashy, provocative showmanship with a contemporary sense of how old and new politics affect viewers’ lives.
Black audiences have embraced Stone’s films ever since his multiethnic-cast ‘Platoon’ and especially his football epic ‘Any Given Sunday,’ which featured Jamie Foxx’s breakout performance as the upstart young quarterback. It’s because they have been able to appreciate Stone’s awareness of how race and class play into all our social institutions -- from the military to professional sports to the outrageous prison riot that boiled over with the unarticulated grievances and resentment of the mostly black inmates in ‘Natural Born Killers.’
In this new film, Stone once again treats ancient history in a way that the politically anxious underclass can readily understand. The racial and economic classes currently recruited for the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq will be able to see themselves mirrored in the troops that followed Alexander (played by Colin Farrell) in his triumphant, but ultimately tragic, eastward push.
A more intelligent film than Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator,’ ‘Alexander’ enlightens viewers about the politics that are implicit in battles between nations and kings. The epic confrontation between Alexander’s Greek army and the Persian army contrasts the armor and machinery of each legion, pointing out social and facial differences so that the difference in cultural style looms as large as the vague, arbitrary political rationales for the fight.
By using the warrior genre to enlighten moviegoers, Stone depends on pop art to make up for the insufficiencies of our modern educational system. Students from ineffective urban schools may not know anything about historical figures such as Prometheus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Bucephalus or Alexander the Great, but because Stone makes films as a conscientious populist (he knows better than to insult audiences by merely offering them escapism), he tries to be both entertaining and instructive about history. The film’s most surprising impact comes from its similarity to Greek tragedy, an obscure theatrical form that Stone revives in early scenes with Angelina Jolie as Queen Olympias, Alexander’s witch-like mother and wife of King Philip (Val Kilmer). Olympias claims that Alexander was fathered by the Greek god Zeus, and Jolie has the otherworldly demeanor, statuesque beauty and far-away eyes to make the claim credible. She makes the echoes of Greek tragedy scintillating, just as Fatoumata Coulibaly did playing the matriarch in Ousmane Sembene’s Greek tragedy-derived ‘Moolaade.’
Like Sembene, Stone understands it is useful for audiences to look at movies with the same curiosity people that used to bring to established forms of storytelling. Some of the best special effects in ‘Alexander’ are the bright, tile mosaic maps of the ancient world used to punctuate each sequence -- another form of audience enlightenment and visual enchantment. This makes it easy to follow as Alexander cuts his swath across the globe. Imperialism confronts exotic worlds. Stone shows the white West venturing into the colored Orient. Alexander himself criticizes his troops, citing “Your contempt for a world far older than ours!”
At this point, Stone sharpens his cautionary tale against the hubris of Western expansion. When Alexander conquers Bactria, he goes against his advisers’ demand for a Greek heir and takes as his first wife the dark-skinned Roxane. Stone cast Rosario Dawson (‘Men in Black II’ and ‘The 25th Hour’) for her full-lipped resemblance to Angelina Jolie to imply Alexander’s Oedipal complex. But audiences will also react to Roxane for her apparent ethnicity. (In the film’s press kit, Dawson describes herself as “race-mixture on two legs, combining Puerto-Rican, Cuban, Afro-American and even a relevant dash of Irish.”)
Stone’s boldest tactic was to have King Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) narrate the film to fit oral tradition, but it also linked the film to Steven Spielberg’s ‘Amistad’ where Hopkins’ Supreme Court oration helped the Africans win their freedom. This connection is Stone’s way of making a movie epic relevant to today’s audience. ‘Alexander’ is not about hero worship but about a fascinating historical figure whose ambition and destiny (like JFK’s and Nixon’s) affect our lives. Stone shows Alexander as more than a figure of myth or a force of nature but as a manipulator of history. This is the rare film that scrutinizes the roots of Western imperialism -- detailing how the West tried to impose its history on the world.
BREAK IT DOWN: Too intelligent for action freaks. Best suited for those curious about history.
Nov. 26, 2004