Beowulf
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
From the dawn of the motion picture era, Hollywood has felt no compunction about taking liberties with literary classics. A 1929 silent featured this immortal credit: "The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare. Additional Dialogue by Sam Taylor." The 1939 Wuthering Heights has a happy ending, with Catherine and Heathcliff enjoying a ghostly embrace on their beloved moors. In the 1940 Pride and Prejudice (scripted in part by Aldous Huxley), Lady Catherine De Bourgh's withering cross-examination of Lizzie Bennet is transformed into a sweetly humorous test of Lizzie's love for Lady Catherine's nephew Darcy. In his hilarious nonfiction account of 20th Century Fox, The Studio, John Gregory Dunne quoted a producer preparing a new version of A Christmas Carol: "Dickens was a terrible writer. He doesn't tell you why Scrooge is mean. We go into all that, with the unhappy childhood."
But never, in the annals of motion picture history, has an adaptation of a great work been run through the shredder quite as thoroughly as Beowulf is in this lavish and technically astounding new version--a combination of live action and computer animation directed by Oscar-winner Robert Zemeckis.
"Frankly, nothing about the original poem appealed to me," Zemeckis has said, a remark that suggests he might not have been the best person to make a film version of it. But no matter, because Zemeckis discovered to his delight that the screenplay he was given "explored deeper into the text, looking between the lines, questioning the holes in the source
material." In his estimation, the script--written by a fantasy novelist who wrote the Sandman comic books and a screenwriter who helped come up with the concept for Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction--actually improves on one of the oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon works of literature.
"They managed to keep the essence of the poem," says Zemeckis, "but made it more accessible to a modern audience and made some revolutionary discoveries along the way." Ah, yes: revolutionary discoveries. Like devising a plotline that turns Beowulf into an attack on . . . Beowulf. Imagine a movie called The Torah that tells the story of creation from the perspective of Christopher Hitchens, and you might get a sense of the rather shocking transformation that takes place here.
Rather than being the world's greatest and bravest hero, as he is in the poem, the Beowulf of Zemeckis's film is a puffed-up and vainglorious liar who sells his soul and manhood for power--and the promise that his repugnant behavior will be whitewashed forever by a hagiographic poem dedicated to his glory. The Epic of Beowulf is, in the estimation of the movie version of Beowulf, a tissue of lies. Beowulf knows this all too well. His final words are: "It's too late for lies." But he dies before he can correct the record. So the "revolutionary discoveries" made by the screenwriters of Beowulf include the fact that the Epic of Beowulf is a travesty. The true story of Beowulf is that (to quote the film) "there are no heroes anymore" and "men are the real monsters."
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