Troy: B
BY NEIL FAUERSO
TROY FULLY KICKS OFF a summer season unprecedented for its glut,
bombast, and glitter. With a budget approaching $200 million, an oiled and
supple cast including Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Peter O’Toole, and
source material rooted in the greatest war story of all time, we have the first
truly monstrous epic since The Return of the King. But where The
Return of the King was the hysterical, fever dream of geek fantasia, Troy is like the
most expensive, deluxe TNT movie of all time. The visuals are eye candy for
sure, but in a Las Vegas “recreate the majesty” sort of way, the
dialogue delivers glorious clunkers like “men have always been haunted
by the vastness of eternity” or “Immortality, it’s yours.
Take it!” and the acting has the tender excess of early talkies. Still,
Troy passes the crucial and only essential test of this caliber of film—it
entertains. For 163 minutes I didn’t look at my watch once.
The story, of course, is very familiar. Paris of Troy (Orlando Bloom)
steals Menelaus’s wife Helen, and Menelaus goes to his power-hungry
brother Agamemnon, who wants to conquer Troy anyway. Agamemnon launches
a thousand ships led under the fiercest of all warriors, Achilles (Brad
Pitt), while Troy is defended by King Priam’s (Peter O’Toole)
eldest son Hector (Eric Bana). Battles and tears ensue.
What makes Troy so far superior to the bloat of Gladiator or the stultifying,
corny pretension of Gangs of New York is its pace. Director Wolfgang Petersen
(The Perfect Storm, Air Force One, In the Line of
Fire) wisely oscillates
between showy scenes of melodramatic chatting and pristinely vivid, galvanized
battle scenes. The fights, whether massive like the siege on Troy’s
walls or small like the spectacular sparring between Achilles and Hector,
have a gracefully visceral quality to them without becoming unintelligible.
And the dramatic scenes, while drenched in puffery and eyeliner, have
a sweet quaintness to them—it’s sort of comforting to see
actors who are paid so much money utter ludicrous declarations so seriously.
As for the marquee leads, well, they admirably shed any coolness or posturing
and embrace their, gawky, mulleted legends. Brad Pitt, hairless and coated
in oil, looks like a cross between a bloated goth rock singer, and a B-actor
known for his work in erotic surfer films. Still, he commands a definite
presence and menace. His nifty, neck stab one-ups Legolas’s moves
for the coolest trick around.
Eric Bana, who seemed cast in lead in last year’s Hulk, has real
gravitas despite the rat’s nest of hair extensions that follow him
wherever he goes. And Peter O’Toole, though looking like the blue
ribbon winner in the septuagenarian beauty pageant, makes a grand return
to his stately and magnetic form.
In the end, Troy is a great, silly movie. The sets seem ready to collapse
under their opulence and fakeness, the women’s bronzed skin and
billowing gowns are the left-overs from Playboy’s historical photo
shoot, and the cinematographer cannot help but swoop in and out of the
grand creation as if swimming through the splendor. This is the way a
movie with this agenda and budget should be like, of old, of the 50s,
when they still used models and the men would always don a short leather
skirt to appear nobler.
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