Alexander (2004)

The soldier’s masculine brotherhood and its closed world of secret fears and private affections have long been a favourite theme for Oliver Stone. This chest-beating hunk of a movie gives him the broadest possible shoulders on which to carry it.

Our hero absolutely outclasses those wimpy beta-males of military history: Achilles, Caesar, Napoleon — or indeed Sherman, Patton and Schwarzkopf.

Macedonia’s Alexander the Great had conquered most of the known world by the time he was 25; when he died at 32 in 323 BC, he presided over a vast empire stretching across Central Asia.

If anyone is allowed to have dyed blonde hair, snowy white tunics, intense relationships with other men, and a simply impossible mother — well, it is this highly-strung hombre.

Unlike the mealy-mouthed Troy (2004), Stone’s movie does at least tackle the nature of male love, and has the child Alexander with his boisterous fellows, being taught by Aristotle (Christopher Plummer) that these relationships are acceptable when their intimacy transmits and promotes noble ideals.

Alexander imbibes these verities from Aristotle as he hears his vision of a Hellenic army encircling the known world. There is no contradiction between these two attributes of manhood: warlike and tender.

Alexander grows into a sensitive but fiercely ambitious, visionary youth, and Colin Farrell plays him with his natural Irish accent rather than an all-American or Bardspeak Brit.

Oddly, though, to cover any anomaly, Stone has Val Kilmer play his father, King Philip, with an Irish accent as well, and Jared Leto has to do the same as Alexander’s friend Hephaistion.

Interestingly, his formidable mother Olympia, played by Angelina Jolie, speaks as if she runs an Italian restaurant in one of cinema’s scariest performances. She is like Anthony Perkins’ mom in Psycho (1960).

With a mommie dearest like Angie, you too would hazard everything in battle rather than come in for your tea!

Everything is narrated in languid flashback by Ptolemy as a worldly, sun-weathered old man played by Anthony Hopkins, dictating his memoirs in the Mediterranean sun and brooding on the lost glories of youth and victory.

The feel of these flashback-linked scenes recalls the classic BBC TV version of I, Claudius.

Stone establishes the trauma of Alexander’s early boyhood, having the poison of conspiratorial politics poured into his ear by his scheming mother, and then leapfrogs Philip’s death to Alexander’s own eminence as the young king and makes the great cavalry charge at Gaugamela and the defeat of the Persian army the big – and very long –  setpiece for the movie’s opening act.

But the movie only achieves power and narrative muscle once Alexander’s armies venture further east, grow more afraid and care-worn, and finally get bogged down in the forests of India, where Alexander looks like the classical answer to Conrad’s Mr Kurtz.

It is here that Stone unveils his big storytelling flourish: with Alexander stranded on his eastern expedition, he loops the narrative back to Alexander’s beardless youth and tells the story of Philip’s assassination, Alexander’s agonised acceptance of his own fate and his realisation that his mother was almost certainly behind a murder designed to ensure his succession.

Alexander petulantly quarrels with Jolie, who is forever allowing snakes to slither over her arms and letting those great sensuously chapped lips pout with Machiavellian malice. It sounds like a never-ending lover’s tiff, and these scenes ignite a flame of silliness and absurdity in the film which never seems to go out.

When Alexander finally marries his Asian queen (a dull, perfunctorily exotic role here for Rosario Dawson), a truly ridiculous wedding-night scene follows, in which he must coax and subdue her with his warrior-lover’s passion.

In the marital bed, Farrell hisses and bears his fangs like a jungle cat (did he improvise these touches?), but the blood and glory of the battle scenes always look happier than the cockpit of personal passion.

Stone contrives a watchable debacle for Alexander in the far eastern forests, where, mounted on his steed, he challenges an Indian warrior atop an elephant.

The battle concludes with a terrific tableau depicting a fateful asymmetry: Alexander’s horse rearing up in profile, vainly challenging the vast trumpeting beast. He is borne away from the field of battle on his shield, wounded but not vanquished.

It contrasts with the cringe-making final speech that a tearful Alexander must give at the bedside of his gravely ill friend Hephaistion, defiantly proclaiming his vision of a noble empire in which conquered peoples are brought together and educated in Hellenic values.

If there was a message here for modern audiences doubting the Pax Americana in the Persian Gulf, an awful clunk of bathos annulled it. The camera looks back at Hephaistion’s face, immobile in death, glassy-eyed and faintly slack-jawed as if someone had snuck in and hit him over the head with a frying pan.

Alexander orders the doctor to be executed. The acting coach seems to get off lightly.

Stone’s Alexander has got plenty of oomph in its battle scenes and a strong, ambitious sense of geopolitical sweep. Fortune favours the bold, as the movie never ceases to remind us, and fortune has favoured Stone with some success here.

But the intimate story of Alexander the man is fumbled.

Farrell’s king is not allowed to mature or develop; his devastation at not begetting a son – surely a vital part of his human make-up – is glossed over, lost in the clash of swords, the pounding of hooves, the thunder of martial glory.

With a soldier’s misplaced loyalty, Stone protects Alexander from the character-building experiences of failure.

Alexander
Colin Farrell
Old Ptolemy
Anthony Hopkins
Olympias
Angelina Jolie
Philip
Val Kilmer
Aristotle
Christopher Plummer
Cleitus
Gary Stretch
Parmenion
John Kavanagh
Attalus
Nick Dunning
Eurydice
Marie Meyer
Hephaistion
Jared Leto
Ptolemy
Elliot Cowan
Philotas
Joseph Morgan
Antigonus
Ian Beattie
Cassander
Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Nearchus
Denis Conway
Perdiccas
Neil Jackson
Leonnatus
Garrett Lombard
Polyperchon
Chris Aberdein
Crateros
Rory McCann
Darius III
Raz Degan
Bagoas
Francisco Bosch
Stateira
Annelise Hesme
Pausanius
Toby Kebbell
Roxane
Rosario Dawson
Young Alexander
Connor Paolo
Child Alexander
Jessie Kamm
Young Hephaistion
Patrick Carroll
Young Nearchus
Peter Williamson
Young Cassander
Morgan Christopher Ferris
Young Ptolemy
Rob Earley
Young Perdiccas
Aleczander Gordon
Wrestling Trainer
Brian Blessed
Omen Reader
Tim Pigott-Smith
Nurse
Fiona O’Shaughnessy
Persian Chamberlain
Mohammed Tsouli

Director
Oliver Stone