ALEXANDER (2004) ¢ ¢
D: Oliver Stone
Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer,
Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Anthony Hopkins,
Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Alexander the Great conquers Asia, but neither Oliver Stone nor Colin Farrell can get a handle on Alexander. A big, long, slow-moving epic with a lot of arch dialogue and Farrell as the bleached-blond conqueror looking like a young surfer dude or an outcast from a metal band, depending on what phase of Alexander's life he's trying to portray. For all the information and speculation packed into Stone's script, you never get a coherent sense of what Alexander was really about, and Farrell has neither the capacity to make you care, nor the charisma to make you believe he could lead an army to the ends of the earth. The romantic angle is interesting, though. While Alexander clearly has a taste for both oysters and snails, his most enduring emotional attachment is with another man. Not that he and Hephaistion (Jared Leto) actually get it on. They exchange meaningful looks and long, lingering hugs, but it's Rosario Dawson as Roxane who gets the nude love scene. In fact, there are only two significant female characters: Roxane and Olympias (Angelina Jolie), Alexander's snake-charming mother. Both are manipulative ballbreakers, something that probably says more about Stone than it does about Alexander. Anthony Hopkins, safely removed from the proceedings, narrates the story as Ptolemy, padding around his palace in Egypt 40 years after the great man's death.
