IF YOU SPEND ENOUGH TIME watching Inside the Actor’s Studio and listening to DVD commentary tracks, you learn that, since they have very little other work to do, actors are forever agonizing over “choices.” Of course everyone involved in the production of cinema makes choices and these thousands of choices must align just-so in order to create a good movie. The master film editor Walter Murch likened the making of these choices to playing a game of Negative 20 Questions:
Michael asks Walter: Is the object bigger than a breadbox? Walter–who has picked the alarm clock–says, No. Now Anthony has chosen the sofa, which is bigger than a breadbox. And since Michael is going to ask him the next question, Anthony must quickly look around the room and come up with something else–a coffee cup!–which is smaller than a breadbox. So when Michael asks Anthony, If I emptied out my pockets could I put their contents in this object? Anthony says, Yes.
Now Aggie’s choice may have been the small pumpkin carved for Halloween, which could also contain Michael’s keys and coins, so when Michael says, Is it edible? Aggie says, Yes. That’s a problem for Walter and Anthony, who have chosen inedible objects: they now have to change their selection to something edible, hollow, and smaller than a breadbox.
So a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens. To end successfully, the game must produce, in fewer than 20 questions, an object that satisfies all of the logical requirements: smaller than a breadbox, edible, hollow, etc.
In filmmaking, Negative 20 Questions begins with a story idea and each member of the cast and crew then contributes a series of if–then choices. If these choices line up in an interesting and non-contradictory way, then a good movie is produced. (In case you’re wondering, the original creator of Negative 20 Questions was not Murch, but physicist John Wheeler.)
AS A GAME of Negative 20 Questions, the movie Troy is fascinating. Written by Homer, adapted by David Benioff, and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, Troy begins with the Iliad as its source and then spins outward as the various players make their choices: If the Iliad is going to be a movie, then it needs a big budget. If it’s going to be a movie with a big budget, then it needs a movie star as Achilles. If it’s going to be a big budget movie with a star as Achilles, then Achilles and his attendant Patroclus can’t be lovers. And so on.
There are two choices, however, which stand out above the rest. The first is the decision to cast the Greeks as villains and the Trojans as the movie’s heroes. In Troy, Paris and Helen are madly in love, and she leaves Sparta with him of her own volition. Menelaus–a wife-beater if ever there was one–enlists Agamemnon’s help to bring Helen back to him, so he can slit her throat. Agamemnon, a brutal, power-mad tyrant, agrees to go to war and is thrilled that Helen has given him a pretext to attack Troy, since he has long coveted the city. And Achilles is a brooding, philosophical hunk. No longer a tragedy in which heroic equals are pitted against one another by Paris’s vanity, Troy is the story of the conquest of a good and noble people by an army of crafty barbarians.
Then there’s Petersen’s approach toward the gods: Troy supposes that they don’t actually exist. You’ll recall that the gods were somewhat integral to the Iliad. Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena go to Paris asking him to mediate their dispute, and it is Aphrodite who gives Helen to the young prince as a bribe, setting the tale in motion. The gods directly intercede in many battles during the long siege. Achilles’ invulnerability comes from the fact that his mother–the divine sea-nymph Thetis–dipped him in the River Styx.
Yet in Troy the gods never make their presence known. All of the events are brought about by earthly actors. Although most of the characters proclaim their devotion to the gods, the more cynical among them seem to believe that the gods are a myth for the weak-minded. We meet Achilles’ mother, who appears quite mortal, and besides which, it isn’t even clear that Achilles is invulnerable. Troy is the Iliad told by agnostics; the gods are AWOL and those who believe in them are dupes.
If you work in Hollywood, then religious believers are idiots. Even if they’re only pagans.
IN TRUTH, once you get past these two big revisions, Troy has much to recommend it.
While not as visually rich as Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Troy is a beautiful depiction of what war in the Mediterranean might have looked like. Cinematographer Roger Pratt, most well known for his work with Terry Gilliam, is in fine form. Petersen’s direction is not as lean as it was in Das Boot or In the Line of Fire, but he is in better form than he was in Outbreak or Air Force One, for whatever that’s worth.
The performances are uniformly solid. Eric Bana makes for a reasonable, gods-fearing Hector. Orlando Bloom is suitably effete as Paris (you can see why Peter Jackson saw him as an elf). In a smart bit of casting, unknown Diane Kruger plays Helen–the most beautiful woman in the world should not be a face the audience has seen before.
The two cornerstones of Troy, however, are Brian Cox and Peter O’Toole. Cox, one of the three great British actors to find their fortune in American popcorn movies, gives us an Agamemnon filled with barely restrained avarice. He is outdone only by O’Toole, whose Priam is a man nearly broken by age, failing physically and intellectually. Priam fails to defend his people, and his last great act as king is to kneel before Achilles in an attempt to ransom back the body of his son. Here, O’Toole is as good–as very, very good–as he’s ever been.
Which is a problem for Brad Pitt. In an otherwise serviceable performance, Pitt’s climactic scene with O’Toole exposes him as a boy among men. The two actors huddle in a tent in the dark speaking of honor and death and love. One imagines that neither Bloom, nor Bana, nor any of the other hardbodies on set would have been eager to step into Pitt’s shoes. With no physical business to cover him, even a reasonably accomplished young actor would look like Dustin Diamond next to O’Toole.
Fortunately for Pitt, in nearly every other frame of Troy he has lots of physical work. In fact, one of the movie’s great successes is its theory of what Achilles’ physicality looks like. Petersen presents an Achilles who triumphs not through strength or power, but speed and agility.
BACK, FOR A MOMENT, to the two big choices. A kind interpretation might suggest that the filmmakers are citing Homer, but leaning on Virgil. Yet there are a host of other changes from the original text. The siege of Troy, which took nearly a decade, is compressed into several weeks; Patroclus rushes into the fray without Achilles’ blessing; Ajax dies not by his own hand, but in battle.
Some of these changes stem from Troy‘s game of Negative 20 Questions. For instance: If there are no gods, then Achilles’s armor isn’t divinely wrought. If there’s nothing special about Achilles’ armor, then there’s no reason for Ajax to covet it, dishonor himself, and eventually commit suicide. If Ajax doesn’t commit suicide, then he might as well die fighting the Trojans.
Other departures are gratuitous. For instance, Paris survives the sack of Troy and escapes with Helen, Andromache, and Aeneas. As the changes mount–and become less and less required for purposes of internal logic–the reason for them becomes more and more clear: The writer believes that he is improving on the original text.
This isn’t to suggest that screenwriter David Benioff, whose sole previous credit is The 25th Hour, is incompetent, or has done a bad job. He isn’t, and there are some genuinely nice moments in Troy. But trying to “fix” Homer is an act of epic hubris. It’s the type of choice the gods would surely punish.
If they existed, that is.
Jonathan V. Last is the film critic for The Daily Standard.
