Toronto’s interpretation of the Fringe, not surprisingly given that the city is the most “diverse” in the country, has increasingly leaned toward serving the vast marketplace for correctness, or (spinning around the wheel 180 degrees) an almost-as-vast range of rude self-expression, or the flaunting of off-the-wall navel lint. I don’t want to single out any performers from this year’s venues because a quick look at the roster of presenters will argue my case more convincingly than I could with an itemization.

So when I was dragged, more than a little reluctantly, to the showing of Spiral Dive at the St. Vladimir venue on Spadina just south of Harbord on Tuesday, I wasn’t expecting to have a good time. I went because the playwright is an old collaborator of mine, Ken Brown, who’s been the principal spirit behind a small, uncompromising company called TheatrePublic in Edmonton for the last 20 years. Brown is best known for creating the long-running one-man show Life After Hockey, and quite a lot less famous for mounting, at the Edmonton Fringe in the summer of 1990, a one-man version of my 1986 book, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. His version of Cambodia was fairly well-received, and I cheerfully soaked up most of the credit for it. But it didn’t go anywhere because the next spring Brown turned it into a wildly innovative multi-staged multimedia refiguring of the book, this time called The Cambodia Pavilion that not only translated the multiple focuses of the book’s structure successfully, it managed to present them more or less simultaneously — a feat I honestly didn’t think could be done. It was also so costly to mount that Brown had to remortgage his house, and ended up nearly losing it when several tut-tutting Edmonton critics decided that The Cambodia Pavilion was precisely what it set out to be: an assault on both the formalities and limited subject matter of stage drama — not to mention the human sensorium.

Spiral Dive, which Brown has written and directed, features three young and startlingly gifted Edmonton actors we’re likely to hear a lot more from in the coming years — and the relatively simple stage dictated by the Fringe’s limits. But like his interpretation of Cambodia, its intentions are anything but simple. The Spiral Dive presented at this year’s Ottawa and Toronto Fringe festivals is episode one of a trilogy about Canadian Spitfire pilot Jack Harding. Spiral Dive: Episode Two will be performed at the Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Edmonton festivals later this summer.

Unlike too much of the Fringe fare, Spiral Dive is neither self-expressive nor self-promotional. It is a series of layered stories about Canada, the early, thrilling days of aviation, and about how cheap and urgent life became during the Second World War. Beyond that the play is about the human condition that binds all of us together in time and space despite the lack of curiosity that currently characterizes our cultural life in this country.

Now, I’m fairly well known for falling asleep at the theatre when I do go. Worse, people who’ve sat next to me are usually grateful when I do fall asleep because I don’t suspend disbelief willingly, and that frequently makes me a groaning heckler before I drift off. I’m happy to report that I was forced completely out of character while I watched Spiral Dive. Brown’s stories hooked me within the first ten minutes, and I remained alert for the performance’s full 90 minutes as the narrative tracks sifted over and through one another.

I was initially taken by the acting of Bryan Webb, who plays Jack Harding’s childhood pal David, along with a half-dozen other bridging roles. In the character of David, Webb makes no secret of being dead, the victim of a German torpedoing of the minesweeper on which he served. Webb is the kind of actor who is fun to watch in any role, and his ability to morph from one character to the next was effortless and without seams.

Caley Suliak, who begins as Jack Harding’s Canadian girlfriend, transforms herself into an hilariously-dull but libidinous English milkmaid, and then into Eva, a haunted Polish exile who falls in love with Harding. Suliak is an actor whose range sneaks up on you. She’s particularly strong as Eva, and that’s no small feat, given that she’s perfectly believable in her other roles, and along with Webb, also acts as a kind of witnessing chorus for the action.

Blake Turner, in the single role of pilot Jack Harding, has a less-demanding job, at least on the surface. He’s able to create Jack as a nuanced and not-completely sympathetic figure, and that’s part of what makes the play interesting. You find yourself wondering how, given his combination of stumble-bum naivete and brashness, he gets to survive and not his friend David, and that raises the issue of whether, given that there are two episodes of the play to come, he’s going to make it. It’s the sort of suspense that normally requires a much more elaborate canvas to create.

But if Brown has been skilled at selecting actors for his production, the primary energy comes from the materials he’s given them to work with. Brown has a long-standing interest in aviation, and part of his research was learning to fly planes himself. I’ve always known that he’s an exhaustive researcher, and he’s done his work here with clear relish and the attention to detail he’s known for. What I’d forgotten about him — or maybe I never really understood this at all — is that he’s a brilliant writer and story-teller. What I’m saying is that you don’t need to be a World War II buff to get Spiral Dive, and you don’t need to know anything about Spitfires or about aviation. He gives you stories that are fully realized, infused with emotions and ideas that are fully contemporary, and moves you to care about his characters and where they’re going. He even succeeds in making you experience aerial combat with Jack Harding — no minor feat on a 20 foot stage with few props.

Is Spiral Dive worth your time? Absolutely. The best testimony I can offer on that is my first question when I ran into Brown after the performance: “What happens next?”

That’s high praise, and Toronto can only hope he can be talked into returning to next year’s Fringe to give us the answer. In the meantime, get your ass to one of the remaining performances of Episode One. They’re at St. Vladimir Friday 5:45 PM and Saturday 10:30 PM.

If you’re out and about the country this summer, Episode Two will be performed in Winnipeg July 16-25th, Saskatoon July 28-August 7, and at the Edmonton Fringe August 13-23.

Toronto, July 9, 2009, 1309 w.

Last night I saw the first of actor Tony Nardi’s Two Letters, which is a one-man show currently running in a number of Toronto venues on successive nights until December 4^th.

I went primarily out of a sense of duty. Nardi hangs out at Dooneys, and I’ve gotten to know him fairly well over the past several years. I like and respect his intelligence and enjoy his wit and his quick and quirky sense of humour. I also think he’s a good actor, not that I really know anything about acting. But I have seen him in a number of television movies and short series, and each time out his characterizations were convincing enough to make me forget that he’s actually a guy I know. Most people can’t convince me that they’re for real in ordinary life, so this is a serious skill Nardi has.

I always thought, by the way, that actors were self-involved airheads who had to inhabit other people’s lives because there was no one home where they were coming from. Last night convinced me that I’m either wrong about this—or that Tony Nardi is quite a bit more than an actor. I suspect it has to be both, because Nardi is, by his own definition, an actor.

At the moment, Nardi is an angry actor. What made him angry enough to write the first of the two letters was an offer from (I think) a television producer to play the role of an Italian character in a way that demeaned—and here is where Nardi gets interesting—both Italians, actors, and human beings in general. Nardi turned down the role, which I gather isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence in this country. And then he began to stew about it, and about the larger implications it carried.

The contents of the letter—which is aimed, ostensibly, at a real-world female casting director named Sarah who couldn’t fathom why Nardi was so annoyed by being asked to embody a demeaning ethnic cliché—will surprise you. Only a small part of his anger is the usual ethnic nationalism that has turned multiculturalism into a social and political stinkbomb. This isn’t to say Nardi isn’t proudly Italian. He just isn’t the vulgar stereotype of the ball-scratching, leering patriarchal mafioso. Neither, he argues, is any other Italian.

What he’s really angry about is that contemporary film and television in Canada increasingly operates by this kind of stereotyping, and that it, among other things, contributes to making our characterizations of reality smaller and slower than we know they actually are. He wants to know why this has happened, and what’s going to happen to us if we continue to let it happen. These aren’t rhetorical questions, by the way, and aren’t presented as such.

The two letters he’s written and is now performing—the second letter concerns the conditions of live theatre in Canada—are quite a lot more than angry rants by an actor who doesn’t want to play cartoon characterizations of human beings. Nardi presents his subject matter with an élan that echoes, alternately, the great Italian playwright and puzzle-maker Luigi Pirandello and, more oddly, Sam Coleridge sitting on the cliffs of Dover in 1798 wondering what, exactly, the French Revolution was about to rain down on the English.

That may sound like heady stuff, and in all the good ways, it is. But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it’s sententious or boring. Nardi delivers his materials without trying to overpower his audiences by monumentalizing the subject matter or making himself the focus of attention. He’s going to make you laugh out loud any number of times because, did I mention this? Nardi is a very, very funny man when he wants to be. And he tells, as Coleridge once did, “most bitter truth, but without bitterness.”

He certainly got me thinking, and judging from the discussion forum that went on more than a half-hour after the two hour performance ended, I wasn’t the only one he woke up.

Most of the conversation circled around the fear that everyone seems to feel now that culture has been delivered into the hands of the market. The general consensus hovered around the notion that “marketization” has reduced both our cultural options and our collective artistic courage by making issues of profitability the primary concern. Canada may have 30 million people, but as “cultural markets” go, it feels like pretty small potatoes considering the 800 pound American cultural gorilla. Accurate or not, Canadian filmmakers and television producers seem to feel like they’re trying to operate a lemonade stand outside the front doors of Wal-Mart.

 Certainly I could have testified to the effect marketization has had on Canadian writers and book publishers, who are now tailoring (at least) mainstream publishing to fit the marketing purposes of Chapters Indigo, where a half-dozen or less marketeers control the purchase (and therefore the editorial choices) of 70 percent of the book trade in Canada.

No one in the audience at the performance I attended seemed interested in making the logical step of focusing on who actually gets the benefits of the marketization of culture, maybe because it seems too simple to merely point the finger at the corporations.

The reality is doing that it is too simple. Marketization couldn’t have been achieved as easily as it has if we hadn’t all chosen identity over citizenship thirty years ago, and then broken down identity into a thousand ethnic and preferential banana republics we’re not willing to bring into public discourse because it might affect our self-esteem.

Tony Nardi, to his credit, has opened that discourse. Let’s hope it goes somewhere before we’re all making cartoons for the tourist industry.

There six sets of performances left: Saturday November 18 and Sunday November 19 afternoons at 2:00 P.M. at the National Film Board Screening Room at 150 John Street; Monday November 20^th and 21^st at the Canadian Film Centre, Garden Room, 2489 Bayview Avenue at 8:00 P,M.; November 24^th and 25^th at the Robert Gill Theatre, 214 College Street, (3^rd Floor) 8:00 P.M.; November 27^th and 28^th, Factory Theatre Rehearsal Hall, 125 Bathhurst, 8:00 P.M.; December 1^st and 2^nd , Columbus Centre, 901 Lawrence Avenue West at 8:00 P.M.; December 3^rd and 4^th , Grano Restorante, 2035 Yonge Street, 8;00 P.M., Tickets are $15 at the door.

Call 416-686-3597 for additional information.

900 words. November 14th, 2006

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If you read the Friday movie reviews in your local newspaper, you already know that director Ang Lee’s controversial contemporary Western film, Brokeback Mountain, which opened a couple of weeks ago, is the “gay cowboy movie.”

If you don’t read the reviews, “Brokeback Mountain” is the story that begins with two taciturn 19-year-old cowpokes, Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), who meet in a grungy Wyoming town in 1963, get a summer job sheepherding in the nearby mountains from an equally taciturn, especially gruff ranch foreman, Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), and make their way by horseback, along with pack mules and a sprawling herd of cottony, bah-bahing sheep, into the alpine pastures and snowy peaks of Brokeback Mountain (played by the Alberta Rockies).

A rough, if not very talkative, comaraderie ensues, but there’s just enough chit-chat to learn that Jack is an aspiring rodeo rider whose folks run a desolate hardscrabble ranch nearby, and that Ennis’s parents missed the one curve in 42 miles of straight Wyoming road when he was a kid, and that the orphaned teen has made his way from ranch to ranch ever since, and is planning to get hitched to his girlfriend come the end of summer. Even the tight-lipped Ennis saying that much causes Jack to remark that that’s “more words than you said in two weeks,” to which Ennis mumbles something like, “more than I said in my whole life.” As Annie Proulx puts it, “They were respectful of each other’s opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected. Ennis, riding back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he’d never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon.”

In the movie version, Proulx’s terse prose gives way, understandably enough, to lots of mountainous landscape, forded streams, campfires, roving sheep herds, the occasional coyote or grizzly, and a considerable amount of drunken light, all photographed by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. At the end of one inevitable well-liquored campfire evening, Jack persuades Ennis to crawl into the tent bedroll rather than riding back down to the puptent where he usually beds down among the sheep. And then, all of that nature — mountains, moons, horses, whiskey drinking, and horny boys — takes its course. Though Jack starts things off, soon enough, as Proulx matter-of-factly tells us, Ennis “got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he’d done before but no instruction manual needed. They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack’s choked ‘gun’s goin off,’ then out, down, and sleep.” The movie version is more interested in the cinematographic details of sky- and mountainscapes than in the graphic details of the boys’ coupling (I assume the reference to a gun going off indicates that Jack comes, too), but there’s enough there for even mainstream audiences to get the idea.

Come daylight and sobriety, the only thing said is Ennis declaring, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack’s reply, “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.” Of course, given the circumstances and the force of nature (one of the film’s advertising lines goes, “Love is a force of nature”), it’s not at all a one-shot thing. “They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word…” Proulx informs us.

Nor was it nobody’s business but their own. True, “there were only the two of them on the mountain, flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk’s back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours.” So, sure, “they believed themselves invisible, not knowing Joe Aguirre had watched them through his 10×42 binoculars for ten minutes one day, waiting until they’d buttoned up their jeans, waiting until Ennis rode back to the sheep,” before bringing up a message about an illness in Jack’s family. Jack doesn’t figure that out until he goes back to the boss’s trailer the next summer looking for work (and maybe Ennis), only to have Aguirre snarl at him, “You boys found a way to make the time pass up there, didn’t you?,” adding, “Twist, you guys wasn’t gettin paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose.”  

At the end of the summer idyll, back in the bleak streets of the nowhere town from which they’d started out, with the first snow coming on, there’s the poignant, awkward parting. “You goin a do this next summer?” Jack asks Ennis, one foot up in his pickup. “Maybe not… Well, see you around, I guess,” Ennis says. “Right,” Jack says, and they shake hands, hit each other on the shoulder, and then there is “nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions.” But “within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand… He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.” A very long time.

And then life goes on, as real life does. Ennis gets married to Alma (Michelle Williams), babies get made, attempts at ranching fail, and eventually they’re all trapped in the working-class squalor of a littered apartment above a commercial establishment in another faceless Wyoming town. Meanwhile, Jack goes down Texas way, makes a not especially successful stab at rodeo riding, but meets Lureen the rodeo queen (Anne Hathaway), whose daddy prospers in the farm equipment business, marries, has a child, and eventually they’re all trapped in the middle class-squalor of big screen TV and the in-laws over for holiday dinner. In real life, that would probably be that. But in the story, some four years later, Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he’s passing through town on his way to visit his folks.

It only takes one look, one hug, one impassioned kiss (silently viewed by Ennis’s wife from the upstairs back stoop) for the rekindling of a passion that will run another decade and a half. The film traces the mutual slow disintegration of their marriages and the respective social brutalities of Jack’s and Ennis’s lives — some honky-tonks and once-in-a-blue-moon paid-up gay sex on the other side of the Tex-Mex border for the former, senseless punch-outs and grinding poverty for the latter. The dreariness is punctuated over the long years only by semi-annual “fishing” trips (during which, as Ennis’s wife notes, no fish are ever brought home), where the multiple pleasures of that summer on Brokeback Mountain are re-enacted.

At one point, Jack, the more explicitly conscious of this pair of brokeback lovers, tentatively suggests, “Listen, I’m thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life.” They both know “it ain’t goin a be that way,” and worse, it’s a dangerous fantasy. Men have been killed for less, as the film makes clear, and no doubt some of the movie audience will remember the real-life murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, not so long ago in the Laramie, Wyoming outback. “Two guys livin together? No. All I can see is we get together once in a while way the hell out in the back a nowhere,” Ennis says. “How much is once in a while?” Jack bitterly wants to know. Ennis replies, “I goddamn hate it that you’re goin a drive away in the mornin and I’m goin back to work,” and then he delivers the tale’s punchline: “But if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”

And that’s about it. Almost predictably, there’s a denouement (which I won’t reveal) that provides the last stifled sob in this legitimate three-hankie weepie.

The indisputable virtue of Brokeback Mountain is Heath Ledger’s remarkable acting performance as a man almost without words, filled with a passion that from one moment to the next might either implode or explode, and you can’t anticipate which way it’s going to go. It’s a cinematic revelation on a par with the other great acting portrayal of the year, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s turn as Truman Capote in Capote, the morally ambiguous tale of a writer’s relationship to a pair of cold-blooded killers about whom he’s writing a book. Ledger is more than competently seconded by Jake Gyllenhaal and a solid supporting cast, but it’s Ledger’s role that provides the telling silences that echo through the film’s audience.

Like all the Hollywood films that have something to say (and they are few), Brokeback Mountain is inevitably part of America’s current “culture war.” That the film’s message of tolerance doesn’t devolve into a tract or a TV disease-of-the-week movie is thanks largely to Larry McMurtry’s restrained, pinpoint-sharp screenplay. McMurtry, who’s written screenplays (The Last Picture Show), a passle of bestselling novels (including Lonesome Dove and other modern Westerns), and intelligent meditations like Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, is the sure-handed intelligence guiding this movie-making herd, and keeping it for the most part from straying into cow-pies of sentimentality.

There are minor flaws. It’s difficult for two actors in their mid-20s to portray characters who over the course of the story age 20 years. That means that at the outset, during those first pastoral romps, they’re not quite able to physically reproduce the coltishness of 19-year-olds. And when Gyllenhaal acquires a mustache as his character reaches his 30s, it only reminds us of James Dean trying to grow into a middle-age Texan in Giant. The women in the film don’t have a great deal to do, even though cowgirls have the blues, too, but this is, admittedly, a story about a man’s world, however distorted. The horrors of heterosexual domestic life are a bit over-stark compared to the suggested innocence of nature and love. On the whole, though, the shortcomings are forgiveable.

Part of the tragedy of the story is that these guys never get to the other side of the mountain — on the far side of which lies gay San Francisco. Set in the period 1963-83, Ennis and Jack live in a realm little penetrated by the outside world. No word of a gay lib movement or even the Vietnam War reaches these mountain fastnesses. This is one film that demonstrates that ignorance isn’t bliss. Instead, Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, who’s made a range of Oscar-winners from Sense and Sensibility, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to such blockbusters as The Hulk, keeps his eye tightly and wisely focused on an almost inarticulate, socially impossible relationship.

Of course, Brokeback Mountain “subverts” the Western film genre as well as male identities — something every film critic or cultural studies graduate student will be happy to point out — but so have Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys, and any one of Neil Jordan’s gender-benders, from The Crying Game to his current Breakfast on Pluto. Maybe the interesting thing about this particular story of bareback riders is that the lovers strike us as believably real, as does the love, and that’s no small accomplishment, in art or life.

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Vancouver, Dec. 26, 2005

The best thing—among quite a few good things—about Wes Anderson’s recent movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is that it reminds you that art isn’t supposed to be like life. Life is restricted to events that operate by conventional physics and social dynamics, and those are restrictive, time consuming, and well, generally pretty boring. Art, on the other hand, is fluid, free to invent, and happily liberated from functional necessity, be it the requirement that one spend a certain percentage of one’s time straining on the toilet, or putting up with stubborn, self-proud people without the brains god gave geese, and others with more ordnance than ideas. Then there’s the stupid practical problems: in the “real” world, you can’t see through the side of a steel-hulled ship to catch all the fun stuff going on inside.

Art, in other words, is faster—or slower, if that’s what is required—and there’s no need to wait around shuffling feet for something interesting or significant to happen. Art can invent zebra backed crabs, rainbow-coloured sea horses, and Bill Murray playing Jacques Cousteau. Just snap your fingers, or write it into the script.

The Life Aquatic also reminded me of how depressingly rarely today’s films take full advantage of artistic licence—and how much fun it can be when they do, for film-makers and audiences alike.

I don’t know if Wes Anderson is a genius. Probably he isn’t. Judging from his other movies—along with this one—his best claim to genius is an insistence that his actors ought to be having as much fun making the movie as the audience has watching it, which isn’t normally the road to accreditation as a genius, given that having fun was something my mother insisted on even while she was doing the laundry, and nobody called her a genius or even an artist. But it works as both a life strategy and an artistic method, and Anderson is getting more confident about it as a movie-production formula with each film he makes.

It also isn’t clear to me whether this movie belongs to Anderson or to Bill Murray. I suspect it’s a little of both, and that both are about equally responsible for bringing the marvellous cast of actors on board, as it were. Whichever or whatever is responsible for assembling the cast, some of the small roles in this movie are beyond delicious. Owen Wilson, as Zissou’s accidentally-produced, accident-prone but not quite long-lost son Ned Plimpton and Cate Blanchett as a haplessly-straight journalist trying to uncover the logic of a contemporary Ship of Fools are wonderfully played, but Willem Dafoe, as Zissou’s crazed-with-loyalty Teutonic assistant Klaus Daimler, is downright astonishing. Dafoe, who’s made his career chewing on scenery, is so steely in his dedication to underplaying this role that you actually forget he’s Willem Dafoe. The consequence is that he’s outrageously funny where a lessor actor, hamming it up, would have simply been a neutral within this over-the-top cast. So too with Bud Cort and Angelica Huston, who play to the script without detectable self-irony or genuflection. Only Jeff Goldblum, as Zissou’s long-time competitor, Alistair Hennessey, seems to be having too good a time to hold the pose.

Murray’s interpretation of Zissou is characteristically self-ironic and profane, but it’s a style that makes his parody of Cousteau—or rather, the half-environmentalist-half-entertainment demimonde that Cousteau operated in—sharper by sheer contrast. Was this what Cousteau was really like? Probably not, but it’s likely much closer to the world Cousteau lived in than most of us ever dreamed: underfunded, overhyped, inhabited by charlatans and crazily-wounded refugees from ordinary life. Zissou’s world is also a speeded-up, essentialized metaphor for the world everyone now lives in, with implications that are worth taking seriously: that in the nihilism of commercial life, concentration and obsession are the crucial tools, but that these, most of all, need to be willing to take the long route, and recognize a laugh when it’s there, however inappropriate. GreenPeace badly needs a retraining voyage on the Belafonte, along with a list of others too long to name—if only so they can reacquaint themselves with the notion that it’s on those apparent trips to nowhere that the meaningful stuff appears, and that real meaning never appears without the accompanying cage of life’s essential absurdity.

710 words June 24, 2005

Very occasionally, Hollywood gives its “Best Picture” Academy Award to a film with something on its mind, like Marty (1955), Annie Hall (1977), or A Beautiful Mind (2001). Mostly, though, it prefers to give the award to something epic, say, Gone With the Wind (1939) or last year’s Lord of the Rings (2003). If it can’t get something epicky, it’s willing to settle for something opicky – biographical pictures, or biopics as they’re known in the trade. If it can get something both epicky and opicky – Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Patton (1970), or Gandhi (1982) – all the better.

This year the epics have flopped, and Hollywood has been making its money on biopics, an unusual number of which have hit the screens, from Martin Scorcese’s film about aviator Howard Hughes to studies of R&B master Ray Charles, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, singer Bobby Darrin, Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie, songsmith Cole Porter, and world conqueror Alexander the Great. I’ve seen about half of them and duly noted the Academy Award nominations for Martin Scorcese’s The Aviator and Taylor Hackford’s Ray, which will probably scoop up the major share of the Oscars at next month’s award ceremonies. But it’s a bad pic about an ancient warrior, rather than the box office boffos, that raises some artistic questions worth pondering.

The first of 2004’s soon-to-be-forgotten epics, Troy, a sword-and-sandals affair based on Homer’s Iliad, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles, and armed with a budget that launched a thousand digitalized ships, quickly sank from view. Troy tried to capitalize on the Oscar-winning Gladiator (2000), but sword and sand isn’t much of a thrill in these days of digital special effects that can conjure up everything from Middle Earth to Jurassic Park dinosaurs to Star Wars.

The epic-biopic, also in the sand and spear genre, that was actually anticipated with some interest is director Oliver Stone’s Alexander. It was released in the U.S. around American Thanksgiving, and arrived in Europe for Christmas, so those of us on far side of the pond were adequately forewarned.

You could chart the flop in the successive punning movie review headlines. It started with a lot of “Alexander the Not So Great” reviews (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times), went on to “Alexander the Grate” (Rick Groen, The Globe and Mail), was speared by the gay press as “Alexander the Str8” (Chris DeVito, XtraWest), and eventually was roasted as “Alexander the Turkey” as it played to empty cineplexes.

Alexander differs from Troy in that it is about a semi-documented piece of history, circa 350-330 BCE, rather than a great semi-historical myth, and it is directed by someone who has made interesting movies in the past (Stone’s Salvador and JFK, among them). What goes wrong with Alexander is quickly pinpointed by critic Roger Ebert: “Here is an ambitious and sincere film that fails to find a focus for its elusive subject.” Ebert points out that Stone “is fascinated by two aspects of Alexander: his pan-nationalism and his pan-sexualism. [Stone] shows [Alexander] trying to unite many peoples under one throne while remaining equally inclusive with his choice of lovers.”

The problem is that “it remains unclear if Alexander has united those peoples or simply conquered them, and his sexuality is made murky by the film’s shyness about gay sex,” says Ebert. In the end, “we welcome the scenes of battle . . . because at least for a time we are free of sociopolitical concepts and the endless narration of Ptolemy the historian,” lugubriously portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in a desperate bid by Stone to impose some narrative coherence on the sprawl. 

The real problem with Stone’s movie, and one that makes it difficult to make an interesting Hollywood-style biopic about Alexander, is that if you spend $150 million to line up all the spear-throwers and elephants, you’ve got to get a lot of 15-year-old boys (or, okay, 15 to 25-year-old boys) to come to the movie theatre and pay for the damn thing. And that means you’ve got to tailor the movie to the tastes and interests of its adolescent audience.

I knew we were in trouble, at least on the sex thing – we might as well start there, and leave the tricky geopolitical issues for later — when young Alexander (Connor Paolo) and his boyhood pal Hephaistion (Patrick Carroll) are presented as cute Macedonian teenagers in a wrestling school scene. Naturally, as the son of King Philip (energetically played by Val Kilmer), the backcountry warlord who conquered the Greek city states, Alexander has to be trained in warrior stuff, along with the other sons of the local aristocracy. Stone hauls in the great old character actor Brian Blessed to play the wrestling coach and give the usual Old Gipper pep-talk, while the kids roll around in the dust. As some of us know, Macedonian and Greek kids rolled around in the dust stark-nekkid, but in Alexander they’re garbed in something that look like Depend Diapers for elderly incontinent folk. Well, of course they’re not naked, you say.

Stay with me on this for a minute. Why are they not naked? Because you can’t show naked teenage boys in a movie. Well, at least not in a Hollywood movie. Or at least not in a Hollywood epic movie that depends on teenage boy moviegoers to cover the budget. And why can’t you show naked teenage boys to teenage boy moviegoers? Because you, well, you just can’t. Why not? I don’t know. It has something to do with sexual suggestion, I suppose, because if the boys are naked, and if when they grow up (into Colin Farrell as Alexander and Jared Leto as Hephaistion), they become or continue to be lovers, then . . . well, maybe some group like Focus on the Evil Family will come stomping down on Mr. Stone’s movie like a herd of elephants for encouraging teenage boys to engage in you know what. And god only knows what’ll happen in those darkened movie theatres when the teenage boys see the giant naked teenage boys up there on the silver screen. At which point, it turns into a porn fantasy, and nobody decent wants to go there, right? All of this is a relatively small detail, but it’s emblematic of what goes wrong with the whole thing.

There’s a subsequent scene in which young Alexander tames the untamable wild horse in plain view of his proud dad and the other Macedonian cowboys, and that’s perfect for the teen lads in the movie theatre. That’s what they and Focus on the Family and the National Rifle Assn. have come to see. As for the homo stuff, Stone discreetly reduces it to a little obscure speech delivered by the boys’ tutor, famous old philosopher Aristotle (Christopher Plummer), and you have to listen really closely to hear Aristotle, fresh up from Athens, say that homosex is okay if done for the right noble reasons. Presumably this, and a lot more goes over the heads of the teen moviegoers. After that, once Alexander and Hephaistion get to be young grownups, the homo stuff is confined to Sensitive New Age Guy Hugs. It’s possible that Stone shot a lot of sexy Farrell-Leto scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor but, if so, they’re not in the movie, even though the movie was slyly promoted as a big breakthrough on the homo issue. In any case, there’s not so much as a same sex kiss, and what sex there is is truly ludicrous.

There’s a bizarre performance by Angelina Jolie as Alexander’s mother, Olympias, performed with a strange accent and snakes slithering all over her body that is meant to suggest something Oedipal, I think, and there’s a weird bed scene in which Alexander and his foreign bride, Roxane (Rosario Dawson) enthusiastically wrestle around naked with a knife. It’s one of those scenes that’s supposed to embody every 15-year-old boy’s fantasy of a sex scene. You want to cry out, Come back, Hephaistion! No, wait, that’s Shelly Winters in Lolita (1962) calling out for her dog, “Come back, little Sheba!” (And Stanley Kubrick’s little masterpiece didn’t even get a Best Pic nomination in the year that Lawrence of Arabia swept through the desert.) As you can see, Alexander is one of those movies that causes the mind to stray.

Critic Ebert may have welcomed the scenes of battle. I found them pretty boring. Even with the horses and elephants rearing in slo-mo in the forests of India, and the leaves of the trees turning magenta to represent the consciousness of a wounded Alexander, they’re pretty pale compared to what you can do with special effects in the afore-mentioned Middle Earth, outer space, and dinosaur parks. As for the geopolitical issues, you can’t expect teenagers to sit still for all that, so Stone breaks it up as much as possible, with cutaways to Ptolemy/Hopkins periodically delivering gobs of exposition. About the only thing amusing is watching the extra who plays the inkpot carrier chasing after the scribe who’s writing on a portable parchment as he follows a peripatetic Ptolemy around the palace patio. Late in the movie, there’s a very awkward flashback to pick up the assassination of Al’s dad, Philip, but by then it’s too late to stitch together the tattered tale.

What are the geopolitical issues? One of them is, Why conquer the world? It’s an issue on which the scholars are divided, including Robin Lane Fox, Stone’s resident adviser on the pic, and the author of Alexander the Great (Penguin, 1973). All of the scholars are working from Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander. Arrian was a second century CE Greek-speaking soldier, Roman Empire administrator, and historian in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. Arrian read the biographies of Alexander written by Ptolemy and other contemporaries some 400 years earlier (all of which are now lost) and produced a judicious redaction of the conqueror’s career.

Living in a world in which the boundaries of the known world are fuzzy terra incognita, the suggestion is that Alexander wanted to conquer the world in order to establish its bounds. Alexander’s head was filled with the stories of Achilles that he’d read in Homer, partly thanks to his tutor Aristotle – remember, all of this is happening a mere generation or two after the death of Socrates – and maybe if you could establish the world’s boundaries, it might allow a mortal to cross over into godhood. Anyway, that’s the poetic version.

The more practical geopolitical issue, and one that persists to this day is, Once you conquer the world, how do you administer it? That question seems to have an answer: multi-culturalism. Macedonia was the Greek outback, and the Greek-speaking Macedonian warlords were pretty much regarded as semi-barbarians, both by the Glory That Was Greece (the now diminished city states of Hellas) and by the major kingdom in the region, Darius’ Persia. It’s Persia that has to be conquered. And Alexander does it. This is one of those stories of, How ya gonna keep’m down on the farm, once they’ve seen gay Paree? In this case, Paree is the Persian capital of Babylon.

The interesting development historically is that while Alexander’s cowboy warrior chums are perfectly happy to go back to the farm, educated Alexander realizes that Persia is the superior civilization, and sees that if he’s going to run an empire, he’s going to have to integrate the Persian ruling class into his military and administrative regime. Alexander’s Macedonian homeboys don’t mind if Alexander sleeps with Persian boys (that, after all, is natural), but they’re definitely pissed-off to have Alexander consorting with the fruity Persians, adopting Persian diplomatic customs, developing a mixed-blood Macedonian-Persian army corps, etc. So, in addition to founding a string of cities in his own name (the most famous of which is Egypt’s Alexandria), one of the first franchise chains in Hellenic history, Alexander adopts multi-culturalism as an administrative tool.

A little of this, not much, is conveyed by Stone’s movie, and the Persian boy (his name is Bagoas, and he’s played by Francisco Bosch) is relegated to the dancing sidelines, reduced to smouldering glances and no speaking part. As Ebert observes, Stone fails to find a focus for any of this, sex or politics, and the movie is a hash, to say nothing of the box office flop.

Maybe it’s a story that can’t be told. That might be a good guess, except for the fact that somebody’s done it. Mary Renault’s novel about Alexander, The Persian Boy (Vintage, 1972), presents the whole story through the bedroom eyes of Bagoas, a well-born Persian teenage eunuch. The novelist Gore Vidal thought it was a pretty good book. When he reviewed it in 1973, he campily asked, “Can your average beautiful teen-age Persian eunuch find happiness with your average Greek world-conqueror who is also a dish aged only 26?”

But camping and war-camping aside, Vidal’s praise for Renault was genuine, as well as sound literary judgment, given that her novel of the ancient world holds up pretty well three decades later, especially in light of Stone’s inchoate blockbuster. In his review of The Persian Boy, Vidal observes, “We are able to see the Macedonian troops as they appeared to the Persians: crude gangsters smashing to bits an old and subtle culture they cannot understand, like today’s Americans in Asia.” Vidal was prescient: today’s Americans are smashing to bits a culture in old Babylon itself. Vidal himself, by the way, went on to write a successful ancient world novel, Creation (1981), also from the Persian perspective.

Personally, I’d prefer to see a non-Hollywood version of The Persian Boy, say, directed by Pedro Almodovar, to Stone’s botched biopic. It would have some spectacle-like filmic bits: in Renault’s novel, Bagoas’s family fortress gets overrun in an internecine Persian political squabble, heads get chopped off and tossed into saddlebags, the boy is kidnapped and then gruesomely castrated before being put to auction on the slave market, etc., eventually ending up in the tent of Darius for a while before settling down with Alexander. But Renault leaves aside the battle scenes (helpful for reducing the film’s budget) and concentrates on the camp followers.

There are some mushy purple passages, but Renault is good, psychologically astute, and even decorous on the sex scenes. Not lurid, but no flinching either. There’s just enough gossip in the ancient texts to suggest that Bagoas might have been an historical character, and in the novel, the main thing Renault tries to work out is the relationship between Bagoas, Alexander’s teen bedmate, and Hephaistion, Alexander’s former teen bedmate and lifelong love. It’s a difficult triangular portrait to pull off, and Renault is more than minimally plausible.

She’s particularly good on the multicultural issue, and the interesting epic scenes are not the bloodbaths with casts of thousands of extras on the plains of Persia or in the jungles of India, but the gruelling desert march back to Babylon. Her Persian boy survives the wars – Alexander, in the end, doesn’t, dying of fever at 32 – and, in Renault’s version ends up as a retainer at the Egyptian court of Ptolemy. All in all, she shows that a coherent story can be told, even though it perhaps can’t be filmed as a Hollywood epic for teenage moviegoers.

Well, once you’ve crunched your popcorn over the problems of Alexander, The Aviator and Ray are easily dispatched. Martin Scorcese has yet to win a director’s Oscar, despite a quarter-century string of interesting movies, from Taxi Driver (1976, when it lost the best pic and director Oscars, for godssakes, to Rocky!) to his recent Gangs of New York (2003). He now has Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Howard Hughes, sometime movie director, aviation mogul, and obsessive-compulsive disorder nutbar. The Aviator, set between the 1920s and 1950, features Hughes’ romances with actresses Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), and comes complete with sensational airplane crashes, great nightclub set-scenes from the 20s, political skullduggery, and the gathering darkness of mental illness. Despite all the razzle-dazzle, more than one critic has noticed that there’s something hollow at the core of this spectacle.

Scorcese has great in-joke fun portraying Hughes as a detail-obsessed movie director who took three years and a chunk of the family Texas tool factory fortune to make an aviation war saga, Hell’s Angels, at the end of the 1920s. Hollywood laughed at the Texan upstart, and Hughes’ films were hardly great art, but their director had an instinct for making money at the box office. His Western, The Outlaw, which was mainly about Jane Russell’s mammaries, was also bankable.

In DiCaprio, Scorcese has a better actor than most critics allow. DiCaprio could always act, even when he was best-known for being a pretty boy. In his early films, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993) and The Basketball Diaries (1995), there was both presence and thespian skill. There was never any doubt about the looks – see Agniezka Holland’s film Total Eclipse (1995), in which DiCaprio plays bad-boy poet Arthur Rimbaud, for a glimpse of the actor at the apogee of his beauty – and with the Hughes biopic, DiCaprio is seeking to make the turn into acting adulthood. His version of Hughes is competent enough, complete with sly charm and creepiness, but there’s something empty in the movie’s main character that’s never made up for by DiCaprio’s convincing portrayal of being overtaken by madness.

As for the rest, Cate Blanchett won a lot of praise and an Oscar nomination for her turn as the formidable Hepburn, although I found the role playing rather grotesque. The undoubtedly great acting performance in the film is Alan Alda’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of a twitchily corrupt U.S. Senator in the pocket of a rival airlines mogul (played with quiet authority by Alec Baldwin). Altogether, Scorcese’s film combines classic Hollywood big spectacle with, simultaneously, a near-pastiche of Hollywood big spectacle filmmaking. It’s just the sort of thing likely to please Oscar voters in a year without a great film.

The other crowd pleaser is Taylor Hackford’s biopic of blind rhythm and blues artist Ray Charles. It’s got two things going for it: Ray Charles’ music, and a pitch perfect performance by Jamie Foxx, who’s come a long way since his TV comic days on In Living Colour. Beyond that, it’s a middling uplift film, grittily sentimental (as compared to old-fashioned treacly sentimental) and politically correct. There’s almost nothing for any of the other actors to do in this narrowly focused bio that covers the stretch of Charles’ career from the end of WWII to about 1965, when “The Genius,” as he was known to his PR handlers, conquers his heroin addiction. It skips the last four decades of Charles’ life (he died last year), and while it offers the requisite amount of “Mess Around,” it’s mostly a lot of sweet “Georgia on My Mind.”

Scorcese and Hackford will no doubt go home with some of the gilded statuettes, but in a year of not especially memorable movies, it’s the soon-to-be-mercifully-forgotten wreckage of Oliver Stone’s epic-biopic that at least leaves one wondering about what happened. As for me, I’m still grousing that Lolita (1962), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), and Tootsie (1982) didn’t win “Best Picture” Oscars in their respective yesteryears. Hell, I would’ve preferred last year’s Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and spooky Japan, over all those hobbits and Mordorous orcs from Lord of the Rings.

Berlin, Jan. 29, 2005