TROY: ”Lo, how the mighty hath fallen!”

TROY (2004) is a fine motion picture up there on the same level as GLADIATOR, the Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe (2000) venture that won 5 Oscars and turned Crowe into a superstar.

While TROY isn’t exactly the same story you find in THE ILIAD, neither is GLADIATOR the same story as that of Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ last days either, so
the purists will quibble but the average moviegoer will not mind if artistic license was involved. For all we know, THE ILIAD may make what really happened in the Trojan Wars just as historically variant as TROY makes Homer’s legend. At least TROY preserves the core of the old story, and beyond the historical/book legend, you get people confronting inner and outer challenges just as timeless and universal as those of the participants in the Middle Eastern military conflicts of today.

The context of TROY is important.

In Thomas Cahill’s most excellent book THE DESIRE OF THE EVERLASTING HILLS, about the centuries before and after the switchover in history from B.C. to A.D., the author devotes many, many pages at the beginning of the book painting a picture of the rise of the early civilizations. Cahill distills what we can learn from that era and shows us how, time after time, in civilization after civilization, the thing most prized was not philosophy, art, religion or political skill or science. Rather, it was the Warrior Ideal- the myth of the invulnerable and skilled fighter. This is actually an archetype, for we find the Warrior Ideal surfacing in the early Clint Eastwood movies, other movies like TOP GUN, right on up to Vin Deisel’s dark-star turns in his Riddick movies. It is an enduring archetype that is one of the core themes in TROY and reflects the viewpoint of ancient humans. The leaders of early civilized man, like Alexander The Great, were ruthless, blood-smeared, steely-eyed killers. Warriors. Conquerors.

In the tale of Conan The Barbarian, the sage asks the barbarian with a shout: “Conan! What is best in life?” Fixing his questioner with a flinty-eyed stare, Conan replies, “Crush the enemies! See them driven before you! And hear the lamentations of their women!”

TROY’s warrior ideal, of course, is manifested for us primarily in Achilles, played by Brad Pitt, and to a lesser degree in Hector, played by Eric Bana.

In battle, Achilles is a free-spirited, seemingly invulnerable killing machine, who apparently has two loves in life: (1) to be remembered as the meanest, toughest hombre in the ancient world long after he is gone, and he also loves (2) beddable women. Yet to its credit, the film, through Pitt’s excellent performance, does not accept the Warrior Ideal at face value in the modern fashion of the way Eastwood, Cruise, and Diesel, et al., are presented in their more modern myths. No, Achilles is sometimes a man so uncomfortable with being the Warrior Ideal that he looks like he is in the throes of an identity crisis and is about to come out of his skin. During the second half of the movie, he has a “relationship” with a Trojan Woman whose vibes match up with his, and when it looks like he will have to leave her, he thanks her “for giving me peace.” Achilles can’t make up his mind as to whether to be a steely-eyed killer or whether to pack it in and go off to some island and maybe grow an olive tree plantation or something. His frustration finally drives him to an angry rage when his cousin is slain, and that anger rules him so much that he punches out his most faithful fellow soldier and he almost chokes his lady-love to death. For the Ideal Man to lose control of himself and submit to anger is a way of showing that a real man is really not a god or even a superman, but can be reduced to a slave, a slave to his own violent emotions, if he loses perspective.

This may make you think of what our own modern warriors in places like Iraq must be going through. War is not about glory. It is a downer. When Achilles tires of making war,
his whole raison d’etra seems to depart from him. He knows that to be an Ideal Warrior is not really the zenith role a human being can play, but it is cruelly empty and bears a crushing load of guilt. He knows, he knows that the best a man (or woman) can be must be something better, and that for all his skill and fame, he has somehow missed it. Clint Eastwood's portrayal as a self-loathing old gunfighter, pickled in guilt but chained to his destiny, in UNFORGIVEN, comes to mind.

Brad acts all the way through the movie with this style, and shines, whether showing horrendously deadly skill in the to-the-death fight scenes, or weeping over a fallen enemy’s body, or losing his temper, or telling some pompous king what he can do with his grandiose ideas of power. I smell Oscar here.

The plot, of course, is derived from THE ILIAD of Homer (not the Simpson guy, but the ancient Greek guy, o ye who haven’t studied history). A prince of Troy named Paris makes off with Helen, the wife of a Greek king, and the king and his brother, another king, along with ancient special-ops soldiers like Achilles and his buds, go, with about 50,000 of their closest friends, in a thousand ships, to try, as the surface reason has it, to capture Helen and bring her back to Greece again. That’s the surface reason, but apparently the real reason is that the Greek kings can exploit Helen’s “kidnapping” as a pretext for going to war with Troy and adding Trojan real estate to the Greek territorial domain. But good old Achilles doesn’t like his army’s leadership and so he becomes something of a loose cannon. The war eventually happens and I’ll let you see what unfolds from that moment on..

Eric Bana as Hector does an outstanding job as Pitt/Achilles’ opposite number. He might be up for Best Supporting Actor. Viggo Mortensen could have also been great in this role.

There are a lot of other fine actors in the movie and I can’t name them all, but let me single out one in particular: Sean Bean. As Odysseus, King of Ithaca, I truly think Bean did the best acting job of all the players in the film, even outshining Pitt or Bana. And he doesn't try to steal the movie either; he just carefully does a superb job, almost in utter silence at times, every time he is on-screen, communicating with his face and body language in an instant what others with much more dialogue are slow to reveal. If the saying is true that, “there are no small parts, only small actors,” then Bean sure shows us some fine work with a relatively small part. He showed more wisdom than anyone else in the movie. It was particularly delicious to see Sean land such a great role and give it 110% because, for the last few years, Sean has almost always been given smarmy roles as a heavy, such as the frightening I.R.A. faction-offshoot villain in Harrison Ford’s PATRIOT GAMES and the cowed and intimidated and finally expelled spy team member of Robert di Nero in RONIN. He did get a nice role in LORD OF THE RINGS, but in a lot of his earlier work he had to grit his teeth and play the bad bad bad guy, just like Jack Palance and Lee Van Cleef did years ago. So I think it serves him right, after being somewhat typecast in his previous films either as a bad guy or a cowardly, defeatable guy, to finally be given such a sterling wonderful part as the heroic and only royal friend of Achilles. If it were up to me, I’d give Bean the Best Supporting Male Actor Oscar right now and be done with it. Just my epinion.

In the end, the proud and the powerful fall, but even in death they leave a story worth retelling for thousands of years, and they remind us that in today's world, power and pride and might may look good on a recruiting poster, but even the Warrior Ideal is an idea that may have outlived its archetypal usefulness, and amnesty should be the grist for the ideal of peace. Pitt's Achilles seems to symbolize that when he allows the Trojan king (Peter O'Toole) to take his son's body back into the walls of Troy instead of simply killing the old (enemy) monarch when he has the chance.

This idea is not to say that that we don't need warriors, but maybe, just maybe, they should know how to make peace as well as prosecuting war. Our world is redefining the meaning of the word "warrior." No longer can a warrior live for combat alone. He must know in equal measure how to sow and cultivate the seeds of peace. This seems to be a major but hidden message in TROY.

One vital element in the movie is the music. Just as GLADIATOR has the ghostly strains of Enya's etherial voice running through it, TROY imitates this by having some well-crafted ghostly vocal strains which sound Middle Eastern running through it as well. James Horner was in charge of the music, and James knows a few things about sound-tracks indeed. And another thing I liked about Horner's choice of music was that he avoided his (typical) ploy of using an angelic voiced choir whenever the heroes die or some otherworldly spectacle appears in the movie. Horner does that--- almost to a fault--- in some other movies (listen to the music at the end of THE ABYSS, for example), but he doesn't do that here in TROY. I think this musical move was invented when Speilberg did the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS end scenes, when the humans are admiring the little people's flying saucer, by the way. Movies like GLADIATOR may have picked up on that. I suspect Horner took many of his cues from GLADIATOR'S score, and whatever he did, it came out of his creative oven just right. I liked the Josh Groban ballad during the credit rolls at the end, too.

If you have the time, stay in your seat at the end and watch the credit rolls all the way through. I think I counted FIVE production units that worked on this movie in many location settings. That's incredible. I guess not everything is done by CGI in this day and time, even as good as CGI is today.

The skin shots, made much of by some (Gorsh, you mean sex still sells?), seemed not all that distracting and were tasteful and beautiful. Brad, by the way, looks like he really got his bod sculpted well through a lot of workouts and discipline so he could look like a real Achilles. I wish I had his trainer. And the ladies were very easy on the eyes, for those of us that lean in that direction. Balance, balance.

I sure hope this movie breaks even (dollarwise) or better at the box office. It raises the bar for “epic” films and you’ll remember why you like to go to the movies. Like GLADIATOR, it moves away from the sclock and campiness and swooning that we sometimes have seen in historical epics of the past and makes the god-inspired actors pleasingly human, as we are. And that makes history all the more fascinating as a prism through which to understand the present day.

***** 5 stars.