Movie Review #2 - Model B

All right, kiddos, here's the second one. Read both carefully. Take notes if yu need to. Look up the words you don't know - don't come asking tomorrow. What do I always say? "My middle initial is 'D', but it doesn't mean 'dictionary'!"

See you all tomorrow, period 3!

So this afternoon the four of us - my husband, the girls, and I - sat on our bed and watched the latest incarnation of the unknown poet's BEOWULF. I went in prepared to hate it. After all, the director had cast Angelina Jolie in the role of Grendel's mother, among other insupportable decisions, such as the one to make Wiglaf, Beowulf's successor, equal to him in age, as opposed to the young, strong, vital man he is in the original poem.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning...

The movie opens with a drunken Hrothgar and his men, with the women attending them, in the world-famous hall of Heorot, celebrating in typical male fashion - wine, women, and song. Hrothgar's wife, a beautiful, silent, and much younger woman, watches the festivities with cold disdain. The noise of their revelry, as his men chant his name, echoes in the dark, damp lair of the demon Grendel, who emerges to wreak havoc on the ones who dared to disturb his gloomy peace.

The resultant slaughter propels Hrothgar into a deep depression. He bars the doors of his great hall, buries the dead, left behind by a rampaging monster, larger than life, uglier than sin, and madder than a wet hen. Enter Beowulf, accompanied by fourteen of his trustiest warriors, including the faithful Wiglaf. His mission, one he has eagerly chosen to accept, is to defeat the demon Grendel, and restore laughter and good times to the Danes.

So far, so good. The movie adheres strictly to the poem...well, almost. There is a troubling glimpse of Beowulf and Hrothgar's young wife becoming very aware of a "something" flaring between them. We all notice it, as does Wiglaf, who warns his friend and lord that warriors must be focused to fight, and not be distracted by their lusts. It is a lesson this Beowulf would have done well to learn.

The challenge by Unferth, true to the original, allows Beowulf to boast of his prowess, though it seems to give the edge to Unferth, till Beowulf reveals that his challenger, the man attempting to cast aspersions on his ability and courage, was himself guilty of murdering his kinfolk. But all this is "true".

Then Grendel arrives, intent on destruction. He has been brought there deliberately by Beowulf. First, the queen sings a beautiful song about heroes, and then Beowulf's men raise a rousing, and unsurprisingly bawdy tune, guaranteed to wake the dead. It wakes Grendel, who comes to silence his tormentors. Only this time, although he manages to kill a few of them, and even chomps on the head of one before our horrified eyes, he is outmatched by an agile and wily Beowulf, who manages to shackle him to the central beam of the hall. This is how he loses his arm, as he struggles to flee this mighty opponent. And Beowulf has fought him barehanded, again true to the original.

So, I'm beginning to relax, and to think that maybe, just maybe, this will continue as it has begun, and we'll have a winner. Well...that was a foolish hope.

Things take a turn for the worse with the introduction of Grendel's mother. Hrothgar is seen to take his own life, bequeathing his kingdom and his queen to Beowulf. When he finds her, not only is Grendel's dam not a hag, but she is also never killed in the movie. She is an agelessly beautiful, patently seductive witch, who manages to lure Beowulf into a one-night-stand that produces the dragon with whom he fights, and whom he must kill at the end to protect his people and his lands.

We discover, just before Beowulf finds and "mates" with her, that Hrothgar has himself committed the gross sin soon to be his successor's as well. Grendel is Hrothgar's offspring, as the dragon is Beowulf's. And they were spawned in the wet, cold, eerie cave in which Grendel's mother makes her home.

The changes not only include a Wiglaf far older than the young man in the original poem, a Beowulf who rules in a land not his own, and an affair with Grendel's demon mother, but other liberties are taken as well. In the final battle with the dragon, Beowulf defeats the monster single-handedly, literally, without Wiglaf's help. He has a "bed mate" other than his wife, whom he nonetheless professes to love at the end, before the final battle, when he must make peace before he leaves to do battle. His wife helps to save his lover's life when the dragon attacks them both. Beowulf is sent off to Valhalla in a ship which is set aflame, instead of buried in a huge, burning mound on the headlands. And it is suggested that Wiglaf will share the fate of his friend and lord, at the end of the movie.

How, you may ask, will he do so? Ah...I see I neglected to mention the little matter of the gift. After Beowulf defeats Grendel, Hrothgar presents him with a beautiful golden horn, decorated with a dragon. The horn remains behind in Grendel's dam's cave, for she has promised Beowulf that as long as she has it, he will be a powerful king, and live well and prosperously. But then, the horn is found by a villager, and the ensuing mayhem almost causes the complete destruction of the commuity.

And when Beouwlf's burial ship has sunk, and Wiglaf has discovered the horn half-buried in the sand just under the water at the shore's edge, Grendel's mother, whom we see just prior kissing Beowulf's corpse on the burning ship, rises from the sea and shows her face to Wiglaf, who stares at her, mesmerized.

*GROAN* What we have here is a movie which began founded in a work of literature, and ended up in a place so far removed as to be horrifyingly laughable. The fact is that even here, where the producers and directors had the chance to present the three epic battles which the hero fought and won, they chose to present only two, making of the third, which was actually the second in the poem, a psychological struggle which the man loses because he thinks with his second head!

So, what can we learn from this incarnation of the epic tale? Well, let's see...

* Men don't function well when they are in heat.
* Unless men can resist the call of the flesh, they doom their communities to despair and disaster.
* Even evil women are more powerful than the mightiest men.
* Men who think with their second heads usually spawn "monsters".

May I hazard a fifth lesson, one that perhaps producers and directors should learn?

* The re-enacting of great works of literature is best left to those who understand them, who appreciate their importance in human culture, and who can forego their limited vision of the world to present something that is very likely outside their scope and experience.

That "monster" remark above reminds me... There was a very Mary Shelley's Frankenstein moment in the movie, when Beowulf first meets Grendel's mother, before he drops his pants and "does" her (thankfully, something we are spared the sight of!), when she compares him to her son, calling him a "monster". Hey, when she's right...

I did not like this movie. It did not make changes to answer questions left open by the fragment of the poem that remains extant. It introduced sensational, salacious, and frankly ridiculous elements into a story that, if treated as fantasy, would have been a fine thing to watch. I cannot imagine why it was made... Well, actually, I can. The reason is simple - so people can make money. The demon Grendel, the seductive Miss Jolie, the brawny Beowulf, whose real name escapes me (a bad sign that, when you don't know the name of the actor who plays the key role!), and Anthony Hopkins as the drunken Hrothgar, must have been enough to draw the movie-going crowds to what for me is a clear and present FLOP!

My rating: 2 stars, only because it actually started out "true" to the original.