This is not a typical film for me, like the last film reviewed here, it was the recommendation of a friend, the same friend actually, so I had a fairly good guess what sort of film it was going to be like. This film arose out of a vigorous discussion of Plato’s views of theatre, I punted the proposition that amusement parks were morally worthless by dint of focussing solely on, well amusement. Although I think Plato was a wingnut I can understand where he was coming with some of his views on theatre.
By the same line of thought, though scarcely immoral, amusement parks are vacuous and saccharine; amusement parks are ultimately boring because they are superficial and emotive. Somehow this resulted in me agreeing to see the film Gladiator. (This is how conversations between us usually go).
This is the story of Maximus, it is the story of a decent man who fell far and landed hard. The story of a man who sought his redemption, in rage and hate and animus, but who destroyed himself in the process.
The other major characters in the story are Commodus, “Caesar Jr”, Lucilla, his sister Juba, a Numidian, and Gracchus, a republican senator.
During the opening half hour Commodus murders his father, the Caesar, to ascend the throne by deception. His father had planned to devolve his powers to Maximus with the eventual aim of returning power to the senate, much to the horror of his ambitious and personally insecure son. To secure his position he tries to execute Maximus however the attempt is bungled and Maximus makes a physics-defying escape, running home to rescue his family.
Commodus is, unfortunately, much more effective with his family however, his forces destroy the estate and murder his child and wife. Maximus buries the bodies and collapses in grief and exhaustion.
With him collapses the first phase of the character’s development, “Optimistic-Maximus”. He gives way to “Numb-Maximus”. This man looses all will to survive or fight or do anything for any particular purpose, he even looses his name. He is addressed simply as “Spaniard” during this time.
However, once he recovers from his numb-ness the death of his beloved family will prove a major, if not the sole, factor in the character’s development and a key event in the story’s causal flow, more on that later.
He is picked up by slave traders and meets Juba, a Numidian Farmer also in the caravan. Shortly, Proximo is introduced in one of the film’s few comic scenes. The slave-trader bustles up to him full of good news about his latest shipment and Proximo greets him angrily, to say the least; his Giraffes are defective! they won’t mate! Perhaps the most incongruous line in the whole show is Proximo’s apoplectic “You sold me queer Giraffes!”
Using the supposedly homosexual giraffe for leverage, Proximo is able to extort a much lower price for the slaves and then drags them off for training as gladiators. So numb is Maximus that he even refuses to fight during the training, characterizing himself as a scribe, claiming septilingualism (which is met with the caustic declaration that tomorrow he can “scream in seven languages”). Proximo berates the captives, cursing their mothers and telling them that they shall fight, while offering his own utterly nihilistic world-view as justification for the atrocity.
Spainiard (for he has lost his name) seems to take this view at face value, after all, it is not so very different from his own. Many of his actions during this period are motivated by nihilistic whim. Later, Proximo addresses his “Spaniard” advising him to be more creative in his destruction, more showmanship-like. In the next fight he obliges with a colorful double-handed sword-display… the crowd goes wild! Like all other acts during this period “Numb-Maximus” is here motivated by apathy apathy and recklessness. “Why not?” after all, he is thinking, “Nothing matters any-more.” He is personally lost and disoriented
The political motivation for the resumption of the games in the city of Rome is made evident during conversation between Gracchus and his ally Gaius. The games dazzle the people into surrendering their freedom, playing into the autocratic agenda of the new emperor. One cannot help but feel that here, like elsewhere the creators are waxing polemical about the George W. Bush administration to the Sept. 11 disaster. This, however cannot be the case as the film was released in 2000 and the lines themselves must have been written much, much earlier. It is interesting to watch the film through the lens of the post-9/11 world and see the relevance of the political statements.
Proximo proves to be a more complex character than previously expected, he turns out to be a former gladiator himself, he shows his Spaniard the wooden sword that is the symbol of his freedom, something granted personally… by the emperor…
In a flash, of course, Maximus realizes that this is a way he can get close to the emperor and obtain his revenge. This is the beginning of the end of “Numb-Maximus” and the beginning of the beginning of “Vengeful-Maximus”.
As his performance enraptures the crowd and delights the emperor, Maximus does get his chance, eventually, Commodus walks out after one of the fights to meet this “Spaniard”, bringing with him his young nephew. Agonized, he finds himself unable kill his foe because of the presence of the boy. The crowd forces Commodus to spare Maximus, beginning the emperor’s decline in to open madness.
This is an important moment for both characters, Maximus proves he can pull himself together and act rationally and even, by the standards of his day, decently. This is, of course, a necessary lens, we must view him in the context of; the moral standards of his day as, for by ours, he is a murderer of the worst kind, I’ll talk more about that later.
Casting his numbness aside, Maximus even argues with Proximo about the moral goodness of the fight, his resolve is now fixed. Things begin to move much more quickly now as he plots with Lucilla and Gracchus to re-unite himself with his old army and overthrow the emperor by force. Commodus suspects the plans, though, and by dint of threat to her son, forces Lucilla to reveal everything. His guards invade Proximo’s compound and Juba and the other gladiators hold them off while Maximus escapes, only to be recaptured.
Completely delirious, Commodus announces he will duel Maximus in the arena, however he stilettoes him in the lung to ensure his advantage, in-spite of this, driven by his hatred and overwhelming thirst for revenge Maximus is victorious, when Commodus looses his sword, his guards refuse to aid him and Maximus beats him to the ground and stabs him with his on stiletto.
But with his wound the exertion is too much, Maximus hastily orders the gladiators freed, Gracchus re-instated and all power returned to the senate before collapsing surrounded by visions of the afterlife. He dies in Lucilla’s arms, assuring her that her son is safe.
Maximus is played by Russell Crowe, who has his work cut out for him. The character is larger than life, and spends a good part of the film in a state of deep depression, this in-fact almost threatened to completely de-rail the production as depression is not a valid personality. The producers clearly hoped that we would simply not notice how dullardly Maximus is during his “Numb” period. Crowe gives the role his best effort though, and while I don’t think he deserved it he did win an Academy Award for the rolê.
Crowe gets off to a poor start but soon makes up for lost ground in the middle to end of “Optimistic-Maximus”, particularly when he prays for his family, which is touching without being sappy, the convincing tenderness and regard for his wife and child give much more depth to the character and perversely impel him later to vengeful blood-lust.
As mentioned during the plot overview, Maximus can be divided into four parts, “Optimistic-Maximus”, “Numb-Maximus”, “Vengeful-Maximus” and one not mentioned in the narrative, “Peaceful-Maximus”. Each Maximus represents a different phase of the character’s development as a result of events in his world.
“Optimistic-Maximus” peters quickly, he is tired but hopeful of returning home and growing vegetable-marrows. “Optimistic-Maximus” dies with his family and is replaced by “Numb-Maximus” who cares about nothing and initially just wants to sulk, but is stirred to cold nihilistic homicide in the arena.
“Vengeful-Maximus” is the Main-Maximus. This version of the character is driven by his personal rancor towards Commodus and the “need” to kill him for personal and political reasons. The enmity between the two is handled differently by both, Maximus is honed into a single-minded and charismatic killer, Commodus diffused into an erratic lunatic.
When Maximus slew his foe he also killed “Vengeful-Maximus” very abruptly, hinting that this is not a natural personality but one acquired due to intense adversity and hardship. The true, Maximus, at peace with himself and others then appears, briefly, before he too perishes, this-time literally. Maximus dies, in physical person, once, (as semi-blatantly foreshadowed in numerous opaquely religious cut-scenes), but dies metaphorically four times.
Joaquin Phoenix fares much worse with his character, Commodus. Commodus is a boring, one dimensional person, driven solely by his personal insecurity (he even admits to “still” being afraid of the dark) and power-lust, then his growing paranoia and final insanity. Rather than hire an expensive celebrity actor the director should have used a card-board cut out instead, it would have been quite as effective at half the cost.
The only feature of the bland, insipid character is his first hidden, then increasingly open and finally overt lust towards his sister. While this might seem extremely shocking, incest being one of the few remaining sexual taboos in the western-world, it was, in-fact quite common in ancient Rome; the real-life Commodus is implicated in unlawful carnal knowledge of several sisters say most historians.
As you might imagine, a character solely composed of insecurity is quite uninteresting. Worse, Phoenix badly over-acts in several key scenes thus utterly destroying the ability of the viewer to view the character as anything other than an overgrown, histrionic, brat. Phoenix’s portrayal is unhinged, overbearing and wearisome.
Connie Nielson does quite better with her much more plausable character Lucilla. Lucilla’s main motivations are fear for her son (the next in line), evading her brother’s incestuous proclivities and concern for the people of Rome (she learns the games are financed by sale of emergency-grain reserves). There are hints of a past flirtation with Maximus but little comes of it in-spite of a jarringly out of character kiss between the two (the godfather of all holly-wood clichés).
She is a widow, and praised by her late father for her personal strength and intelligence. At first willing to stand aside and keep her distance from her brother she is brought to action by her fear for the well-being of the people and for her fear for the life and moral integrity of her son.
Juba is played with simplicity and sensitivity by Djimon Hounsou. This is somewhat harder than it sounds, there is a fine line between “simple” and “provincial”, Hounsou carefully avoids crossing the line and wandering into the realm of “village idiot”. Juba is warm and realistic, yet reserved and keeps his emotions in check. Nevertheless the simplicity of the character is problematic, it makes it difficult for us to identify with him or care for him as he has no clear motivation for anything. The character could fairly be described as “empty”, this though, might be too harsh..
Proximo is a gruff and rough character played by Oliver Reed who played nothing but rough and gruff characters. Reed died of a heart attack half-way through the film and had to be replaced by a CGI model from The Mill for some scenes.
And of course, Gracchus, played by one of my favorite actors, Sir Derek Jacobi, no stranger to swords and sandals (he played the titular rolê in the BBC’s celebrated I Claudius.) Jacobi plays his rolê with aptitude and verve, his studied tonality and refined elocution pair well with the understated and upper-class part.
The direction is tolerable, the overall appearance of the film is indistinct and visually noisy, while the music is atrocious. Hans Zimmer takes the fantasy setting as an excuse to be the bombast’s bombast. The score alternates between loud, obnoxious, repetitive and clichéd, and effete, vauge, unmemorable and clichéd. It is a score, very much for the moment and nothing else.
The plot is intricate without being esoteric; repeatedly, throwaway characters and scenes are referenced or revisited. A servant from the first act reappears in the third, small figurines of Maximus’s wife and child (delightfully) re-appear twice and the story’s conclusion is repeatedly foreshadowed, albeit very indirectly.
As expected it commits several egregious historical errors, Rome was not founded as a republic, but as a monarchy. Nor would an army-garrison be situated just out-side of Rome, except in special circumstances the army was not even allowed on the peninsula. (Forgotten the origin of the phrase “crossing of the Rubicon”, eh?)
Maximus is a complex and morally ambiguous character, he falls into a deep existential pit, is forced to grapple with his damnation to freedom, the cruelty and indifference of the world and the consequences of one’s, and other’s acts. He retreated into himself and then burst out in anger and started killing.
Maximus did not, I repeat not have the right to kill any of the gladiators, nor even Commodus. His love for his family and the cause of their death is irrelevant. Two wrongs do not ever, ever make a right. The ends do not justify the means. He should have mourned the dead and started over with a new life, difficult? yes, but from what we’ve seen of this character, quite doable.
This is the singular weakness and failing of the film, it’s a great story, undoubtedly, if quite fancifully implausible. While Maximus is indeed a highly compelling and vivid person, the glossing over of the moral issues with his quest is inexcusable. Films have been celebrating—er—studying moral ambiguity for some time now, but this is not like that. This is a case of the hero being unambiguously wrong.
The only reason we are able to tolerate the body-count and barbarous behavior is that Maximus is a product of his times. We, the viewer, are able, because of the verisimilitude and narrative persuasiveness of the film, to view him through the notions and perceptions of a contemporary Roman. He is, of course, the quintessential Roman hero, he possesses many admirable qualities: tenacity, sense of duty, sense of honor, warriormanship-in-defiance-of-physics, and impressive physical toughness and fitness, including the patented-hollywood-power-of-miraculous-ability-to-rapidly-regenerate-from-grave-and-even-unsurvivable-injuries, and more.
All of these qualities are viewed as desirable even today, and some rightly so. The problem lies in the what he used them for. He had great gifts and used them for revenge and hate. He allows himself to be nearly consumed by his despair but instead of overcoming this, he turned it into fearsome wrath.
When he finally accomplishes his goal, when he finally kills Commodus, what then? There is nothing left for him to do but to die, that one single motivation controlled his life, it subsumed him. Therefore, I would classify this film as a elegiac tragedy, not a costume adventure-drama as it most other critics have. Perhaps this plaintive, even… threnodic coda is the film’s way of addressing the moral issues, but if so, I find it most unsatisfying perfunctory.
3.5 of 5 stars
