Is there a Beowulf curse?

Beowulf is back, but perhaps not for long. Robert Zemeckis's "performance capture" 3D animation, based on the earliest surviving poem in what would evolve into the English language, has won this weekend's box office scurry - but has fallen short of expectations nonetheless.

It's hard to know why filmmakers persist in trying to adapt the story of a Viking warrior who appears with a group of men to vanquish Grendel, a monster terrorizing a kingdom in Denmark. In the version of epic that survives - and you can access all you'll want to know about it here - Beowulf then defeats the monster's vengeful mother. It's bit like making a movie about Vincent van Gogh. It has never been done well, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone from trying.

Updated through 11/22.

What's particularly amusing about this latest version - and here's my review for Screen International - is that Zemeckis admits that he didn't like Beowulf when he read it, and that the screenwriters, Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman, determined that the Irish monks who copied the poem repeatedly over the centuries most likely censored much of the "flavor." They then seem to have concluded that the flavor was sexual in nature, so we have sexual mockery among the revelers in King Hrothgar's lodge (under siege from the monster Grendel) and bawdy innuendo from Beowulf's men when they arrive. We also get a serving girl with large breasts - video game large - who naturally gets the juices pumping in one of Beowulf's men. some might call her a wench. All this, in the name of authenticity.

Still, however Beowulf fares in the long run, animation is very much alive and well. Ratatouille is still cooking up savory international returns and thriving on DVD. And here comes Persepolis, the animated film adaptation of the four-part graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian-born resident of France who cites Art Spiegelman and Maus among her influences for her tale of adolescence and young adulthood in Iran and Europe at the end of the Shah's reign and the early days of the Islamic Republic. It's a little obvious, but no less true, to say that Satrapi (with her collaborator Vincent Paronnaud) has created a humanizing animation to cut through the preconceptions that tend to rule our views about Iran in the United States. Persepolis is satirical, but it's also tender, especially in Satrapi's depiction of her relationship with her freethinking grandmother. (The implication is that free thought is just as Iranian as Islamic tyranny, and perhaps with deeper roots.) And there's sex, too.

That's about all it has in common with Beowulf, though, to be fair, it's not that there aren't some moments of humor in this new version of the saga. When Beowulf (voiced by Ray Winstone) strips to fight the invading monster Grendel, Zemeckis makes sure that there is always something between the viewer and any body part that might imperil the movie's PG-13 rating. You thought you were watching a video game about Beowulf, but it turns out that you're playing "Where's Willie." Did the monks leave this part of the epic poem on the monastery floor?

Zemeckis shows us that you can get Vikings to do pretty much whatever you want, and to look any way you wish. Which leads us to Angelina Jolie, as Grendel's mother, clothed in nothing but a gold sheen and... high heels? Now that's a monster. If this is what those monks intended, they must have spent quite some time at the confessional.

Zemeckis's Beowulf goes the state-of-the-art route. Beowulf and Grendel (2005) is an example of the blood and guts approach, shot in Iceland in the rain on tidal plains and barren fields, with actors who looked as if they had been on medieval diets for years. For an account of the making of the film that might make you think there's a Beowulf curse, see my review of the documentary about shooting the epic. Everything seems to have gone wrong. Maybe the first thing that went wrong was to try to make a film about Beowulf.

How else can you explain The 13th Warrior, John McTiernan's battle epic about an Arab voyager's (Antonio Banderas) trip north to a kingdom of warriors who are being killed and eaten by monsters - sound familiar? Vladimir Kulich plays a fighter named Buliwyf in this dream-team flop (Omar Sharif's in there, too) that tries to turn Beowulf into something of a travelogue. If that sounds preposterous, at least you didn't invest in it. And then there's the Christopher Lambert Beowulf. No need to dwell on that one.

So far, no adaptation even comes close to toppling the cliché. The book really was better. Give it a try, with Seamus Heaney's modern translation.

- David D'Arcy

In his piece for Wired on the state of 3D, Frank Rose quotes Avary: "It's so large and extraordinary and hyperreal that I can't be anything but giddy. When I left the theater, I wanted the rest of the world to look like that."

"The most interesting thing about Beowulf, alas, is its technology," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "It's the work of a man who has fallen in love with his toys, but I miss the wicked satirist who made Used Cars."

Earlier: "Beowulf."

Updates, 11/20: In the Guardian, Paul Arendt talks with Michael Morpurgo, author of a version of Beowulf for children: "Eventually, the film leaves you no room to use your own imagination. As a viewer you're not treated with enough respect."

"Inspired by the new film of Beowulf, I decided to go back to the source," blogs Stephen Moss. "To be honest, I assumed I would hate it: how could an everyday story of a sixth-century dragon slayer connect with someone waiting for a plane in drab 21st-century Stansted? How wrong I was. I adored it: the fantastic story, the muscular, lyrical verse, the drama of the battles and the pathos of Beowulf's end."

You might be surprised by the number of films that've been made based on poems. Joshua Glenn's got a list; via Dwight Garner.

"The CGI performance-capture version of Angelina Jolie as 'Grendel's Mother' (the only name ever used to refer to her) in Robert Zemeckis's 3-D Beowulf is just the latest in a line of cartoonishly exaggerated femmes fatales to be found in Zemeckis's work," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "Beowulf, for all its technical accomplishment, already looks more dated than his [Who Framed Roger Rabbit?], its CGI animation providing no competition for old-fashioned ink and paint. Thus, my ranking of Zemeckis's femmes fatales: Grendel's Mother - Somewhat Sexy; Lisle von Rhoman - Sexier; Jessica Rabbit - Sexiest!"

Update, 11/21: "In Beowulf, Zemeckis isn't interested in history or mankind's warrior instinct; he's concerned about 3-D effects that make beer mugs and rodents project from your lap more than how they come toward you," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "This advance feels like a regression."

Updates, 11/22: "As an exercise in pure mise-en-scene, there's literally nothing else like it, and I can't wait to see it again," writes Dave Kehr.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Carolyne Larrington takes us on a tour of past cinematic adaptations; as for this one, "there is much to enjoy in the noisy, action-packed spectacular effects of the fights. Grendel in particular, half-foetus, half-corpse with the flayed skin of a Gunther von Hagen figure, is both grotesquely terrifying and pitiable; the fear evoked in the poem when the monster realizes that he has met his match, and his miserable death in the mere are brilliantly realized."

Posted by dwhudson at November 18, 2007 3:11 PM