Monster Mash

But never, in the annals of motion picture history, has an adaptation of a great work been run through the shredder quite as thoroughly as Beowulf is in this lavish and technically astounding new version–a combination of live action and computer animation directed by Oscar-winner Robert Zemeckis.

“Frankly, nothing about the original poem appealed to me,” Zemeckis has said, a remark that suggests he might not have been the best person to make a film version of it. But no matter, because Zemeckis discovered to his delight that the screenplay he was given “explored deeper into the text, looking between the lines, questioning the holes in the source material.” In his estimation, the script–written by a fantasy novelist who wrote the Sandman comic books and a screenwriter who helped come up with the concept for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction–actually improves on one of the oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon works of literature.

“They managed to keep the essence of the poem,” says Zemeckis, “but made it more accessible to a modern audience and made some revolutionary discoveries along the way.” Ah, yes: revolutionary discoveries. Like devising a plotline that turns Beowulf into an attack on . . . Beowulf. Imagine a movie called The Torah that tells the story of creation from the perspective of Christopher Hitchens, and you might get a sense of the rather shocking transformation that takes place here.

Rather than being the world’s greatest and bravest hero, as he is in the poem, the Beowulf of Zemeckis’s film is a puffed-up and vainglorious liar who sells his soul and manhood for power–and the promise that his repugnant behavior will be whitewashed forever by a hagiographic poem dedicated to his glory. The Epic of Beowulf is, in the estimation of the movie version of Beowulf, a tissue of lies. Beowulf knows this all too well. His final words are: “It’s too late for lies.” But he dies before he can correct the record. So the “revolutionary discoveries” made by the screenwriters of Beowulf include the fact that the Epic of Beowulf is a travesty. The true story of Beowulf is that (to quote the film) “there are no heroes anymore” and “men are the real monsters.”

I don’t want to sound pious about the original, a work that has tortured English majors and lovers of literature in general for untold centuries–forced by sadistic masters giggling into their beards to try to make sense of its incomprehensible Anglo-Saxon. Even when translated into modern English by a superior poet like Seamus Heaney, Beowulf is a chore, since it does not have a narrative line but rather is a seriatim account of three hand-to-hand confrontations over the course of 50 years between the warrior Beowulf and three terrifying supernatural creatures: first, the man-eating giant Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally a fire-spewing dragon.

The storyline devised by the two screenwriters, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, finds a perversely clever way to weave it all together. The unifying glue is Grendel’s mother, who is not a monstrous hag of the deep but a Circe-like sea demon embodied by Angelina Jolie. She is a Satanic temptress who seduces men into impregnating her with the promise of granting them worldly power. Grendel is the issue of her liaison with Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins), and as a result of that tryst, Hrothgar has been rendered infertile. Eventually, she pulls the same trick on Beowulf (Ray Winstone) after he slays Grendel, and their offspring is the dragon whom Beowulf is forced to fight after serving as king for 50 years.

Power corrupts and destroys. Heroism is only the result of good public relations. Glory is a sham. Oh, and poor Grendel is a developmentally delayed sufferer from a skin condition that only attacks people because they make too much noise.

Whatever this is, it isn’t Beowulf; it is, rather, Beowulf in reverse. The Beowulf of the poem has no characteristics but his heroism: his overpowering strength, his physical bravery, his cleverness in battle, his undying honor, and his love of glory.

The poem endures because of its exploration of these noble qualities and because of its two primal tropes. First is that the force attempting to avenge Grendel’s death is his grieving mother, who is even more powerful and frightening than any avenging male might be. The second is that it ends with an old Beowulf recapturing the glory of his youth by slaying the dragon–and losing his life in the process. Rather than bemoaning the tissue of lies his legend has become, as in the film, Beowulf says on his deathbed that he never plotted a quarrel, nor swore an unjust oath, and takes joy in these accomplishments. In the film, by slaying the dragon, Beowulf commits the worst of all his crimes, since the dragon is his own son.

This travesty of Beowulf is an epic not for the ages but for the Bush administration. For what is Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf but Hollywood’s vision of George W. Bush–a blowhard warmonger and craver of riches who reaches the summit of power through illegitimate means and has built his career on deceit? That’s all well and good, but was it really necessary for medieval scribes to spend hundreds of years keeping the tale of Beowulf alive through the Dark Ages so that their precious handiwork could be turned into the source material for the animated equivalent of a Keith Olbermann rant?

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.