A Classical View of Human Tragedy:

“Death and regeneration, anger and compassion, burial and feast, suffering and affirmation, ar the final images of the Iliad. Achilles suddenly sees before him, more clearly than any other, a great abyss, the limits imposed by the human condition itself. His heroic effort is to accept this rather bleak world with its death and sorrow, and to step ahead. This faith in the courage and dignity of the human spirit is reflected more universally in the glow the funeral pyre and feast in Troy … Perhaps only with the final book – after some fifteen thousand verses – can the first-time reader begin to make sense of Achilles’ ‘journey,’ to share his sudden awareness of the tragedy of human existence as the bond that unites us all.” (Hanson & Heath, pgs. 205-206)

In Troy, it is indeed tragedy that unites the Greek and Trojan. It is Priam’s sorrow over his son Hector that finally moves Achilles. In light of this, his past rage and vengeance seem silly and wasteful. They are fighting a war and now the best and most moral man in the war is dead. Achilles may have been the greatest warrior, but Hector was good in many ways where Achilles has not even come close. I cannot imagine what anyone who does not see this in that scene could possibly be thinking.

I mentioned earlier that the film’s single combat scenes were consistent with ancient military and epic traditions, however quaint they appear to us today. But the way that the film focuses in on single combats does more than follow Homeric tradition. It makes the war more personal. All the CGI’d soldiers clashing with thousands of other CGI’d soldiers in the world will never portray the real tragedy of war. There is a point where eagle eye views of thousands fighting thousands becomes entirely abstract. Instead, Troy makes you watch human personalities in single combat – yes, even in the midst of a battle of thousands. Neither does the camera move from single combat to single combat only to luridly dwell upon the bloody killing blow like it does in many battle scenes in other films. Instead, you feel every blow all the more because you are focusing on two human personalities. In Troy, when one character dies, it matters.

I’m asking the viewer to pause here and consider what it means to mock or reject a story that has things like single combat contrary to modern sensibilities. “Why don’t the archers on the walls just shoot Achilles?” one of my friends asked when were were watching the film. To scoff at Homer’s Iliad is, more often than not, to consider oneself morally superior to anyone who could have lived or appreciated that ancient world. Alberto Manguel, in his Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography, pleads with us to stop judging the stories of Homer by modern standards:

“The chronology we have invented for ourselves prompts us to imagine that our sense of the world and of ourselves evolves, and that there is progress of feeling and imagination as there is development of technology and invention. We see ourselves as better than our ancestors, those savages of the Bronze Age who, though they wrought fine cups and bangles and sang beautiful songs, massacred each other in horrible wars, possessed slaves and raped women, ate without forks and conceived gods who threw thunderbolts. It is difficult for us to imagine that, such a long time ago, we already had words to name our most bewildering experiences and our deepest and most obscure emotions. The phantom figure we call Homer exists somewhere in the dark distance, like the ruins of a building whose shape and purpose we ignore. And yet, here and there … lie perhaps the inklings of an answer.” (pgs. 234-235.)

The answer, I think, lies in the value of human tragedy. We still kill today for the sake of vengeance. Prosecutors in our own criminal courts still use “retribution” as one the justifications of punishment and sentencing. The modern day battlefield, with all its technological improvements, still has countless fatalities ultimately caused by human pride, human incompetence and often a very real human thirst for revenge. The Iliad is a story of an avenger who learns to have empathy for his enemy’s sorrow. It is a story of how good men can die for a pointless cause. It is a story of how widows and orphans are still made even today. Our morality has not changed or improved since the days of Homer.

I appreciate how the film increases the moral influence that Briseis has on Achilles. By simply voicing her point of view, she makes much of what Achilles focuses upon ring hollow. “Why did you choose this life?” she asks him. “What life?” he responds, not comprehending. “To be a great warrior?” (this may be the best delivery of a line that Rose Byrne gives during the whole film, combining sadness, curiosity and mockery all into a single tone of voice). Achilles’s answer to her question is both nonsensical and referential: “I chose nothing. I was born and this is what I am.” At first it sounds like a poor attempt by the scriptwriter to sound deep, hammering home once again the endlessly repeated themes of fate and destiny. But if you think back to the beginning of the film, Achilles answer is not entirely true. He made a choice after his mother’s prophecy. And now Briseis is about to convince him to make another choice. When he attempts to wax eloquently about how death and mortality makes everything more valuable and more beautiful, he doesn’t even phase Briseis. “I thought you were dumb brute,” she replies. “I could have forgiven a dumb brute.” No other character speaks like this to Achilles.

For all the talk about fate, destiny, fame and glory, the Trojan War was still a great waste of human life. And for all our modern day talk of human rights, weapons of mass destruction, red lines and the judgments of history, we still see great wastes of human life today. We still can cause great pain and suffering by our exercise of political power. We are not bound to do so. We are not forced to do so. And yet we do so still. In fact, compared to the Trojan war, our wars seem to be growing worse and worse with each new historical age. Simone Weil, in her wonderful essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” attempts to explain this theme:

“The relations between destiny and the human soul, the extent to which each soul creates its own destiny, the question of what elements in the soul are transformed by merciless necessity as it tailors the soul to fit the requirements of shifting fate, and of what elements can on the other hand be preserved, through the exercise of virtue and through grace – this whole question is fraught with temptations to falsehood, temptations that are positively enhanced by pride, by shame, by hatred, contempt, indifference, by the will to oblivion or to ignorance.”

These are the big ideas that both the the literary work, the Iliad, and the cinematic work, Troy, are about. Human pride and human greed are causes of unjust wars. As a result, less powerful people often seem bound to untimely and undeserved ill fates. Even the powerful, the great and the strong can find themselves up against irreversible circumstances. That Achilles the soldiers stands up to his unjust commander is heroic and inspiring. That Hector defends what he loves with all of his strength against any odds is quixotic and inspiring. That many characters, including Achilles, are blinded by their own vices and that their mistakes cause the deaths of even those they love is a problem that humanity always seems to repeat over and over again. So when you think about Troy, you don’t have to demand that it be as deep as Homer’s epic poem, but you can also appreciate how the classical themes and values imbedded in it make it different from other war films.

Remember, 2004 alone was the year that gave us a number of historically based films trying to be seen as epics, including King Arthur (a film that plays with the historical Arthur, but then kills off half the characters before the story can even begin, including battle scene after battle scene after battle scene) and Alexander (where Stone bungles the most interesting part of the story, Alexander the Great’s tactical genius, and instead spends a great deal of screentime on Alexander languorously making doe eyes at Jared Leto). Most grand-sweeping-CGI-armies-on-the-battlefield-from-helicopter-view war films do not have complex characters. They are not personal. They very often do not have fight scenes between a protagonist and antagonist who are both cared about by the audience. Even more rare is that they usually do not portray wars between characters who, on both sides, are genuinely attempting to grow in practicing the old virtues. Troy does all this and more. Weil continues:

“Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune’s image. The Greeks, generally speaking, were endowed with spiritual force that allowed them to avoid self-deception. The rewards of this were great; they discovered how to achieve in all their acts the greatest lucidity, purity, and simplicity. But the spirit that was transmitted from the Iliad to the Gospels by way of the tragic poets never jumped the borders of Greek civilization; once Greece was destroyed, nothing remained of this spirit but pale reflections.”

Simplicity of character and theme are, paradoxically, also strengths of Troy. While your major human personality types are almost all represented, and while someone like Achilles has a complexity to his character that is difficult to plumb, sometimes the simple and the true can also be something to cherish. Personally, Eric Bana delivers one of my favorite performances of his in this film (the other being in Munich). He does not need great complexity of personality to be interesting. It is quite true, as Ebert hinted, that some heroes can be plain, straightforward and single-minded.

Like the Iliad, one of Troy’s greatest strengths by far is the character of Hector. Eric Bana inhabits him and delivers all the best qualities that you could ask for in a hero – strength, discernment, courtesy, gentleness, kindness, determination, courage, love for his family, love for his country, realism and, above all, a profound moral sense of what is occurring around him … and what to do about it. When his brother is unthinking, Hector already anticipates and does his best to prevent the harm that Paris can cause. When the entire court of the king agrees to act rashly, Hector is the only one willing to stand up to them and explain practical realities, however unpopular they may be. When Ajax and slaughtering every Trojan within reach, Hector goes within his reach. When no one is thinking ahead about how to save or protect family, Hector is willing to plan even for the worst for those he loves.

He is, above all, a good man. He doesn’t care about gaining more political power. He wants to spend time with his family and love his wife and son. He’s willing to continually place himself in harm’s way. And, when up against the very worst of odds, he is the only Trojan willing to meet them. In the film, Bana gets all this right and more. He indicates what he’s thinking simply by looking in the right place (where no one else is looking). He speaks softly in scenes where other actors would have raged. His resolve is unassailable, whether confronted with Paris’s naivety, Achilles’s shocking obsession with eternal fame, the folly of his father’s advisors or all the force and threats that Agamemnon can muster. There is no hint of bitterness with his relation to his brother or even with Helen. He is quick to rebuke falsehood or injustice and he is quick to forgive and show gentleness.

The film introduces his character with his rebuke to Paris’s declarations about his latest romance. It is a ringing rebuke that could be made to many a young person in today’s modern hook-up culture. When Paris declares “I love her!” all Hector can do is groan. “It’s all a game to you, isn’t it? You roam from town to town bedding merchant’s wives and temple maids and you think you know something about love. What about your father’s love? You spat on him when you brought her on this ship! What about the love for your country?” This is not hard to understand. It is quite old-fashioned and traditional. Some viewers may find a character like this boring, but I wish there were more characters like this around today. Even Hector himself admits to his own simplicity. Unlike many a before battle speech scene in a film (and even here, Brad Pitt is forced to deliver a rather unintelligible one), Hector is a man of few words. “Trojans! All my life, I’ve lived by a code and the code is simple. Honor the gods. Love your woman. And defend your country.” For him, that is enough and he expects it to be enough for his men. When exposed to Achilles’ obsession, Hector gives the basic and common sense response: “You speak of war as if it’s a game. But how many wives wait inside Troy’s gates for husbands they’ll never see again?” Achilles retorts with a joke, but Hector’s point remains.

Hector’s character is so strong (and Bana’s presence charismatically fills it), that much of the story really revolves around him. And the mere fact that he does not always persuade or succeed does not detract from his stature. Even when he fails or loses, Hector does so gracefully and does not cease to be the moral voice that profoundly affects everyone else. This is because he is in the right. He gives Priam his confidence. He gives Paris opportunities to grow into someone better than he is. He refuses to even consider Agamemnon’s offers. He is kind to Helen and explains to her that she is less a cause than an excuse. He grieves over what he does in battle. He loves his wife and child. And he is the one Trojan willing to stop even Achilles himself. Moreover, those of us who appreciate Hector are not alone. In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

“Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in later times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.” (pg. 80)

Because of the universal appeal of Hector’s being in the right and because of the lasting value of the themes in this story, I expect that Troy will be valued as a film more in the future than it was when it was first released. It is not perfect. There is so much more that Petersen could have done. But then, Petersen would have had to make a twelve hour film instead of a three hour one. I still glad that he made the three hour one. Perhaps someday, a great director, with a vision for how mythology can resonant and shape the ways in which we view the world around us, will make a masterpiece of a film based upon the Iliad. Until then, at least we have one decent production that gives us an ideal warrior who does not become right by becoming mighty. At least here, we have a war film that questions the assumptions of the martial code, that does not resort to reductionist unmessy endings not to be hoped for in real life, that does not glorify vengeance, that shows revenge to be pointless, harmful and vain, that insists upon a higher standard of justice even in the face of divine or religious claims to the contrary, that can find grace in the face of human tragedy and that values the old-fashioned hero who is not right because he succeeds. Some stories may indeed echo across history, and this film may be one of those echoes, but it is not the echoing itself that is valuable. Instead, it is the moral and imaginative substance of what crosses historical ages. Petersen’s film manages to preserve at least a few of those substantive classical ideas. In most of today’s action films, as a rule, they are not easy to find.

Jeremy Purves writes about movies Redemptio Sehnsucht and other stuff at Cincinatus’s Ploughshare.

Tags: Iliad, Troy, Wolfgang Petersen