Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Grendel
Meets Grover
(Beowulf, 11/19/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
In
Annie Hall Woody Allen offered the timeless educational tip,
"Just don't take any course where you have to read Beowulf."
It's not clear if the same advice was supposed to apply to movies, but
director Robert (Back to the Future, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?)
has forged ahead anyway. In at least one respect, Woody can rest easy:
Zemeckis' computer-animated Beowulf no more resembles an old Norse epic
as it does every other overly busy, overblown Hollywood sword-and-sandal
fantasy. Nor will there be a test afterward.
As amply covered in the entertainment
media, this Beowulf uses a motion-capture technique where the
actors perform in front of a blue screen, wearing skin-tight suits with
dots pasted on them. These dots are then used to animate CGI figures
that may or may not resemble the actors. In fact, the figures can look
like anything at all (e.g. Gollum in Lord of the Rings), yet
move with the fluid realism that has forever eluded stop-motion animators.
The problem with the technique comes,
ironically, when it is used to portray more or less normal-looking humans.
Zemeckis' use of it in 2004's The Polar Express is widely perceived
as a commercial disappointment, in part because its CGI version of Tom
Hanks seemed to resemble the actor but clearly wasn't. The effect came
off as more creepy than heart-warming. The rationale for Beowulf
is based on a demographic calculation: since its target audience of
elder teen males is already used to CGI football stars and CGI warriors
in computer games, they'll be more apt to accept the technique. Based
on the first weekend's box office returns ($27.5 million), that gamble
seems to be working.
Whether the film has anything else
to offer is less clear. The sixth-century hero is played by Ray Winstone,
a British actor whose pudgy real-life appearance hardly earns him the
sobriquet "Ray the Ripped." As anyone who couldn't heed Woody
Allen's advice knows, Beowulf is a Geat (Swede) who comes to the kingdom
of the Danish king Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) to vanquish the monster
Grendel. Lurking in the background is the even more malevolent figure
of Grendel's mother (Angelina Jolie), a succubus who looks more than
capable of stealing away anybody Jennifer Aniston manages to marry.
Visually, the movie works better
in its quieter moments. Where the action scenes look like they'd play
as well on an X-Box as the big screen, the animators otherwise achieve
remarkably precise effects of lighting and POV that would difficult
to match in live action. In what is essentially a very expensive comic
book, the creepiness of near-humanoid characters isn't such a drawback.
(Indeed, the bearded and scarred faces of the men looked better here
than the women's, whose smooth faces come off looking mannequinish.)
I was bothered most of all by the way some figures rarely seemed to
blink—a jarring lapse in versimilitude that gets distracting once
it is noticed.
Grendel, the ultimate party pooper,
is aptly voiced by the unique Crispin Glover. Zemeckis visualizes him
as a somewhat putrid-looking old man with an unfortunate resemblance
to Grover from Sesame Street. Why he is attacking King Hrothgar's
grand new mead hall is never made very clear—all that medieval
carousing seems to bother his sensitive ears, yet Grover . . . I mean,
Grendel . . . never seems to consider just moving to quieter digs.
Beowulf screenwriters Neil
Gaiman and Roger Avary want to explore themes of sexual power and father-son
conflict, but they forget to motivate their characters. In this respect
I was more impressed with 2005's relatively low-budget Beowulf &
Grendel (queable from Netflix). Featuring the pre-300 Gerard
Butler, stunning Icelandic locations and absolutely no special effects
(Grendel is portrayed by a big, hairy guy), Beowulf & Grendel
is slighter film that does a better job of refreshing the myth.
It is interesting that the newest
technologies in storytelling are often applied first to the oldest myths.
Ray Harryhausen, after all, thought it best to apply his stop-motion
skills to making The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, not Little Women.
It's as if modern techniques are forever seeking to redeem the ancient
imagination. As Beowulf & Grendel suggests, though, there
may be power left in real places and actors made of flesh.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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