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AFTER
Beowulf, animation will never be the same again.
After this film that suspends disbelief without asking
you to, myths will never be the same again. After this
myth, all high-school and university teachers who have
introduced students to the Scandinavian myth
appropriated in old English, shall have been forgiven by
everyone. They shall have been thanked, too. Not for
their ponderous (as we now fondly recall) version of the
story about witches and monsters but, at least, for
their initial introduction to a world that we never
thought will serve as an endless spring for marvelous
and outrageously huge narratives about bravery. Or that
someday, an antinarrative technology called film will be
employed to recover the true nature of myth, which is to
tell a story and tell it in such a way that people will
listen, be afraid and heed the lessons that are bigger
than the story itself.
After
Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, storytelling will never be
the same again. Gaiman, his soaring imagination
unbridled by dull logic, and Avary, a mind fueled by a
sense of violence that is troublingly gratuitous but
infinitely gratifying, remind us that a story is only as
good as it can hold its audiences’ attention, and their
common sense and common anxieties at bay. The rest is
predictable and can be easily provided for: a
comfortable seat, a thoroughly adult audience (children
can watch some other time), lovers not talking to each
other, and a theater with a technology that can
replicate thunders and simulate the sound of a golden
dragon with a wingspan predating by several industrial
revolutions that of the Airbus A380.
The film
is animated. Press releases attempt to explain the
combination of computer technologies with the
traditional use of the camera. Interesting, of course,
is the idea that now we refer to filmmaking with the
camera as traditional. Robert Zemeckis, the director,
talks of a hybrid in technology. In the first scenes we
see this: people who do not look like human beings.
Sometimes the traditions of film support this hybrid, as
in extreme close-ups, because they are not done by
ordinary vision and do not suffer comparison with
reality. We never really look up close extremely. This
is the small problem at the beginning of Beowulf.
Baffling
and challenging artists for centuries, the eyes become
the next problem of this film. Characters seem to look
past each other, as in expressionist plays or stilted
presentations. Somehow, even with the technology called
EOG that enabled the filmmakers to track the tiniest
movement of the eye and the eye muscle, we are conscious
that something is missing in how people stare or look at
one another.
It must
be said, however, that these points are very much the
shifting and the fidgeting that attend the initial part
of storytelling, the gathering around a bard/nanny/wiseman/maga.
When at last the storyteller shows us a giant bird
swooping on a rat and taking us for a ride across
snow-capped mountains, and we are carried over leafless
and black trees and as we scan the bleakest of
landscapes, we know that we are at the threshold of new
and untested filmmaking. We are being taken for a ride
but we love it: the dizzying heights and the pretend
flight that will cease to be pretense, at least in our
minds. The fun does not end there; it is only the
beginning of a treat that brings us back to the days
when heroism meant slaying dragons and where kings are
supposedly unafraid of anything.
The
monsters in Beowulf do not shortchange us: they
are worth nations and oceans in form and content.
Grendel’s look is for the books. Cursed as an outsider,
he is a human being inverted, with his entrails
displayed and his outer skin flayed out in most parts to
show festering wounds. He has, however, the saddest eyes
and a strange weakness: he is bothered by songs and
merrymaking; his weakest organ, the ears. He is,
however, strong enough to swing to death humans. Before
the old king, he cowers like a spurned child before a
father whose power is in his loins.
Then
comes our hero, Beowulf, from across the seas. He sails
over the most massive of waves computer technology could
generate. He is unafraid because, as he tells his
comrade, the ocean is his mother and she will never take
him back into her darkest womb. In another setting those
lines would have spelled doom for unredeemed cheesiness,
but in Beowulf the lines match epic for epic
whatever it is the tale is about to tell.
Beowulf,
as created by the filmmakers from the human
manifestation of Ray Winstone, whose figure was
transformed from a bulky boxer figure into what he
describes as a 6'6" monolith worthy of epic poetry, must
be the most heroic of forms to grace the screen. He is
as unreal as the buffed studs that populate Hollywood,
but even those muscled creatures can really never be the
Beowulf that now graces this new retelling. “CGI-ed,” it
is this unreality that convinces us that Beowulf and all
that he stands for is real. Well, at least in this
exquisite film.
With
deference to technology, ascription of acting excellence
is highly contentious for this mythical enterprise.
Starting with Winstone to Angelina Jolie’s monster
shucking off cleft feet for golden stilettos, one has to
acknowledge the neomagic that seems second nature to
computers and their possibilities. John Malkovich and
Anthony Hopkins, in their respective rights, have to
battle not only monsters but also their own phantasms
on-screen. In the end, whatever frustrations the actors
may have felt and to what degree they have embraced this
new film order, the performances bear fruits of awe—and
that great realization that myths are only true insofar
as they are told and retold and never forgotten.
At last,
when the most startling of animations—or that other
hybrid that Zemeckis translates as reality/fantasy—comes
to pass, the content of the form remains the legacy of
Beowulf, the film its hard copy and the myth the
soft copy of oral tradition. Retold for potency and/or
recovered from the refinement and dull sameness of
civilizations, Beowulf shouts out the same
metaphors by which we live our grand memories of the
cycle of life. They are legions: power as residing truly
in one with a noble heart, women so powerful because
they can hate truly and love fiercely, and the old truth
that we make our own monsters. But, of course, out of
the parchment and aided by new devices, the lessons are
sexier and assured of battling the shorter attention
span of those who need to listen to the myth. |
