“I thought you were a dumb brute,” says Briseis. “I could have forgiven a dumb brute.”

Indeed, the Achilles of TROY is no dumb brute. That’s one of the reasons why if you’re a scholar of the ILIAD, the movie TROY could rub you the wrong way. Because – at least to my reading – the Achilles of the ILIAD is indeed a dumb brute, a bully, concerned only with his own glory, even to the detriment of those he loves best.

Marion Zimmer Bradley portrays his character just this coldly in THE FIREBRAND. And in truth that’s what I was looking for. Yet the ancient Greeks largely ignored Achilles’ selfishness and petulant sulking – instead idolizing him as a hero who chose glory above length of days. Brad Pitt’s Achilles is both of these, at once selfish and self-sacrificing, far more nuanced and interesting than I had expected.

The movie gives Achilles an opportunity to kill Hector early in the war, but he lets the Trojan prince go free, asking (as my own brutish, selfish Achilles might): “Why kill you now, with no one here to see you fall?” And yet he grieves his noble opponent once his fury over Patroklos’ death has ebbed.

The movie’s Achilles is – reasonably enough, given the warrior culture – a Bronze Age heartthrob. When the time for war comes, Achilles is not (as the traditional myth would have it) hiding in disguise among the women, but oversleeping with a pair of them after a night of carnal pleasures. Later, the young captive Briseis falls in love – or in lust – with him far too easily. But TROY inspires the audience to identify with neither the cowardly playboy Paris nor the vacuous, careless Helen; Hector and Andromache, while attractive and admirable, are too troubled by the war’s implications for their people and their infant son to throw themselves lustily into passion. Perhaps Achilles and Briseis offered the best possibility for the love scene every modern movie must have.

One might question the handling of the Achilles/Patroklos relationship. Patroklos is shown as Achilles’ younger cousin, though Homer makes it clear that Patroklos was the elder; and though there are some homoerotic overtones, there is never any implication that the two were lovers. But the movie – in one of its best departures from Homer – does a masterful job of handling Patroklos’ death. The battle is at dawn, the light poor. The camera never lingers long on the fair-haired young man in Achilles’ armor. My viewing companion, not as familiar with the myth as I, had no idea that the man Hector slew in battle was not Achilles until the moment Hector drew off his fallen opponent’s helmet.

Achilles’ death is another well-done deviation from the text. Although in the Iliad he falls to Apollo’s arrow before the sack of Troy, the film shows him as one of the warriors within the Horse. Because the movie (in agreement with my own personal preference, if not Homeric tradition) shows no overt intervention by the Olympians, it is Paris who brings Achilles down – but in such a way that those who find his body can reasonably draw the conclusion that Apollo sent the fatal bolt through his vulnerable heel.

Peter O’Toole’s Priam is well-played: a brave, noble, over-pious, and ultimately foolish old man. He shelters pretty Helen in his citadel, when any rational leader would have turned her out; he dismisses the battle-savvy counsel of Hector, believing the omens of his priests instead. He goes to Achilles humbly, asking for the body of his son; and unlike in the Iliad, Achilles allows the old man to take the abused and mutilated body of his son without demanding an obscene ransom. And yet poor old Priam dies like the ghost of some even more ancient generation, with Agamemnon’s spear through his back – asking, “Have you no Greeks no honor?”

There are some forgivable anachronisms: mounted cavalry, metal helmets, some suspiciously steely-looking swords, coins on the eyes of the dead, and a remarkably classical-looking vase. The palaces are far too large and not nearly colorful enough; the women’s costumes are about a thousand years out of date. On the other hand TROY offers some excellent touches such as the amphorae painted with Cretan octopus, the ivory-plated helmets and armor on Agamemnon and Menelaus, the figure-of-eight shields of the Greeks, and the Hittite-influenced carvings in Troy.

The young Aeneas makes quite a nice cameo appearance. But conspicuously missing are the strong Trojan women of the myth: Kassandra, Hecuba, and the Amazon warrior Penthesilea. No doubt that’s why Briseis is so much more than the passive war trophy we see in the Iliad: she embodies some of Kassandra, and quite an unexpected bit of Klytaimnestra – which, though a serious deviation from the mythic cycle, helps to complete the story the movie sets out to tell.

My main complaints with where TROY deviates from tradition come at the very end, and so I hesitate to belabor them here. Suffice it to say that some characters who should meet their deaths for dramatic completeness are spared in the movie; others, for whom a painful and humiliating continuation of life is appropriate, have their suffering cut short or find an undeserved escape. But overall I found the movie engaging, believable, enjoyable, human, and far, far better than any of the other recent portrayals of the classical world which have found their way into production. Yes, I plan to buy the DVD.

“The gods won’t fight this war for us,” observes Hector at one point. And indeed, as Paris discovers when fleeing from Menelaus’ sword, there is no divine intervention. In the end we must deal with foolish, noble, brave and selfish human beings. In TROY we see the nobler combatant fall. Sometimes that is the way of it. And sometimes, as valiant Aeneas discovers, there is still hope.

Return to Home for Tapestry of Bronze