Gladiator

viewed May 6, 2000 at the Century Plaza 10

For full information about this film, click here

Continuing in the longstanding Hollywood tradition of roman costume spectacles with Romans conniving in British accents (to convey their imperial nobility, no doubt) over the fate of the empire, Ridley Scott's version of the toga epic is a lot of blood, guts, severed limbs.  It borrows from the Braveheart aesthetic -- lots of gore propelled by right wing thinking.  Thematic borrowings from Julius Caesar (musings on the mob mentality) and Hamlet (climactic one-on-one duel) are thrown in for good measure.  The result, believe it or not, is incredibly engaging and entertaining.

My chief delight was in the gladiator scenes, which for the most part were cleverly conceived and riveting to watch.  Granted that the action was at times muddled (it is supposed by some that this was done deliberately to avoid an NC-17 rating), the scenarios are great.  My favorite fight is a scaled-down recreation of the battle of Carthage, with a measly, ill-equipped band of gladiators posing as the Carthaginians, fending off a dozen or so chariots as the Roman conquerors.  Another fight pits a gladiator against an opponent twice his size, who keeps backing him into corners where tigers lie waiting in trapdoors.  Fortunately the tigers look a lot less digitally synthesized on the big screen than on the TV commercials.  The same cannot be said for much of the Roman architecture, especially the Colosseum, which looks like it belongs in a video game (I'm sure it will be for the inevitable PlayStation version of the movie).  

The fights are gorier than any other Roman flick save Caligula, but are rather scant in number and spaced out between long expository scenes setting up the antipathy between a general Maximus and the ascendant Caesar Commodus.  Such scenes bored some of the men folk in the audience ("Where's the gladiators?  We came to see gladiators!"), whose sentiment were an interesting counterpoint to several interesting dialogues about the fickle, bloodthristy nature of the crowd, and how gladiator and caesar must both serve this insatiable appetite for vicious entertainment.  This movie obviously knew who it was playing to, and it was obviously trying to elevate them with such philosophical passages, a doomed enterprise to be sure. But I found the murky, shadowy production values far more compelling than the prettiness of most Roman movies.  I found the genuine seriousness of all involved to add to the entertainment value, an interesting contrast to the entertainingly fake seriousness of last year's early summer hit, The Matrix (which I have come to like much more in retrospect than in my first viewing).

Setting the solemn-as-constipation tone was lead Russell Crowe -- as engaging as ever, despite the fact that he is basically stiff as a board.  He is the new incarnation of the Hollywood ultra-male, more meditative than Gibson, more compact than Connery.  Joaquin Phoenix also has a breakthrough as young, inexperienced but deadly successor to his father's throne. always dangerous, emotionally wounded, fearful of everyone and everything.  

But the collective character that I found myself thinking about most was The Crowd.  There was something going on in this film -- with all of its musings on the fickleness of the crowd, the film itself seemed to treat the crowd with fickleness: in fact the crowd in the movie is nothing more than a handful of people digitally multiplied to fill the stadium.  It seems to say that these violent players play to a mere projection, an empty, soulless representation of humankind.  The end of the film I found fascinating: the crowd cheers the outcome of the final Colosseum showdown, but the computerized crowd in the stadium is oddly silent, as if absent.  Did the filmmakers forget to add the cheers to the soundtrack?  Or had they forgotten that the crowd existed?  Or that in the end, they simply don't matter?  And what would the audience think of such things, if they bothered to notice?  The mutual contempt was sitting ripe on screen, for anyone who cared.

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