BEOWULF

Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Paramount Pictures
Grade: B+
Directed by: Robert Zemeckis
Written By: Neil Gaiman, Roger Avary
Cast: Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson, Crispin Glover, Alison Lohman, Angelina Jolie
Screened at: Regal E-Walk, NYC, 11/13/07
Opens: November 16, 2007

The manuscript for “Beowulf,” the oldest surviving manuscript of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, transcribed fourteen hundred years ago, was almost destroyed in a fire in 1732. I’d like a euro for every student who wishes it were. Just as the typical collegian is thinking about tapping a keg of Guinness at the Delta Xi house, the daydream is over: he’s given an assignment to interpret and comment upon the first chapter of the poem, and before he can say “Cliff Notes” or “Beowulf for Dummies,” his fraternity brother tells him to relax. Paramount Pictures has made the job not only easy but, hey, believe or not--enjoyable! They made a movie, for Hrothgar’s sake!

No, it’s really true. Robert Zemeckis has done the impossible. He’s not only put some of an unknown author’s 3200 lines of alliterative verse (OK maybe it’s not that alliterative any more) on the screen, but he’s done it in 3-D, with a few of the poem’s characters saved and others left on the cutting-room floor—Beowulf, Hrothgar, Wealhtheow, Unferth, Hygelac, Hygd, Hrothmund, Onela Wulfgar, and of course Grendel and the creature’s lovely mum. Since the anonymous poet wants us to understand that England does not have any vicious or seductive (no-sex-we’re-British) mums, he (she?) situated the action in Denmark just as Shakespeare did with his greatest tragedy.

Whatever you think when you leave the IMAX or any other theater, you’re going to believe that your experience was better than that which you’d have had reading this:

oretmecgas æfter æþelum frægn:
"Hwanon ferigeað ge fætte scyldas,
græge syrcan ond grimhelmas,
heresceafta heap? Ic eom Hroðgares
ar ond ombiht. Ne seah ic elþeodige
þus manige men modiglicran,
Wen ic þæt ge for wlenco, nalles for wræcsiðum,
ac for higeþrymmum Hroðgar sohton."

If Mel Gibson had made "Beowulf," the characters would be speaking like that–with no subtitles for an English-language audience. All of which makes one think of the self-defeating way that Phil Connors replied to Rita in Harold Ramis’s 1993 movie “Groundhog Day.” When Rita said that she majored in French Lit., Phil responded, “What a waste of time.” Imagine what Phil would say if you told him you majored in early medieval English epic poetry! Would it really be a waste, though, to be inspired by the heroic Beowulf, the eighth-century hero whose story inspired readers with the qualities of personal morality, the need to protect kin, and to defend the integrity of your country—against any and all dragons, succumbing only to the horror of being seduced by Angelina Jolie?

The story, or the small part that survives from the text to the screen, goes like this. Beowulf learns that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, something whose appetite is not sated by prune pastries. This something’s mother is no restraining influence on her son, a guy whose face only a mother could love. She’s one to say, “If you don’t act bad, I’ll report you to your father tonight,” except that we don’t know who’s the father. When this guy with a face that could stop a clock attacks the castle of King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins)—may I digress for a moment? If I ever get a Great Dane, I want to name him Hrothgar—there’s heck to pay. Only one man can save the kingdom from genocide: he’s Beowulf, summoned from across the seas, a six-foot-six handsome dude (Ray Winstone) who is boastful, digs the king’s young, sad wife Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn), and wants no gold for killing the dragon only glory (read: he wants Wealthow). He’s a tragic hero, that is a character who suffers from the ancient Greek flaw of hubris, or overweening pride—he’s a liar and a home-wrecker besides, as his new wife, the queen, will learn even before she develops her first gray hair.

To make a long story short and coin a cliché, Beowulf fights the dragon in the nude, and later takes on the dragon’s mother (Angelina), who is also in the nude—while the movie features full frontal nudity of both characters in the nude with a few sexual innuendos, making it perhaps the only picture with all those groovy features that still gets a PG-13 rating. Too bad it’s animated. As for why college students find the poem a frightful bore even though Angelina Jolie and handsome Ray Winstone are characters therein, maybe university students don’t speak English that well these days or maybe it all has to do with the fact that while people related the tale of Beowulf orally and salaciously for centuries before it was written down in the eighth century (or maybe the twelfth or possibly the tenth), the only people who could write in those days were the monks, and they were somewhat uptight about what they put on papyrus leaves.

But the monks were probably not averse to writing about spears and swords, so Robert Zemeckis, who directs this extravaganza and was responsible for the Christmas-like “Polar Express,” has his special effects people throw spears at the audience—not nice, we’re paying customers—just as Arch Obeler did in 1952 with the first commercial picture in 3-D, “Bwana Devil.” That one was a dud. This was is not.

Oh yes, the picture is shown in 2-D, 3-D and IMAX 3-D. For the last two you need special glasses which the theater will throw in free. They’re not cumbersome like the ones you got at IMAX during the past few years. They’re pretty light, in fact, which makes me hopeful that one day soon the geeks will invent a way to show movies in 3-D without requiring the audience to use any glasses at all. Even better, maybe they’ll invent a way to codify pictures into something they might call words that you can carry around in a small unit, say about 7 inches by 10. You just flip it open and read the words as though they were pictures, and you can close the thing and open it up later wherever you left off. You could share it with others at no extra cost too. The fashionable thing to say, will be, “It was better than the movie.”

Rated PG-13. 113 minutes © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online