Gladiator

NOISE MACHINE

The first Roman-era epic since 1959’s Ben-Hur to win the Academy Award as Best Picture, Gladiator is a gigantic and depressing noise machine. From the opening battle with its blazing fires, speeding arrows, clashing armor and rushing horses, to the exotic score mingling Spanish guitar with what sound like Irish, Hebrew and Arabic lamentations, to sound effects so piercing they hurt the ears, we’re in the midst of what is the loudest ancient Rome in movie history. Director Ridley Scott’s intent is to overpower viewers, and judging by the nearly $500 million dollar box office, he’s managed to overpower plenty. His ruckus is a redo of The Fall of the Roman Empire (a fact ignored by a lot of the critics, especially the online variety) and is as historically nebulous as well as remote. Scott might have thought his insurance against detachment would be Russell Crowe (as Maximus/Stephen Boyd) and his penetrating, sexy voice. He has the warty complexion and bulky physique for spectacle—prone to be a fattie, he lost considerable poundage while making the movie—and some will be turned on by how winning he looks in fur capes and gladiator garb. Oscar voters apparently were: he won the Best Actor trophy. (More than a few feared there’d be a legacy attached to Crowe’s Max, and sure enough Ray Winstone not only mimics the Max model in the 2003 PBS/Masterpiece Theatre production of Henry VIII, he could come very close to passing as Crowe’s father, even though they were born only seven years apart.) Thankfully Connie Nielsen isn’t Sophia Loren’s plumpy Lucilla forever reciting “Oh, Livius!” and exonerates herself after Brian De Palma’s twerpy Mission to Mars, but Joaquin Phoenix’s clefty Commodus is a lot less entertaining than Christopher Plummer’s. Promoting Roman sexual deviance, Nielsen and Phoenix do most of their creepy incestuous chitchat in elegantly appointed black marble rooms. The movie’s technology purports to show how computerization replaces the craftsmanship of real set-building and glass shots. If pardoning as well as admiring plywood being used instead of stone for the Roman Forum in Fall, the huge amounts of the computerization in Gladiator—like the falling snow or the blurs & blobs meant to be people in the Colosseum’s upper balconies—don’t pass muster, or the laugh test. Did the designers fail to watch James Cameron’s Titanic split in two? This shortage of integrity in the wizardry is unexpected, as well as disappointing; and because of the breakneck editing, we’re rushed through what otherwise would be juicy decapitations and dismemberments. (HBO’s Rome handles the CGI much more effectively.) No one who loves the roadshows, who enjoys the lavish lunacy of a Sam Bronston epic or the drag balls of De Mille is likely to leave Scott’s epic with the kind of sensorial satisfaction we get from his next one, the Director’s Cut of Kingdom of Heaven. Gladiator exhausts because, one, it’s filled with ridiculous fiction; two, it tediously strains honor via emotions too long in labor; and three, it doesn’t make Maximus any more heroic than he started out as because his nemesis never moves beyond being a darkened-eyed powder puff of Commodus as trickster. (In reality he was assassinated by the athlete Narcissus, who a year later would be thrown to wild beasts in the arena by order of the emperor Septimus Severus.) Yet, to Scott’s credit, the movie’s climax becomes moving. The sound effects editing goes wimpy-limpy in not enhancing the well-deserved slaps Lucilla gives Commodus upon their father’s death. (You know it’s coming and really want to feel much like we felt the undeserved slap delivered to Rodrigo’s father in El Cid.) Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi and Oliver Reed (who died during production) provide support and, with eyebrows as swept fins, David Hemmings in a screamer performance suggesting La Liz in a blimpy upholstery-like caftan and fright wig out of These Old Broads. Dubiously awarded Oscars for visual effects, sound, costume design. Several DVD versions available, including a 171 minute “extended edition,” which returns in proper continuity 17 minutes of previous edits and somewhat ameliorates the shortcomings, though I still don’t know what happened to Maximus’s dog.

MORE NOISE

When Commodus is killed off in 1964’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, his inaccurately depicted demise is shortcut blame for the dramatic decline of the Roman empire, but, as noted by historians, the evidentiary start of cutthroat corruption is probably during the era leading up to Caligula and that the fall would be roughly a four hundred year process. Audiences might have done research to know it’s true Commodus’s sister, Lucilla, was one of the principal conspirators behind an attempt in 182 AD to have him assassinated. Due to sloppy execution of the deed, the actual stabbers were apprehended before getting to him and, rounding up other co-conspirators, quickly dispatched. Except Lucilla, who was exiled to Capri along with three of her children, including a son named Lucius Verus, the offspring of a highly regarded emperor and military general with the same name. To prolong her agony in knowing she’d be next to feel the blade, Commodus waited several months before sending a henchman to slay her and one of her daughters who was also active in the conspiracy. The young Lucius—the very same Lucius who becomes the “hero” in Gladiator II—is thought to have died young, with no known cause, and absent even paltry biographical data, thus leaving gaps to be filled by scripters’ various suppositions, the most common being political familicide to eliminate an heir to power. Often targeted by group assassins, Commodus would get his in 192 AD, when his mistress Marcia, finding out by sheer chance she was at the top of his hit list written on a tablet, plotted with several allies in a race to kill him first. Poisoned wine and/or food was the initial method, which failed, then paying off the wrestler-athlete Narcissus to succeed in strangling him. (Set forth rather decently in Netflix’s Roman Empire: Reign of Blood series.)

Making Lucilla a heroine in Gladiator, Ridley Scott allows further usage of the otherwise long-dead sister in Gladiator II. Sixteen years hence, she’s plotting more assassinations—particularly for two nincompoop brothers as co-emperors—during which she realizes that the new scrapper in town might be her lost son Lucius, who had been sent years before to a safe haven to protect him from a growing list of power-hungry enemies. Rising to Maximus-like glory and, equally expedient, turning out to be Max’s son, Lucius tries to save Mommie Lucilla from being the Colosseum’s next blood-thirst attraction.

Gladiator II, as noisy as its progenitor, is more or less a scene-by-scene flipbook. What differences there are become negatively coincidental and false to history: Paul Mescal’s Hanno, soon to be known as Lucius Verus II, is out to kill Pedro Pascal’s Acacius who, as the Roman general invading the African kingdom of Numidia, killed Hanno’s wife in an act of collateral damage. Having enslaved Hanno, and carting him off to test any gladiator skills against ferocious baboons, Acacius returns as conquering hero to Rome and to his wife—the convenient Lucilla. Treacherous insider machinations galore result in the gladiatorial showdown between Acacius and Lucius, now popular champion in the Colosseum after dazzling the mob by felling a super grotesque rhinoceros with a smattering of dirt. The combat will reverse into anticlimax as a fuddle of conflictions when Lucius weighs the actions of his stepfather general in war and duty to empire and love of wife, playing out as a resurgence of the charged-up emotions and sleazy vicissitudes in Roman elite entanglements, which is to wonder why the writers didn’t this time out make Connie Nielsen a less republican Lucilla and more like Siân Phillips’s Livia. No doubt charmed by Scott’s schmoozing to play another baddie, Denzel Washington larks through his portrayal of the real Macrinus, one of the briefest reigns as emperor in Rome’s history. Getting some laughs, they’re not quite the same disbelieving kind heard when Jaws gets a nod during an enactment of a sea battle in the Colosseum. Before retiring, Scott needs to cap his career as Sam Bronston ghost not with the rumored threat of another Gladiator sequel but a remake of Sodom and Gomorrah, using Facebook’s Reels app to cast the eye candy to fulfill incel fantasies.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com