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 Nominated for Best Actor |
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Director Ridley Scott's visual style
helps lift 'Gladiator' to greatness
By JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
IN A 1979 interview while promoting his enormous hit film "Alien," director Ridley Scott told me he considered it his job to make the maximum use of his background in graphic design and visual imagery to service the story's needs.
I couldn't help but remember that as a refrain in the years to come as Scott lived up to, or tried his best to live up to, that commitment in such subsequent films as "Blade Runner," "Legend," "Black Rain," and "Thelma and Louise." They were not always successful films (he must still be wondering about "G.I. Jane"), but Scott never lost my respect for what I always saw as a dedicated try to serve the story as best he could.
And that refrain, "to serve the story's needs," was pounding through my head again the other afternoon, as was Hans Zimmer's impressive musical score, when I saw "Gladiator," a film that Scott has clearly filtered through his special visual-design perceptions. It is possibly his best signature film yet, for he had a superior script to work from, a dark tale that combines action and character on the scale of the best of Shakespeare's tragedies. The writing credit goes to David H. Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson, but the visual power goes to Scott.
Critics are saying this
is an old-fashioned throwback to the days of Hollywood period
spectacles on the scale of "The Fall of the Roman Empire,"
"Ben-Hur" and "El Cid," or of the scope of
a Cecil B. De Mille Biblical extravaganza such as "The Crusades"
or "The Ten Commandments."
However, the film I feel it comes closest to is "Spartacus,"
for that Kirk Douglas production dealt specifically with gladiatorial
training and battles as well as issues surrounding slavery and
freedom. Sir Laurence Olivier brought into focus the ruthlessness
of the Roman warrior and hinted at the decadence that would ultimately
lead to the collapse of the Empire. "Spartacus" thrived
on a level of literateness that most of the other epics never
came close to achieving. And literateness is something "Gladiator"
blends well into its stylish action sequences.
"Gladiator" lacks
the Technicolor gloss and sense of beautiful scenic grandeur
of those earlier epics because it has been totally filtered through
the eyes of Scott to be a darkly uncompromising portrait of one
man's fight for the reinstatement of all that was wrongfully
taken away from him.
It is brooding and drenched in shadows, not sunlight. It is cold,
never warm. There is no love or joy in this tyrannical empire
and Scott photographs it on days of overcast gray and nights
of murky darkness. Some movies might make revenge the central
motivation of their characters, but "Gladiator," to
its credit, also deals with duplicity, betrayal, lust for power,
murder, the loss of loved ones, and a deep devotion to the service
of one's country, whatever its faults.
Scott brilliantly sets the stage for his players by establishing the starkness of his vision in the first sequence--a grim, elaborate battle in the Bourne Woods of the Danube between legions of the Roman Empire. They're well-armed with fireball catapults, spear thrusters and the meanest swords, dirks and daggers ever to be assembled--and barbaric Conan-like, axe-wielding warriors from the land of Germania.
By injecting Roman Commander Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) into the battle, and showing him at the head of his legions as a skilled combatant in the art of hand-to-hand combat, Scott establishes credibility for the many gladiatorial battles that will come later after Maximus has been stripped of everything and turned into a slave who must fight to stay alive. Scott also chooses to limit the images of men being hacked and hewed to death by using quick-cut editing, so that while the ferocity of the battle is clearly established, the on-screen blood-letting is kept at a minimum.
It's been a 12-year-long war and Maximus, after battle's end, yearns merely to return to his wife and son living in Spain. But Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris, giving one of his best performances in years) wants him to assume command as the new Caesar and restore an empire that is eroding away because of all the senatorial shenanigans.
But the Emperor's son Commodus, played by Oscar nominee Joaquin Phoenix, cannot stand the thought of another usurping his birth-given role as emperor, and the demented, ego-driven psychopath strangles his father during a startling confrontation. Deemed a traitor because he will not cow down to Commodus, Maximus is sentenced to die.
Crowe, in a role as solidly conceived as the whistle blower he played in 1999's "The Insider," has definitely taken a step closer to super-stardom with his subdued and yet powerful portrayal of Maximus. Two classics in a row doesn't happen often to an actor, and Crowe is destined for many more big movies as a result.
How he escapes, finds his family slaughtered by Commodus' troops, and is recaptured and made a slave is but the beginning of Maximus' dark and troubling journey through "Gladiator." A skilled combatant from the start, Maximus becomes a disciple of the cynical Proximo (Oliver Reed in his final role), a former gladiator himself who earned his freedom and now trains the strongest slaves of the Roman Empire to be served up as fodder in the Colosseum. Maximus sees that by winning in the arena and pleasing the blood-hungry masses, he could gain a kind of control over his own destiny that nearly equals Commodus' control of Rome.
The battle scenes in the
Colosseum are ferocious. In the film's best action sequence,
Maximus uses his leadership skills to bond a handful of gladiators
into a single fighting unit while a fleet of chariots circles
them for the kill, long spikes thrusting out from the churning
wheels. How Maximus' band, following his simple commands, avoids
those poles of deadly steel and overwhelms the chariot force
provides for a rousing duel-to-the-death that is as visceral
as anything I've seen in the movies.
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I MUST PAYone final tribute to "Gladiator" by singling out Oliver Reed's performance as Proximo. He is introduced as a less-than-likeable, seemingly sadistic, snarling man who enjoys seeing men killed in the arena for the sake of a good fight. But gradually Reed builds sympathy for this brash character, who was once enslaved and trained to fight others, and I found Proximo to be a fascinating figure who dominates all his scenes. He conveys that Proximo has moral fiber and can be trusted to serve Maximus' good cause, in contrast to the seediness of his opening scenes. To take his character from villainy to martyrdom is an achievement, and Proximo is but one of Reed's many screen achievements where total commitment to the part was everything.
If you want to go all the way back to the beginning of his stardom, there was Bill Sikes in 1968's "Oliver!" His trilogy of films with director Ken Russell stands as a reminder of his brooding strength on the screen: "Women in Love" (in which he wrestled nude with costar Alan Bates), "The Devils" and "Tommy" (he actually sang in that one). There was his excellent Athos in two Richard Lester Musketeer films. He was often dark and sullen and sometimes he over-chewed on the scenery in his horror genre films but he was always a powerful presence, whether the film was lousy or good.
He was often temperamental on the set and had a reputation for drinking hard and raising plenty of hell while he did it. A boxer and a strip-joint bouncer before he became an actor on British TV, he drank until dawn with the likes of Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole. One time in the airport at Galway, Ireland, tourists viewed his unconscious body as it came toward them, sprawled on a baggage conveyer belt. In a Madrid hotel one night in 1973, he took off all his clothes during dinner and then jumped into a fish tank. "I'm only an actor," he said in defense of himself later. "I'm not a priest beyond reproach."
Reed was on the island of Malta on May 3, 1999, making "Gladiator," when he went out with the usual cronies to belt down a few after a hard day on the movie set playing Proximo. He collapsed during the drinking bout and died of heart failure on the way to the hospital. He cashed in with his boots on. Glenda Jackson, who costarred with Reed in "Women in Love," summed it up well: "I think he died the way he would have wished."
He sure as hell went out in a blaze of glory as an actor. He deserved a nomination for the supporting-role Oscar. He's that overpowering as Proximo. I salute he who has already died: Oliver Reed.
© 2000 by John Stanley
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