Ms. Jolie plays the bad girl in “Beowulf,” a wicked demon, the
mother of all monsters — here, Grendel, played by Crispin Glover — who
can switch from hag to fab in the wink of a serpentine eye. If you
don’t remember this evil babe from the poem, it’s because she’s almost
entirely the invention of the screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman
and the director Robert Zemeckis,
who together have plumped her up in words, deeds and curves. These
creative interventions aren’t especially surprising given the source
material and the nature of big-studio adaptations. There’s plenty of
action in “Beowulf,” but even its more vigorous bloodletting pales next
to its rich language, exotic setting and mythic grandeur.
At the heart of this take on the epic are the bookended
battles fought by the Geat warrior Beowulf (Ray Winstone), the first
against Grendel (and his mother), the second against a dragon. Beowulf
visits the Danish kingdom, where he eyeballs the queen (Robin Wright Penn) and promises to fight Grendel for the king (Anthony Hopkins).
In between intimations of court intrigue, the rest of the
characters do
what they almost always do in movies set in Ancient Times, namely
grunt, shout and eat with their mouths open. Eventually Grendel crashes
the party, and Beowulf leads the charge, bouncing off beast and walls
completely naked, his genitals hidden by convenient obstructions.
Somehow this trick was a lot funnier in “Borat” and “The Simpsons Movie.”
For the poet Seamus Heaney,
whose gorgeous translation of the poem became an unexpected best seller
after it was published in 1999, Grendel “comes alive in the reader’s
imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark.” The reader’s
imagination, of course, has long been one of the banes of cinema. Any
filmmaker who takes a stab at literary adaptation has to compete with
those moving pictures already flickering in our heads, the ones we
create when we read a book. The solution for many filmmakers is to try
to top the reader’s imagination or distract it or overwhelm it, usually
by throwing everything they can think of at the screen, including lots
of big:
big noise, sets, moves, effects, stars and, yup, even big
breasts.
Mr.
Zemeckis throws a lot of stuff at us in “Beowulf”
besides Ms. Jolie, including spears, swords, pools of gore, dribbles of
mucous and images with extremely forced perspectives, which direct your
vision toward the center of the frame, goosing the 3-D effect. Mostly
he throws technology at us. The main characters in the
movie were
created through
performance capture, a system that allows filmmakers to
map an actor’s expressions and gestures onto a computer-generated
model, which is then further tweaked. (Eye movements are captured
separately.) Neither wholly animation nor live action, it is a
sophisticated visual technique, and true believers see it as the future
of movies, though really the most interesting thing about it is that
it’s not intrinsically interesting.
To be honest, I don’t yet see the point of performance
capture, particularly given how ugly it renders realistic-looking human
forms. Although the human faces and especially the eyes in “Beowulf”
look somewhat less creepy than they did in “The Polar Express,”
Mr. Zemeckis’s first experiment with performance capture, they still
have neither the spark of true life nor that of an artist’s unfettered
imagination. The face of Mr. Hopkins’s king resembles the actor’s in
broad outline, in the shape and curve of his physiognomy. But it has
none of the minute trembling and shuddering that define and enliven —
actually animate — the discrete spaces separating the nose, eyes and
mouth. You see the cladding but not the soul.
The character designs for the nonhuman forms work far
better. Grendel isn’t remotely scary, but he looks pleasingly
disgusting, like a stringy, chewed-up cadaver with snake scales and a
suggestion of Mr. Glover’s own beak. Grendel soars through the air
pretty much the way Mr. Zemeckis’s busy camera does: Both are full of
zip. They’re certainly fun to watch as they Ping-Pong across the frame,
though neither goes anywhere meaningful. By contrast, the human
characters move with a perceptible drag effect, as if underwater, with
none of the kinetic vibrancy of real bodily locomotion. That makes the
3-D effects all the more important, because the only time the movie
pops is when something or someone seems to be flying at you.
Yet the 3-D is necessary to the film only in so far as it
keeps your eyes engaged when your mind starts to wander. Stripped of
much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and
context, this film version of “Beowulf” doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D
oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which
probably explains why Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to
sex it up with Ms. Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes. The same
no doubt accounts for why Mr. Winstone, an
actor of substantial stomach
girth who is every inch a sexy beast in his own right, has been
transformed into a generic-looking gym rat complete with six-pack.
Somewhere in B-movie heaven Steve Reeves is smiling.
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