By Matt Zoller Seitz
[Editor's warning: Spoilers abound.]
What is Robert Zemeckis up to, anyway? The mostly middling reviews of Beowulf have accused the director of getting wrapped up in a circuitous, self-defeating technological quest: motion-capturing flesh-and-blood actors (first in The Polar Express, now here) and turning them into photo-realistic yet still unreal-looking cartoons, in order to achieve...what? Surely nothing that couldn't be achieved by photographing those same actors and merging them into computer-generated backdrops, just like every other fantasy with a nine-figure budget. 
The linchpin of most negative reviews is that the Beowulf characters aren't as subtly expressive as real people, or as stylized as the wholly invented creations in CGI movies by Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks -- and that this is too bad, because the performers are formidable and their roles much grittier than the movie's PR campaign suggests. The decadent King Hrothgar (acted by Anthony Hopkins); his lovely, reticent queen, Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn); Hrothgar's scheming, sadistic advisor, Unferth (John Malkovich); blustery Beowulf with his steely glare and six-pack abs (Ray Winstone, digitally youth-ified); Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson), the hero's loyal lieutenant and best friend; the grotesque monster Grendel (Crispin Glover); his slinky-buxom sea-beast mother (Angelina Jolie): all are more detailed and idiosyncratic than action epics usually allow. Every character is complicated and in some ways compromised -- especially Beowulf, a '70s movie hero -- a braggart, liar, trickster and lothario who once paused during a five-day-long swimming race to bang a sea siren and will do it again. (To quote Chris Rock: "It is damn near impossible for a man to turn down sex.") 
Would these characters and situations be enriched -- and wouldn't the movie be better -- if we got to see the actors, rather than seeing them once removed, acting through the CGI version of a rubber mask? Yes and no. Beowulf would be more subtly modulated, and certainly more acceptable to critics, if it were more conventional. Its newness requires creative trade-offs that some may consider deal-breakers.
But a more conventional Beowulf would surely lose the distinctiveness that's bound up in Zemeckis' process. The director's tools aren't new -- they're a high tech version of Rotoscoping, a hand-drawn technique that's been around since the 1930s. But Zemeckis' deployment of the process -- his personal aesthetic -- is new, and defiantly unique. It has elements of live action drama, cartoons, still photography, abstract art, representational painting and puppetry. Beowulf has many flaws -- a sentimental attitude toward warrior machismo; a rushed quality to the second half; an unconvincing sense of physical density and gravity; a few too many dick jokes, including elaborate attempts to shield a nude Beowulf's mighty sword that just become ridiculous. But Zemeckis' vision coheres. The film is primordially populist yet smart -- an old tale told with muscular grace.
Like Polar Express, Beowulf obliterates the distinction between foreground (actors) and background (special effects) that affects even the best live action-CG hybrids. It plays like a meticulously rendered storybook come to life -- but its tone is more varied, mixing (sometimes forced) bawdy humor, Playstation-like violence and solemn poetic touches. The characters move and talk like "real" people but retain a painted quality; this forcibly makes them emblematic rather than specific -- sculptures in motion.
The film foregrounds the sculptures-in-motion idea via a recurring visual grace note. When Grendel's mother rises from a pool in her cave lair, she's encased in what appears to be liqueified gold which slowly melts away as she approaches the hero (a striptease). When monsters die in the movie, their monstrous forms dissolve away. When Grendel's mother sidles up to Beowulf and caresses his sword (the movie's Freudian sight gags are blatant, knowing and funny), the weapon melts like a popsicle in a toaster oven. Zemeckis' CG Denmark is a tragically impermanent world where steel, wood, snow and flesh can melt away, or burn away, or simply decay over time.
This notion isn't auteurist whimsy. It originates in the script, which is credited to comics writer Neil Gaiman and writer-director Roger Avary. The story begins in Denmark a few centuries after Christ's birth, the old pagan ways are in decline and Christianity is ascendant (shades of Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins' 1981 fantasy Dragonslayer). The duo has revised the original poem for the blockbuster film/graphic novel/video game era and stirred in borderline-Monty Python jokes and self-aware philosophizing that might have been inspired by John Gardner's 1971 novel Grendel. The story is broken into two halves -- phases of Beowulf's life before and after liberating Hrothgar's kingdom -- then jam-packed twinned or repeated situations, images and lines. The result is a visual echo chamber in which human (and monster) behavior keeps repeating itself. 
After Grendel's initial rampage, Unferth asks it's all right to pray to Christ as well as to the usual gods, and judging from the body count, neither effort helps. "The gods will do nothing for us that we will not do for ourselves," Hrothgar proclaims. In the film's final third, Unferth's son (also played by Malkovich) is a priest whose faith can't protect him against a dragon's rampage. Beowulf's body is cast adrift in a boat, its mast looming like a crucifix; when the boat is set ablaze, the cross burns and topples into the sea. ("The weak observe the rituals," says Gardner's Grendel, mocking man's practice of religion, "...take their hats off, put them on again, raise their arms, lower their arms, moan, intone, press their palms together.") In the movie's first half, Grendel and Grendel's mother lay waste to the pagan world; in the second half, Beowulf's son (spawned by his night with Grendel's mother) takes the form of a fire-breathing dragon and incinerates the newly Christian world. (The movie could have been called Achilles' Heels. Beowulf's is between his legs.) Grendel's shambling walk -- like that of a beaten, palsied slave -- is linked with the clubfooted gait of the servant boy Unferth abuses; the monster is tormented by the sounds of "merriment, joy and fornication" (Hrothgar's favorite nouns) coming from the mead hall, the architectural representation of a society that Grendel (like Unferth's slave boy) can't join. Glover's performance as Grendel is repulsive and heartbreaking -- Frankenstein's monster as played by a deformed and furious child, with a touch of the hunchback of Notre Dame (when Grendel hears happiness, he shrieks in pain). 
"It's all the same in the end," the monster mused in Gardner's Grendel. "Matter and motion, simple or complex. No difference, finally. Death, transfiguration. Ashes to ashes and slime to slime, amen." These are some of the same themes explored by the Coen brothers in No Country for Old Men, and Zemeckis' direction is just as controlled and specific. But where the Coens' artistry is being taken seriously and argued about, Zemeckis' has gone largely unremarked upon, presumably because Beowulf is based on a poem that bored people in high school, packaged by its distributor as a gee-whiz 3-D spectacle, and described by critics as a successor to the more boisterous, aesthetically unsophisticated 300: a kick-ass cartoon by a director who doesn't care about people. Quite the contrary: while Beowulf's wild action choreography panders to videogame buffs, it's photographed by Zemeckis in a classical style (favoring longer takes, and "cutting" via camera movement whenever possible) that Alfred Hitchcock would have admired. And every shot, cut and transition feeds the story and burnishes its (yes) human themes. Like The Last of the Mohicans and Braveheart, Beowulf is a blood-and-guts action movie about being, nothingness and the urge to leave a permanent mark, whether through legendary deeds (after each heroic feat, Beowulf bellows his name so people will remember it), public works (Hrothgar's mead hall is his pride and joy) or procreation (Hrothgar wants an heir but shoots blanks with his queen; Grendel's mother wants another son to replace the one Beowulf slew; Beowulf later becomes king but fails to produce an heir with either his queen or his mistress). 
Verbally and visually, the movie depicts birth and death as portals to oblivion. When Grendel, his arm ripped off by Beowulf, staggers back to his home, his mother comforts him as he dies, and Zemeckis' camera slowly circles down on him from above as his life force ebbs; resting atop a rock immersed in water, his huge, malformed head eclipsing the shriveling remains of his body, he looks like a newborn infant being bathed in a sink. Beowulf vanquishes his bastard dragon-son by punching a hole through a valve in his throat and ripping his heart out; the pumping of the dragon's heart rhymes across the decades with Grendel's exposed, pulsating eardrum, which Beowulf punches and tears. Beowulf vanquishes Grendel by tearing off his arm; in the movie's climax Beowulf, dangling from his dragon-son's body by a chain, cuts off his own arm to give himself a better shot at the creature's heart. The hero dies in the surf beside beside the golden humanoid corpse of his son; the combatants expire (like Grendel before them) partly immersed in water that enfolds them like amniotic fluid. "The sea is my mother!" Beowulf bellows in his introductory scene as his ship plows through storm-tossed waves evocative of the "wine-dark seas" in The Odyssey. "She'll never take me back to her murky womb."
Eventually, of course, she does. Empires rise and fall; good and evil endlessly circle each other, merging in combat and coitus. Zemeckis makes this sentiment plain in the final exchange of shots between Grendel's mother -- floating near the site of her lover and son's deaths, her breasts bobbing on the surface -- and Beowulf's appointed heir, Wiglaf, who, despite his previously impeccable judgment, stares at the siren in fascination, then wades a wee bit further out to get a better look. (Cue Chris Rock.)
"What is most troubling about Beowulf, aside from the obvious, is what it says about the career of Robert Zemeckis, who has gone from being a director of stories like Forrest Gump to an orchestrator of eye candy and a willing slave to technological advances," writes Los Angeles Times lead film critic Kenneth Turan. That's a questionable assertion, given how cartoonishly exaggerated -- even "unreal" -- his characters were in Used Cars, Romancing the Stone and the first Back to the Future. If indeed Zemeckis lost his way, he lost it in Reagan's first term. He's been on this quest -- applying technological innovation to mainstream commercial blockbusters -- for nearly two decades, starting with 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which employed motion-controlled cameras to let 'toons interact (often in elaborately choreographed long takes) with flesh-and-blood actors. Even then Zemeckis was accused of being too enamored with the mechanics of technology. From the Back to the Future sequels through Forrest Gump, Contact and What Lies Beneath, the gripes continued. (Only Cast Away escaped them.) The all-style-no-substance rap discounts the possibility that Beowulf's substance is embedded in its style. And it discounts the possibility that, in his determination to tell elemental stories with increasingly daring techniques, Zemeckis is one of the few true visionaries making studio blockbusters today.
It's unfortunate for Zemeckis that Beowulf's brains are in its images. That's a severe deterrent to critical respect. As Hitchcock complained to Francois Truffaut, most reviewers treat cinema as if it were illustrated stage drama or literature -- and despite its poetic pedigree, Beowulf downplays such values. It's the kind of movie that Hitchcock, referring to his own popular, critically maligned Psycho, described as "...the kind of picture in which the camera takes over."
He meant that as praise. So do I.
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Matt Zoller Seitz is Editor-in-Chief of The House Next Door.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The camera takes over: Beowulf
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19 comments:
Just finished reading the Beowulf script books. The 1997 draft was, in my opinion, a lot tougher, better paced, more intelligent and had a better ending...although the 2005 draft keeps the action in Hrothgar's kingdom, which is also good. It feels, based on the scripts, like certain people (probably not Zemeckis, I think) wanted some things played down and others played up in their hopes for a mall-crowd drawing, Big Effects Movie ("More monster fights! More sexy mostly naked babes! Less Pat Garret and Billy The Kid style rumination on getting old and screwing up your life!")
Matt, thanks for pointing out the Dragonslayer parallels. (A film which, once I see Beowulf, I suspect I will continue to prefer.) But does'nt anyone remember The 13th Warrior? I thought that was a fascinating take on Beowulf, a wonderful reinterpretation of the story.
I liked The Thirteenth Warrior. The concept was amusing.
As for the CGI Beowulf, I saw a comment somewhere last week that reflects my reaction pretty well. If I could find it again, I'd quote it, but to summarize: the script is a patent product of the Neil Gaiman fantasy factory, the products of which purport to reveal the underlying truth of old, old stories through a simple method of reversal (it isn't even worth calling "deconstruction," though some admirers feel that way about it): The good acquire flaws; the bad obtain sympathy; and then they have sex. I'd add that the movie loses one of the most poignant aspects of the poem due to Gaiman's reverses, in addition: the poem was written, or compiled, by a Christian writing about the distant past, and is textured with Christian and Biblical references. The script attempts to reverse the weave of the poem, losing that texture.
Also, the CGI figures still moved with unnatural, springing, solid-pudding characteristics, rather than the reaching, stretching strains of muscle and bone, but I suppose the technology will improve.
rasselas: "The poem was written, or compiled, by a Christian writing about the distant past, and is textured with Christian and Biblical references. The script attempts to reverse the weave of the poem, losing that texture."
I agree that the movie reverses the weave of the poem and loses the texture. But it comes up with a new one that's interesting as well, and just as cognizant of the pagan-Christian evolution that affects the action.
All this is subordinated to action-adventure setpieces, of course. But given the immense budget, that's to be expected -- and given his desire to entertain, I wouldn't have expected anything else from Zemeckis, least of all a faithful transcription of the original poem.
Hey, hey, hey, whoah, wait a minute.
"The Neil Gaiman Fantasy Factory"?
What, is that next to the Alan Moore Superhero Shop and the Stephen King Industrial Park of Horrors?
I gotta point out, that what you're describing (mythic characters: flawed good guys, sympathetic villians) hardly originated with Gaiman. In fact, it's essentially the Jack Kirby / Stan Lee Silver Age Marvel method, and THAT'S what Beowulf seems like to me: the Jack Kirby Tales Of Asgard Beowulf. The whole thing just reeks of 60s Marvel comics. Beowulf as Thor-like superhero beating up sea monsters and fifteen foot giants, Beowulf's Mother as a sort of visual and behavioural mix of the Silver Surfer, the Enchantress, and Medusa (the Marvel character); the hero is ultimatly defeated by his own mistakes, he failed at a critical moment, and has to live with his regrets, knowing what he's lost (a la Spider Man and Captain America)...it truly has the feel of classic comics, the same way Kill Bill, The Terminator, T2 and Buffy The Vampire Slayer did, much more then the movies actually BASED on comic books...
If you're not familiar with the old Marvel books (that is to say, unlike myself, you have a life) check out Gaiman's 1402 for his direct version of Silver Age Marvel and then look at Beowulf again...I think you'll see what I mean.
jj, in that case, Beowulf should have been a great deal more fun to watch. To me, it was kind of a drag. "Fantasy Factory" was just a snide allusion to Gaiman's predictability. When it comes to comics, I think Gaiman's the Brit you hire when you want "that Vertigo feeling" but Alan Moore isn't taking your calls (cough Dan DiDio cough) and Grant Morrison is too high. I would pay a great deal for a tour of the Alan Moore Superhero Shop, though, particularly the Radioactive Man section.
Matt, I disagree about the value of the new texture. Not to spoil things, but, ironically considering the place of sex in our consumerist culture, sexuality isn't a really adequate substitute for the poet's line about the enemies of Scyld: "God gave them their reward."
I pretty much agree totally - its a messy, occasionally silly, ultimately well intentioned shot at breaking in new technologies without sacrificing story, character, theme, all that good stuff. but i have to say - as much as i enjoyed parts of the movie, i really hated the 3D presentation. it's always been a stupid gimmick and it's no different here (oh look, it's like the spear is pointing *at* me - gasp!). plus, the glasses make the screen too dark, so it's hard to make out what's happening in the night time scenes. and the whole damn thing gave me a headache.
did anybody else have a problem with the 3D or am i, at 26, already a bitter old man shaking his fists at the new technologies?
nice piece, btw. i love this site.
I actually saw it in 2-D, which is how I first saw "Polar Express" (a movie I'm virtually alone in admiring). I will probably see it again to see if 3-D really adds anything, but I was glad I experienced it without the frills -- I felt like it allowed me to appreciate Zemeckis' direction, and see the movie as a movie and not as an attraction, if that makes sense.
Fascinating piece, Matt! I'm a huge admirer of Neil Gaiman's work (especially The Sandman) and I know one thing for sure: Predictable he is not.
Likewise, Zemeckis is a force to be reckoned with, even though The Polar Express was a huge disappointment and the "uncanny valley" faces in Beowulf's trailer almost made me give up on this movie. That doesn't diminish the fact that the technology that Zemeckis is pioneering is without a doubt groundbreaking, which is one of the reasons I'm so eager to see it.
Think about it: Zemeckis first "locks" his movie based on the best individual performance of his actors. After that, he's free to put the virtual camera anywhere he pleases. Best of all: the man has continuous realtime playback throughout his entire decision process.
To make a wild analogy: That's like knowing in advance that the assasination of JFK is going to happen all around you and having all the time in the world to properly cover the course of that magic bullet in slow-motion. And unlike Zapruder, Zemeckis even gets to choose the color of the sky in the reflection of that bullet!
Wow, Peet. That sounds like a synopsis of a Robert Zemeckis movie.
Here is the comment that I was remembering (I don't think my digest really did it justice, for good or ill):
...this sounds suspiciously like an example of the standard Gaiman approach. He takes a well-known myth, fairy-tale or iconic story, and then makes it "subversive" by changing the good characters to bad ones (or vice versa) and by adding some kinky sex, ulterior motives, cussin', hypocrisy, pop psychology, and brutal violence: all the elements of a cynical, snickering, 14-year-old boy's worldview. Then, voila! He has a gritty tale that will be lauded as "adult" and "subversive." To me the results usually look predictable, juvenile and very, very dated: gutted of all the wonder, terror, power and other-ness of a real myth. But, he's popular, and Gene Wolfe likes him, so what do I know?
1602! Sorry. Correcting my above mistake.
That's Gaiman's 1602. Ahem...
Was recently in a conversation with someone and we noted how the comics revolution post 70s was people like Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, Frank Miller and others taking their childhood favorites and re-examining them with jaundiced, adult perspectives: i.e. Watchmen and Dark Knight are Silver Age 60s heroes grown old in the mean, rotten 80s, Sandman is basically the whole of Fantasy and Horror comics done as Gothic romance; Animal Man; Swamp Thing; Miracleman; Moore's Tom Strong is his Fantastic Four, Promethea is Ditko Dr. Strange; there's the aforementioned 1602....But my freind and I then agreed that these guys have pretty much run out of comic books to revise, and now are turning to older and older sources; 19th century literature for League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls, Classic Mythology for American Gods, and now Moore is writing a novel partly concerning events in the Bible and Gaiman is doing Beowulf. Pretty soon they're going to be down to prehistoric cave paintings or something.
I'll second (or third) the comment on The 13th Warrior. That's a rare example of a film that the critics dissed but quite a few historians loved. They seemed to understand what McTiernan was doing with Crichton's marriage of Norse history and mythology.
I don't have much to say about Beowulf (no plans to see it, though this unexpected rave is giving me second thoughts at least), but I do think the ancillary discussion of comics going on here is pretty interesting. Since both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have come up, I'll say that I find both of them infinitely more interesting than Gaiman. The Sandman is a good, if somewhat uneven, work, ultimately more notable for the number of people it has introduced to comics than for its intrinsic worth. There are segments of it that are just brilliant, though, including many of the stand-alone issues and the complete final two story arcs. That said, the characterization of Gaiman as someone who trucks primarily in simple reversals of enduring archetypes is pretty much accurate.
Not so much for Moore or Morrison, and they really shouldn't be grouped in with Gaiman. Moore's deconstructionist tendencies go well beyond Gaiman's, and when he revisits an archetype it's usually to do much more than simply relocate it to a new context or reverse its meaning. He almost always has something deeper and unexpected to say about the nature of archetypes in general and the specific ones he's addressing.
Miracleman is probably the pinnacle of his work in that regard, a sustained meditation on the relationship between God and Superman, and the contrast between a splendid, even miraculous natural world and the "miracles" we invent in our imaginations. Even Lost Girls, his supposedly frivolous relocation of mythical characters into porn, which would seem to be exactly the kind of gritty reductive reversal that's been mentioned here, actually goes far beyond its porn context to question the links between fantasy and reality and between war and sexuality.
Morrison is another case altogether, and that portion of his work that might be called deconstruction is pretty small and not at all similar to either Moore or Gaiman. His Doom Patrol and Animal Man "deconstruct" these archetypical characters only in the sense that he adds depth to their personalities, plumbs their psychological facets and the thematic questions raised by their nature. And in stuff like The Invisibles, he's vaguely referencing superhero archetypes, but mostly he's off in his own whole new territory.
Compared to either Moore or Morrison, Gaiman inevitably comes off as looking somewhat outclassed.
I happen to think both Moore and Gaiman are brilliant. My introduction to The Sandman was Seasons of Mists (not a bad place to start, since it introduces the whole Endless family) and I was blown away by the way Gaiman had found a way to encompass just about ALL religions, mythologies, folklore, fairytales, human history from the Roman empire to the present, the DC universe as well as our own into a seamless whole, while playing out a lot of the stories on an intimate (!) scale. Sure, the artwork of the early books ranges in quality and some of the stories don't work for everybody, but no wonder with Gaiman's impossibly broad taste (as a kid, he literally read the books in his local library from A to Z).
In that light, Beowulf is just another day at the office for Gaiman. This is from the man who said:
"I love religion. I could make up religions all day."
Comic-book CGI action? Give me Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy anytime.
When Star Wars was released in '77, I had the feeling - even at the age of 10 - that a filmmaker had somehow succeeded in creating a movie that not only gave Hollywood new tools ( i.e. special effects) but also challenged and provoked all of us (inside and outside the film industry) in to thinking differently about the way films can be imagined - a "Wow!" factor if you will.
I felt the same way (but to a lesser degree)in 1997 when I first sat through The Matrix. Those films and others like them (and we all have our favorites) were triumphs of imagination, both visually and as story-telling.
Beowulf is as visually stunning as Matt describes and it deserves recognition for it's creative direction. But, whatever it's technical achievements (which are certainly arguable at this point) the visual noise and din created by the presence of thousands of similarly-imagined video games certainly blunts the effect Zemeckis is trying to achieve and releasing the film in 3-D only masks this problem at best.
If there was a "Wow!" factor to Beowulf, someone is going to have to work hard to explain it to me. I'm not saying Zemeckis isn't a visually creative person. You gotta hand it to the guy for at least trying.
Why is everyone blatantly ignoring Roger Avary in this discussion of the script? He wrote the film with Gaiman, was in fact the originator of the entire project. Let's give the man his due, shall we?
Oh, and BTW: great, great review, Matt. By far the best I've read about this -IMHO great- film. You really nailed it. Thanks.
In response to the comment: "the poem was written, or compiled, by a Christian writing about the distant past, and is textured with Christian and Biblical references."
But Avary and Gaiman looked at the poem as if it weren't written by Christians because that isn't where it was originated. Pagans first told the Beowulf story when the Christ god was unknown to them. It was the Monks who wrote down and edited the many different versions they heard into what we have today.
The Writers did what the old oral traditionists did and put their own spin on it that applies to today's people. It makes sense and in that regard and many others it stays true to the poem.
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