What, No Orgy? - Review - movie review

National Review, June 5, 2000 by John Simon

BY one of fate's sardonic ironies, the very week that brought the demise of Steve Reeves, the body-builder actor whose Hercules initiated the popularity of sword-and-sandal (or blood-and-sand) epics, also produced the opening of Ridley Scott's Gladiator, the first such film in many a lustrum, the public's blood lust having switched to more up- to-date genres. Although Anthony Mann's Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) covered some of the same ground-so much so that it has, unfairly, been removed from video stores-Gladiator is bigger, costlier, and beastlier.

It begins A.D. 180, at the end of Marcus Aurelius's rule, with the emperor fighting the barbarians in what, with touching classicism, is referred to as Germania. Commanding the SPQR forces is a fictitious general, Maximus, whose name the screenwriters-David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson-most likely plucked out of Marcus Aurelius's famous Meditations, where the itinerant lecturer Maximus is mentioned as a mentor. A Maximus, to be sure, very different from the grim and growling warrior whom Russell Crowe portrays with unyielding prowess and unsmiling probity, but who, we read, likewise "thought as he spoke," though perhaps not with an Australian accent.

Aided by only minor anachronisms, Maximus defeats the antique Krauts, hairier than the worst hippies, in grandiose nocturnal battle sequences, the forest battleground crisscrossed by somewhat unlikely but wildly photogenic flaming arrows. As a reward, Marcus-played by Richard Harris as only a hair or two less hirsute than the furibund Teutons and about as Roman as Monty Python-picks him as his heir. This naturally angers the heir apparent, Commodus, who, with his sister, Lucilla, has kept well to the rear of the fighting. He promptly throttles his father and dispatches a few trusties to decapitate Maximus, who, however, proves too agile for them and instead cooks their goose, or geese.

Just how he does this is hard to tell, because Scott's chief technique through much of the film is lightning-fast cutting, so that chopped-off limbs, severed heads, gushing blood, etc., fly by so quickly that you can't be sure of what you saw, or whether indeed you saw it-a reasonably good tactic for assuaging the censor while titillating the audience. After a while I found this irritating, because pruned or manicured bestiality has a way of looking more insinuatingly nasty than outright brutishness.

While Commodus enters Rome in ill-gained triumph, Maximus rides himself to a frazzle back to his farm in Spain, but finds that Commodus's men have already done in his wife and little boy by a melange of rape, burning, and crucifixion. During his swoon of grief, he is apprehended by some slave traders, who trundle him off to an exotic North African location and school for gladiators. It is owned by Proximo, a freed ex- gladiator-juicily played by the grizzled veteran Oliver Reed-who now trades in such morituri. Reed died during the filming, thus depriving us of a few more much-needed comic moments. Maxi mus's favorite fellow student at gladiatorial school is a black giant, Juba (Djimon Hounsou), with whom the equally but differently pious ex-general exchanges views of the afterlife and hopes of a reunion with his slain family that should be of interest to all comparative religionists.

Before long, Maximus, Juba, and their colorful colleagues are in the Col os seum, which computer imaging has turned into the awesome eighth wonder of the world. Computer graphics, moreover, have restored the glory that was Rome into a triumph of virtuality, which, as we know, is its own reward. For the plot makes scant sense, least of all a previous love affair between Maximus and Lucilla, who now tries to help him organize a gladiator rebellion (shades of Spartacus). We see one chaste kiss between Lucilla (the charming Danish actress Connie Niel sen) and our hero, who remains faithful to his dead wife. But there are plentiful histrionics from Joaquin Phoenix as a Commodus part effete homosexual, part incestuous lecher planning to marry his sister.

Historical truth is once lightly brushed against, in that Commodus did actually fight gladiators, though these knew better than to win against him. Here everything culminates in a circus duel to the death between him and Maximus, as tricky surprises pile up toward the film's end. But Ridley Scott (of Alien and Blade Runner fame) is too much in love with effects to be an effective director. We do get, however, two-and-a-half laughable hours of lavish hokum, a word of obscure origin, perhaps derived from a late Latin term signifying "hundred-million-dollar Hol ly- wood rubbish."

Where the Heart Is is where credibility comes even harder. In this dreadfully cute movie, weirdness is supposed to supply some reality. An inept epigone of Southern Gothic, it is based on a novel, an Oprah's Book Club selection by Billie Letts. The heroine is 17-year-old pregnant Novalee Nation, who leaves a miserable Tennessee existence for California with her brutish boyfriend Willy Jack in a jalopy that once was a Plymouth. In a small Oklahoma town, Novalee gets out to use the Wal-Mart bathroom; returning, she finds only her Polaroid camera in the empty parking space.