REVIEW - Beowulf (2007)

Clearly, Robert Zemeckis’ screen adaptation of Beowulf based on a screen-play by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary will have two different audiences.  On the one hand, it will be seen by the usual hordes of multiplex scum who want nothing more from an evening at the cinema than a bit of violence and some impressive special effects.  This audience will undeniably love the film.  However, Beowulf being Beowulf, the film will also attract an audience interested in how the film interprets the poem.  This audience will most likely roll their eyes but I think that this film genuinely has something interesting to say about the subject matter.  The problem is that what it does have to say is reactionary and more than a little bit cowardly.

   

This version of Beowulf starts with King Hrothgar opening his new mead hall.  He’s an old drunk with a young wife but he seems to be loved by his subjects.  However, the chanting and banging of tables proves too much for the simple-minded troll Grendel who turns up and begins slaughtering Hrothgar’s men.  In response, the braggart and traditional fantasy hero Beowulf turns up with a small force and battles Grendel, eventually wrestling him naked and ripping off his arm.  In response, Grendel’s beautiful water demon mother kills some more of Hrothgar’s men, prompting Beowulf to go forth an confront the second monster.  However, rather than kill the demon, he learns that long ago, Hrothgar did a deal with the demon according to which he would become a great king on the condition that a golden mead horn stayed in the demon’s lair.  Grendel’s attack on Hrothgar was not random for Grendel was Hrothgar’s son and Hrothgar decided to keep the mead horn for himself, thereby incurring the wrath of the demon.  She makes the same offer to Beowulf who accepts and fathers her a son in the process.  When Beowulf returns, Hrothgar promises him the kingdom and throws himself off a cliff.  We then rejoin Beowulf many years later, a rich and powerful king.  However, he is unhappy as he knows that these riches are not down to his bravery but to the magic of the demon purchased at the cost of his masculinity and his pride.  Suddenly, the mead horn turns up again and Beowulf’s son, a gigantic golden dragon begins terrorising Beowulf’s kingdom.  The choice is clear, return the horn or face the consequences of your actions... Beowulf chooses the latter and dies in the process of killing the dragon.  The film ends with Beowulf’s successor holding the mead horn and staring into the eyes of the demon... will he too make the same compromise?

The problem with Beowulf as a piece of source material is that it is the sole surviving piece of a literary tradition that was extinguished centuries ago.  Unfortunately for modern audiences, Anglo-saxon poetry did not fit with the three act structure that the Greeks came up with and which characterises most works of fiction.  Indeed, Beowulf essentially has a bloke turn up, fight Grendel, fight his mum and then fight a dragon.  Such a structure would not fit a modern film, and so any film adaptation of the poem will require some substantial interpretation... and this is what we get with Zemeckis’ Beowulf.

Despite being centuries old, Beowulf was, until the 1930’s considered solely as a historical datum.  It was not until Tolkien decided to turn his attentions to it that people started to treat it as a work of literature worthy of interpretation and criticism.  Ever since the publication of Tolkien’s "Beowulf: The Monster and The Critics", there has been a robust exchange of views as academics have tried to find the single best interpretation of the original poem.  This gives Beowulf a feeling of fluidity and openness that simply doesn’t exist within the epic literature of the Greeks for example as most of the heavy academic lifting in that area was done decades if not centuries ago.  What is interesting is that aside from discussing the structure of the poem (is it two acts, three acts or a number of acts built around funerals), the main critical bone of contention seems to have been Grendel’s mother.  The traditional interpretation of the poem describes Grendel’s mother as a monstrous hag.  However, since the 1970’s that reading has become unfashionable, partly because it was revealed that the term for monstrous (aelfic) not only applied to the mother and Grendel but also to Beowulf.  As a result, people now tend to interpret the word as meaning something along the lines of “heroic” meaning that Beowulf, Grendel and Grendel’s mother were all larger-than-life heroic types that cared about honour and revenge.  Indeed, many people now identify Grendel not as a troll but as a Berserker (or just an outsider, as in John Gardner's Grendel) and his mother not as a hag but as a warrior woman.  If you compare this kind of thinking about Beowulf and compare it to the traditional interpretations of Tolkien’s time and you’ll see that Beowulf has moved from being a tale that’s very close to a work of fantasy, to a more grounded tale of Viking life much like that described in the various remaining sagas.  Even the dragon is in genre as sagas such as Egil’s Saga are all about Viking life but suddenly feature half-trolls and ogres despite the characters doing such “epic” and “heroic” things as getting your brothers together and going and murdering some bloke while he’s mending a fence because of some land boundary dispute.  The point I am trying to make is that the modern thinking on Beowulf is that it is not a work of epic fantasy.

Try telling that to Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary.

Zemeckis’ Beowulf is a story about living the heroic lifestyle.  Beowulf is undeniably a hero, in fact, he’s preposterously a hero who is not only brave and a good warrior but a swollen-headed idiot who is not above endangering himself and others for the sake of glory or lying about his own failings rather than admit that he once lost a swimming race.  When Beowulf confronts Grendel, he is fighting an evil beast and he is clearly at ease.  However, when he confronts Grendel’s mother he hesitates.  Grendel’s mother makes his phallic sword melt in her hand and rather than do the heroic thing and try to kill the demon, Beowulf compromises.  All he has to do is have sex with a demon in female form and let her keep a mead horn and he will receive riches, security and a long life.  Faced with this offer, Beowulf does what any rational person would do... he makes the correct political decision and makes a pact with the demon, which she sticks to until a slave steals back the mead horn (possibly with the collusion of Beowulf’s draconic son).  Beowulf then realises that he has to return to fantasy hero mode and do what Hrothgar could not do, kill his own son and clean up his own mess.

The moral of Beowulf is clear... there are objectively good people and there are objectively bad people and any attempt by the good people to make a pact with the bad people will end in failure.  The only way to deal with evil is to stamp it out yourself... preferably whilst naked.

A lesser critic than myself would be quick to put a contemporary political spin on this story.  For example, are there not parallels here with the rhetoric spouted by the Bush administration during the run up to the War in Iraq damning all those who would appease evil rather than destroy it?  what about the results of compromises and alliances with the morally dubious?  is Beowulf’s decision to make peace with the demon only for it to come back and haunt him not a little like the CIA’s training and support of Osama bin Laden?  as I say, I think it’s a little easy to spring immediately to comparisons with the War on Terror because anything can be related back to some minute aspect of that most ill-judged of conflict.  All it takes is hermeneutics and a little sprinkle of fairy dust and you too can sound profound!

Instead, I think the relationship with the War on Terror is less one of direct and intended commentary and more one of similarity between the ethics of the fantasy genre and those of fascists.  Both prize the use of force and both see the world in absolute terms.

The reason I bring this issue up is not to lambast the film for its ethics, indeed, 300 is also massively right wing but I thought that was one of last year’s best films, but rather because the film is ultimately all about a moral quandary.  That moral quandary is between living the Heroic lifestyle or making compromises for the sake of peace and, by extension, between the fascistic ethics of the fantasy genre and realpolitik.  Beowulf makes the right decision in deciding to make a pact with the demon, his kingdom becomes immeasurably richer, immeasurably safer and his people undeniably benefit from his decision, even if Beowulf does not.  The demon is honourable, it is only when the horn returns to Beowulf that things start going wrong and, one suspects, a chat with the demon and the return of the horn would have solved the problems caused by its disappearance.  However, despite making the right decision, Beowulf is haunted and tortured by it and it is not only till he returns to the simple morality of the hero that he finds peace.  Intriguingly, a similar interpretation of the story was used by Sturla Gunnarson in his 2005 live action adaptation Beowulf and Grendel (which I shall be reviewing for next month's Videovista).  However, the interesting difference between the two films is that  Gunnarson's Beowulf is cursed because of his decision to be a hero.  Zemeckis’ film punishes Beowulf for his decision to be a wise leader.

While Beowulf’s politics left a slightly sour taste in my mouth, the aspect that really irritated me was the film’s desire to have its cake and eat it by spending the first half of the film relentlessly mocking Beowulf and his fellow Geats’ heroic lifestyle.  The film portrays Beowulf as preposterously heroic even when compared to other warriors and it plays him for laughs before then making a big deal out of his failure to be a hero.  Well... either heroism is ridiculous or it isn’t.  You can’t have it both ways and that is exactly what this film tries to do.  It’s a similar act of cowardice to Terry Jones’ 1987 comedy Personal Services starring Julie Walters as a thinly disguised Cynthia Payne.  In that film, the director plays the fetishists for laughs before attempting to present them as fundamentally good people unlike the “norms”.  Both films have a cynical desire to have their cake and eat it and, as a result, both films are conceptually flawed.

Comments

[Serdar]

I admired 300 enormously as entertainment even when I knew objectively that it was twaddle. I didn't mind; the movie succeeded entirely on its own terms, which was to give us a very creatively-visualized spectacle. The idea that anyone could take it seriously as "history" (or, even sillier, "political commentary") seemed a losing proposition from the git-go, so it hardly seemed worth bothering with. The way I put it to a friend was this: As spectacle, it’s unmatched; as cinema, it’s laudable; as drama, it’s passable; as history, it’s absolute bunk. His answer: “Watching 300 to get a history lesson is like watching porn to learn how to have sex.”

What little I've seen of Beowulf, with its disturbingly plastic-looking faces and even more plastic-looking bodies, doesn't compel me to sit down and watch the whole thing except maybe as a catch-up on DVD. I gave high marks to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within back in '99 because they were trying something that at the time was fairly novel, even if the story was essentially metaphysical goop. But it's been almost ten years since then, and what I'm seeing here is a story which a) didn't need CGI to be told well, and b) probably didn't need to be told at all.

I sometimes give talks about storytelling at a couple of the conventions I go to, and one of the things I hammer on is: A hero is not a hero because the director or author points to him and insists that he's the hero. He's the hero because he behaves like one, and when he's a terminal fathead who creates more problems than he solves, then he's not a hero -- and it's even worse when the movie/book he's in doesn't know that, either.

[A.R.Yngve]

In my more cynical moments, I suspect the drive toward computer-graphics film is fueled by aging actors and actresses -- who want to keep their CGI avatars jumping around and earning money, while the real persons go into retirement...
;-P

Jokes aside... Jonathan mentions that

"Beowulf essentially has a bloke turn up, fight Grendel, fight his mum and then fight a dragon. Such a structure would not fit a modern film"

... so shouldn't BEOWULF be a TV series instead? Action-based TV shows follow the above pattern perfectly: Bloke turns up, fights henchman, fights henchman's boss,and then the next menace and so on...

[Serdar]

A.R.: ... or a video game.

Or a movie made from a video game. That uses CGI.

Which gets itself turned into a video game.

Based on a musical.

This joke goes on forever.

[Kaolin Fire]

I don't really have anything to add to this, except thank you. I think I learned more about Beowulf just now than reading it a few years ago. :)

[Elio M. García, Jr.]

Just to remark on the source material a bit...

O'Keefe's association of Grendel with the berserkers is a good point, but it does not actually negate the monstrous properties of Grendel as described in the text. To quote one discussion of the source material:

"The terror associated with Grendel is also due to his horrifying appearance. He is called *(th)yrse* (l. 426) and *eoten* (l. 761) for he is a giant in size. From his eyes comes a horrible light, like a flame (*him of eagumstod ligge gelicost leoht unfaegr*, ll. 726b-727). Grendel's hand is like some animal's paw, having claws instead of finger-nails [*foran aeghwyle waes steda naegla gehwylc style gelicost, hae(th)enes handsporu hilderinces egl unheoru*, ll. 984b-987a]."

Also, O'Keefe notes that "aglaeca" (which I think is the word you're looking for, rather than "aelfic") really needs to mean no more than "formidable", which is a more neutral value than "hero" or "wretch". I believe the latest edition of the Old English Dictionary has modified "aglaeca" to this definition. Beowulf, Grendel, and the dragon are clearly all formidable creatures, but the latter two are also explicitly described as monstrous. Their monstrous nature plays a much more central role in Beowulf than in Egil's Saga, as well; in Egil's Saga, the fantastic elements are pretty much right at the beginning, and soon disappear IIRC.

It's true that there is a lot more argument over the nature of Grendel's mother, however, and that the earlier reading is too pat and simplistic. That said, I'm not sure this negates the fantastical nature of a story in which the hero has the strength of thirty men, fights sea monsters, can hold his breath and fight for several days and nights under water, and so on.

The fantastic/heroic elements are definitely central to the story. Beowulf could have just been a good fighter (as Egil in Egil's Saga), but instead he's a superhero (almost literally). Grendel could have just been a nasty raider, but he's a monster (possibly a human monster, but a monster none the less). The hoard could have been protected by a troop of bandits, but instead it's a flame-breathing dragon.

Given your description of Beowulf in the film as a "swollen-headed idiot", I'm not sure about his then being called "objectively good". Similarly, the fact that it seems Grendel's mother is not involved in bringing down Beowulf directly -- that it's his son, perhaps, who connives to create a reason to attack his father -- makes me wonder if she is "objectively bad".

Not yet having seen the film, I have seen the trailer, and there's one bit where Hrothgar seems to be surprisingly ambiguous about Grendel's mother. Something like, "She's not like us any more. Not really." I found that line very intriguing, and it makes me think that the narrative is more complex than a strict black and white interpretation.

As to the last comment, that's a very interesting point. The only thing I would wonder is that isn't it true that heroism is about how one acts in the face of adversity, whereas "heroic lifestyle" is how someone who is able to be heroic lives his day to day existence? You can be a hero _and_ a silly git at the same time, I'm pretty sure. By the sounds of it, Beowulf and his band of warriors are not much unlike some celebrated sports club, gods on the field and loud, spendthrift gits off of it -- being gits doesn't negate their competitive capacity.

Possibly the film doesn't carry this off. Perhaps cinema itself is not capable of, in the span of two hours or less, presenting such a fine delineation between the heroic and the trappings of the heroic, or the fetish and the trappings of fetishism.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Elio :-)

Thank you for the excessively learned post. Not being an English scholar, I was trying to go n what I could piece together regarding the scholarship from t'interweb.

Egil's saga clearly has fantastical elements to it. In truth, they're only fantastical from our point of view because in those days they were considered part of the real world. In fact, on page 1 of Egil's saga someone gets described as being a half-troll suggesting that trolls exist.

However, I think there's a difference between something like this film version of Beowulf, which is straight-out fantasy and the sagas which are more embellished tales of real happenings written by people who believed that the fantastical was part of the world.

The Viking sagas really do feature blood feuds over land and people being killed while they're fixing fences but they're still epic and they have fantastical elements. The point I was trying to make was that I suspect that, Dragon not-withstanding, Beowulf has more to do with this kind of story than it does with the modern fantasy.

[Montag]

You elevate the position of critic with your skilled analysis and are indeed a credit to field :D

When it comes to classical literature and many years of sitting in classrooms and hearing professors lecture on about various esoteric conclusions they've reached from even more esoteric methods of analysis of the work at hand, I've ended up taking the position that most of the time, if it sounds like a duck, it's probably a duck.

In other words, people spinning Grendel's mother from an offensive stereotype of monstrous hag to far more palatable (to modern sensibilities, anyway) 'warrior woman' just tends to sound of reaching, and a lot of it.

The movie was an interesting take on the source material, to be sure, and given that it intended to entertain more than provide some insightful and accurate rendition of a epic historical poem, it doesn't deserve any negative criticism on those grounds.

Current approaches to constructing the modern equivalent of the morality play (not too much reaching I hope?) tend to fall flat due to the inability of many to pick a moral scheme and stick to it. Certainly a 'have cake and eat it too' problem, as you said. Either relative morality is seen as a good, or absolute morality is, or some other form, but switching up the scheme in mid-play just mars the whole film for it.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Montag :-)

I'm not sure it's reaching... you just notice that the language describing Grendel's mother is the same as that describing Grendel and Beowulf and you look at source material from similar time-frames and cultural environments and it all links up quite nicely... though I'm not an english or anglo-saxon scholar so I'm just going by intuition.

You're right about morality plays though. They're tricky to construct nowadays as we can allow for several different incompatible and yet internally consistent moral codes. However, you're quite correct that the film shifts from relative morality ("haha... look at the heroes") to absolute morality ("Coward... he should have killed her when he had the chance!") and the result is rather muted.