Film Diary: Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
May. 2nd, 2006 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enitharmonThis is by way of complete contrast to The Seventh Seal. If Bergman's fable was a spoonful of caviare then Gladiator is a veritable Mississippi Mud Pie of a film - the pleasure it provides isn't a symphony of flavours and textures to be savoured and thought about and remembered, it's about sheer overindulgence and you don't care too much where the choclate beans came from or that the cream came from a can
And that's the thing. Gladiator is immensely enjoyable in its way, but it works by a constant bombardment of the senses. It's full of things that work like sugar and give you a rush of energy and leave you feeling full and having a good time, But a few hours later you feel strangely empty. There's not much story there that hasn't been told many times before. After all, in less tha two hundred years Rome had had Caligula, Nero and Domitian. The emperor Commodus is a bit of an also-ran as bad emperors go!
Having said that, Russell Crowe is bloody marvellous. Good company for those venerable hell-raisers Richard Harris and Oliver Reed who also shine in minor roles. Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus kept on inviting unfavourable comparisons with John Hurt's camply sinister Caligula from the BBCs I, Claudius (though that was a very different kind of drama). I can't remember who played Lucilla, such was her impact. It was a very macho film, after all, and it cried out for a Katharine Hepburn, a Bette Davis or a Rita Hayworth to cut through all that testosterone.
It was about spectacle, after all, which is why it was twice as long as it needed to be, and why it opens with an extended, confusing and rather pointless battle scene presumambly to get the adrenaline pumping. There was once a chap called Shakespeare, you know, who wrote a play called Macbeth. He, like Ridley Scott opened with a glorious victory in battle against the odds by a general. Only he conveyed it, not with pyrotechnic wizardry, but with one wounded soldier reporting to his ageing king. That's all you need.
It's interesting that I saw this in the weekend that saw the death of J K Galbraith. Galbraith recognised that a capitalist society has a problem. It needs an educated population to keep generating new commodities for people to consume in order to keep. But it also needs to keep the same population from thinking too hard about what it is being pressured into consuming. The answer is to numb the senses by pummelling them into submission and not allowing the individual either the time or the space to think critically. That's what Gladiator, along with most contemporary culture, is doing and as such it is a fine symbol of our time.
And that's the thing. Gladiator is immensely enjoyable in its way, but it works by a constant bombardment of the senses. It's full of things that work like sugar and give you a rush of energy and leave you feeling full and having a good time, But a few hours later you feel strangely empty. There's not much story there that hasn't been told many times before. After all, in less tha two hundred years Rome had had Caligula, Nero and Domitian. The emperor Commodus is a bit of an also-ran as bad emperors go!
Having said that, Russell Crowe is bloody marvellous. Good company for those venerable hell-raisers Richard Harris and Oliver Reed who also shine in minor roles. Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus kept on inviting unfavourable comparisons with John Hurt's camply sinister Caligula from the BBCs I, Claudius (though that was a very different kind of drama). I can't remember who played Lucilla, such was her impact. It was a very macho film, after all, and it cried out for a Katharine Hepburn, a Bette Davis or a Rita Hayworth to cut through all that testosterone.
It was about spectacle, after all, which is why it was twice as long as it needed to be, and why it opens with an extended, confusing and rather pointless battle scene presumambly to get the adrenaline pumping. There was once a chap called Shakespeare, you know, who wrote a play called Macbeth. He, like Ridley Scott opened with a glorious victory in battle against the odds by a general. Only he conveyed it, not with pyrotechnic wizardry, but with one wounded soldier reporting to his ageing king. That's all you need.
It's interesting that I saw this in the weekend that saw the death of J K Galbraith. Galbraith recognised that a capitalist society has a problem. It needs an educated population to keep generating new commodities for people to consume in order to keep. But it also needs to keep the same population from thinking too hard about what it is being pressured into consuming. The answer is to numb the senses by pummelling them into submission and not allowing the individual either the time or the space to think critically. That's what Gladiator, along with most contemporary culture, is doing and as such it is a fine symbol of our time.
