The story - unlike the hero - lives to fight another day
And so it was with curiosity and not a little apprehension that I settled myself in my seat in Vue West End in Leicester Square at the weekend with a pair of 3D glasses plonked on my conk awaiting the screening of Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (or Biowolf as one of my semi-literate friends has taken to spelling it). The audience were clearly up for a bit of a ruck since the disorderly queue/push-in once the doors were open led to a vigorous altercation between two grown-up men that left everyone – including accompanying teenage daughter and partner – staring at the floor in horror. These days, no one wants to be seen out with a have-a-go hero.
The film itself – after this testosteronic build up – was largely disappointing for many of the reasons cited in reviews you may have read: the CGI motion capture stuff is pretty awful to watch, being neither a convincing facsimile of life nor cartoonish enough to engage the eye and the heart (actors aren't mere mannequins upon which one may dress characters); the words wooden and plastic spring to mind and despite Ray 'I will kill your monstah!' Winston's shouting and Angelina Jolie's pouting, I've seen more raw emotion in an episode of Trumpton. The dialogue was also flat, though I wonder if this is perhaps a fault not unrelated to the lifelessness of the characters; and the action neither thrilling nor inventively conceived or directed. On the positive side, certain sequences were shiversome and the backgrounds were good eye candy. Oh and, if you wanted to know, 3D palls somewhat after about ten minutes.
The reviews I've seen have attacked the film for these faults and then heaped on some more: namely, how dare the film makers retell Beowulf the Hollywood way. Ed Sturton on the Today programme, which had sent a pair of academics to see it, proceeded to put words in their mouths when they were 'too polite' to say that they 'hated it'.
However, this is all to miss the most interesting aspect of the film: which is the story. Beowulf is a tale from the time when, for most people, heroes, monsters and gods didn't just live in the imagination; you might never have seen any, but such things, you were told, existed all the same. Beowulf draws deeply from myth: it is a story of heroes, dragons and monsters. This is where the scriptwriters – Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary – have scored. They have stuck to the story pretty closely - or at least to those bits when Beowulf isn't telling us how it happened. So superficially we are shown Beowulf the hero, Grendel the monster and the fire-breathing, village-despoiling dragon.
But in Gaiman and Avary's telling these become something more than mythical figures: they are also men. Beowulf is a lucky braggart. Grendel is a wounded, tormented soul. The dragon is a raging, vulnerable mother's boy. The heroes are both strong and weak; the monsters childish and misunderstood; queens, maidens and demonic mothers see the truth men hide in their hearts. The story starts with men and ends with men and in between man begets monster and monster begets man. Gaiman and Avary tell us that men want to be heroes and so they write the monsters into their own lives to make themselves heroic.
Seamus Heaney made a stab at Beowulf a few years back. He won the Whitbread and everyone I've met loves his translation. I can't stand it. I like Heaney's poetry - his several cantos of Dante's Inferno in Seeing Things are dramatic, evocative and brilliantly alive. Yet I find his Beowulf flat and unengaging (he has written how he strove for academic accuracy throughout). I much prefer my battered early edition of this that I read many years ago. It gave Beowulf life and excitement. I'm not saying that Zemeckis's Beowulf is better than Heaney's – each, I think, is very flawed. But I do see the point of Zemeckis's film. The story has been retold. Heaney brought nothing new to Beowulf, to my mind he even left himself out in his attempt to be faithful to the original. In doing so, his story – like the CGI motion capture that erases actors – became flat and lifeless.
All of which is to say why something like Christopher Logue's retelling of the Illiad is fascinating and compelling. And why I am very much looking forward to Peter Ackroyd's own Canterbury Tales, coming next year in Penguin Classics (the first few thousand words of which have just been delivered). Zemeckis's Beowulf may be an ugly monster, but it tries to engage with an audience that doesn't trust heroes – in other words a world that is modern.
Stories aren't set in stone. They were told orally in the first days and at present we put them on paper or up on screens. They are retold and they are adapted. They evolve. That is how they survive.
Colin Brush, Senior Copywriter
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