Monster Mash
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Monster Mash A new, improved Beowulf for the 21st century. BY JOHN PODHORETZ From the dawn of the motion picture era, Hollywood has felt no compunction about taking liberties with literary...
...In the fi lm, by slaying the dragon, Beowulf commits the worst of all his crimes, since the dragon is his own son...
...They managed to keep the essence of the poem,” says Zemeckis, “but made it more accessible to a modern audience and made some revolutionary discoveries along the way...
...The Beowulf of the poem has no characteristics but his heroism: his overpowering strength, his physical bravery, his cleverness in battle, his undying honor, and his love of glory...
...Frankly, nothing about the original poem appealed to me,” Zemeckis has said, a remark that suggests he might not have been the best person to make a fi lm version of it...
...His fi nal words are: “It’s too late for lies...
...Grendel is the issue of her liaison with Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins), and as a result of that tryst, Hrothgar has been rendered infertile...
...The 1939 Wuthering Heights has a happy ending, with Catherine and Heathcliff enjoying a ghostly embrace on their beloved moors...
...But he dies before he can correct the record...
...She is a Satanic temptress who seduces men into impregnating her with the promise of granting them worldly power...
...Rather than being the world’s greatest and bravest hero, as he is in the poem, the Beowulf of Zemeckis’s fi lm is a puffed-up and vainglorious liar who sells his soul and manhood for power—and the promise that his repugnant behavior will be whitewashed forever by a hagiographic poem dedicated to his glory...
...In his estimation, the script—written by a fantasy novelist who wrote the Sandman comic books and a screenwriter who helped come up with the concept for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction—actually improves on one of the oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon works of literature...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ From the dawn of the motion picture era, Hollywood has felt no compunction about taking liberties with literary classics...
...Beowulf knows this all too well...
...Rather than bemoaning the tissue of lies his legend has become, as in the fi lm, Beowulf says on his deathbed that he never plotted a quarrel, nor swore an unjust oath, and takes joy in these accomplishments...
...Oh, and poor Grendel is a developmentally delayed sufferer from a skin condition that only attacks people because they make too much noise...
...He doesn’t tell you why Scrooge is mean...
...The true story of Beowulf is that (to quote the fi lm) “there are no heroes anymore” and “men are the real monsters...
...Like devising a plotline that turns Beowulf into an attack on . . . Beowulf...
...In the 1940 Pride and Prejudice (scripted in part by Aldous Huxley), Lady Catherine De Bourgh’s withering cross-examination of Lizzie Bennet is transformed into a sweetly humorous test of Lizzie’s love for Lady Catherine’s nephew Darcy...
...Whatever this is, it isn’t Beowulf...
...But no matter, because Zemeckis discovered to his delight that the screenplay he was given “explored deeper into the text, looking between the lines, questioning the holes in the source material...
...Additional Dialogue by Sam Taylor...
...Glory is a sham...
...So the “revolutionary discoveries” made by the screenwriters of Beowulf include the fact that the Epic of Beowulf is a travesty...
...The unifying glue is Grendel’s mother, who is not a monstrous hag of the deep but a Circe-like sea demon embodied by Angelina Jolie...
...This travesty of Beowulf is an epic not for the ages but for the Bush administration...
...That’s all well and good, but was it really necessary for medieval scribes to spend hundreds of years keeping the tale of Beowulf alive through the Dark Ages so that their precious handiwork could be turned into the source material for the animated equivalent of a Keith Olbermann rant...
...A 1929 silent featured this immortal credit: “The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare...
...First is that the force attempting to avenge Grendel’s death is his grieving mother, who is even more powerful and frightening than any avenging male might be...
...Eventually, she pulls the same trick on Beowulf (Ray Winstone) after he slays Grendel, and their offspring is the dragon whom Beowulf is forced to fi ght after serving as king for 50 years...
...Imagine a movie called The Torah that tells the story of creation from the perspective of Christopher Hitchens, and you might get a sense of the rather shocking transformation that takes place here...
...Even when translated into modern English by a superior poet like Seamus Heaney, Beowulf is a chore, since it does not have a narrative line but rather is a seriatim account of three hand-to-hand confrontations over the course of 50 years between the warrior Beowulf and three terrifying supernatural creatures: fi rst, the man-eating giant Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and fi nally a fi re-spewing dragon...
...Ah, yes: revolutionary discoveries...
...We go into all that, with the unhappy childhood...
...The storyline devised by the two screenwriters, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, fi nds a perversely clever way to weave it all together...
...The second is that it ends with an old Beowulf recapturing the glory of his youth by slaying the dragon—and losing his life in the process...
...For what is Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf but Hollywood’s vision of George W. Bush—a blowhard warmonger and craver of riches who reaches the summit of power through illegitimate means and has built his career on deceit...
...But never, in the annals of motion picture history, has an adaptation of a great work been run through the shredder quite as thoroughly as Beowulf is in this lavish and technically astounding new version—a combination of live action and computer animation directed by Oscarwinner Robert Zemeckis...
...The poem endures because of its exploration of these noble qualities and because of its two primal tropes...
...Power corrupts and destroys...
...In his hilarious nonfi ction account of 20th CenJohn Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...tury Fox, The Studio, John Gregory Dunne quoted a producer preparing a new version of A Christmas Carol: “Dickens was a terrible writer...
...I don’t want to sound pious about the original, a work that has tortured English majors and lovers of literature in general for untold centuries—forced by sadistic masters giggling into their beards to try to make sense of its incomprehensible Anglo-Saxon...
...Heroism is only the result of good public relations...
...it is, rather, Beowulf in reverse...
...The Epic of Beowulf is, in the estimation of the movie version of Beowulf, a tissue of lies...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 11
