Oliver Stone's Bloated 2004 Epic Alexander is a Real Stinkeroo
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I will be honest with you. I have NOT been looking forward to watching and writing about 2004’s Alexander for this column. As we have established indelibly, I am not a fan of Oliver Stone.
Watching and writing about ALL of Oliver Stone’s movies has done nothing to change my opinion of the filmmaker. If anything, I might actually like him less now than I did at the beginning of the project, when my contempt for Stone was vitriolic and intense but not as well-informed as it is now.
I am furthermore not a fan of sword and sandals epics. They’re simply not my cup of tea. I much prefer the dark and gritty world of Zack Snyder’s superhero movies. Furthermore, Alexander is one of Stone’s biggest and most notorious flops. It bombed at the box-office and failed to impress even the perplexingly sizable contingent of critics who think Stone is a genius and that his movies aren’t overwhelmingly terrible.
Normally that would make Alexander more attractive to me rather than less but absolutely nothing about the movie appealed to me.
If I might once again give Stone the faintest of praise, Alexander isn’t any worse than many of Stone’s other stinkeroos, and is decidedly better than movies like Natural Born Killers and The Doors.
I would rather get kicked hard in the nuts over and over and over again than watch either of those movies ever again, whereas I would rather re-watch Alexander then receive a series of painful blows to my testicles.
But if Alexander is not quite as dreadful as its reputation suggests, it is nevertheless exhausting and overwrought in that inimitable Oliver Stone fashion.
The bad decisions begin with a lumbering framing device that finds Nixon’s Anthony Hopkins’ Old Ptolemy (not to be confused the hot young rapper Yung Ptolemy) delivering the heroic tale of Alexander to his students and by extension, the audience.
This is clearly a paycheck gig for the great English thespian. He’s so checked out that his performance here makes his turn in 2017’s Transformers: The Last Night seem like a deeply personal labor of love.
Every twenty minutes or so Hopkins’ sleepy narration returns and it feels like he’s reading from an encyclopedia entry on ancient Greece.
One of Stone’s many glaring weaknesses as a filmmaker and a storyteller is that he feels the need to unpack vast museums’ worth of information in movies designed to educate and edify as well as entertain.
His movie groan under the weight of all that exposition and ambition. Think of JFK, which features multiple info-dispensing monologues running longer than fifteen minutes apiece. But Stone’s storytelling has seldom been as clunky and didactic as is here.
Another crucial mistake is the miscasting of Colin Farrell as a preeminent Greek hero. Colin Farrell isn’t just Irish: he’s Ireland. He personifies that glorious country in unusually pure form.
For a few years the Irish flag consisted of a caricature of Farrell drinking a Guinness and flipping the bird. He’s more Irish than Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
So it is more than a little perverse to cast the brooding embodiment of Ireland as a legendary Greek hero.
Farrell was a very old 27 when he made Alexander so it’s unintentionally comic that he’s introduced as a sexy blonde nineteen year old who looks more like a towel boy at Plato’s Retreat than a world conqueror.
The great love of Alexander’s life is not any of his wives but rather his pretty compatriot Hephaestion, (Jared Leto, who looks like he could go directly from the set to a 30 Seconds to Mars gig at Coachella).
Farrell and Leto’s presence invites the question: why did Farrell and Leto get to be in just about everything despite never being box-office attractions or particularly popular?
In a six year span Farrell starred in Tigerland, Minority Report, Phone Booth, Daredevil, S.W.A.T, Alexander, a New World, Miami Vice and Ask the Dust. Farrell was the star of most of those films and while they were mostly unsuccessful at the box office they’re all major films from some pretty major filmmakers.
Why was Farrell cast, if not for purely mercenary reasons? Probably because he is talented and handsome and a good actor, even if he does not possess Brando level charisma or talent.
Leto, meanwhile, starred in Prefontaine, The Thin Red Line, Black and White, Fight Club, Girl, Interrupted, American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Panic Room, Phone Booth, Alexander and Lord of War in the same decade.
The Oscar winner is, of course, the worst actor in the world so I can only assume that he achieved his success through a pact with the devil.
Angelina Jolie stars as the titular hero’s mother despite being a year older than the actor playing her son. Stone makes this casting even weirder by not allowing Jolie to age.
She begins the film seemingly the same age as her son. Then he gets older but she stays the same age. But if Jolie seems way too young for the role her volcanic performance is the film’s greatest strength.
The performance that stand out here are theatrical in nature. The more an actor or actress channels Oliver Reed, the better the performance. So the standouts, in addition to Jolie, are a scenery-chewing Val Kilmer as Alexander’s debauched father figure and Rosario Dawson as Alexander’s fiery, rebellious bride.
By 2004 Hollywood had thankfully moved beyond the loathsome, sexist and poisonously dishonest cliche of the sexual assault that gives way to enthusiastic consensual sex. Stone unfortunately brings back that regrettable convention here in a way that highlights how he sees the film’s few female characters almost entirely through the prism of sex and sensuality.
Alexander conquers the world but at great personal cost. At its best Alexander captures how disorienting and surreal it must be to be the first Greek to encounter something like monkeys or a pack of elephants.
Then again, you know a massive dream project from someone considered a major filmmaker has flown off the rails when your main takeaway is that elephants look cool and it must be weird to encounter them for the first time.
Alexander is unabashed hagiography. It’s the tale of a God among men who tried to unite east and west and bring about equality and racial and religious harmony but was ultimately too good and too pure for this wicked and corrupt world.
Watching Stone’s tribute to Alexander made me realize that what the bad boy filmmaker really admires in leaders is strength and confidence. I get the sense that Stone would not have a problem with a handsome, brilliant white man like Alexander ruling the entire world benevolently.
That’s at the heart of Stone’s hero worship for JFK and it helps explain why Stone could be fooled and seduced by a monster like Vladimir Putin.
In the end Alexander bored me more than anything else. I didn’t hate Alexander. It didn’t seem worthy of hate. It may be a dream project for Stone but that doesn’t mean it merits anything more than a half-hearted shrug.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
Check out the Kickstarter for The Happy Place’s next book, The Fractured Mirror: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to American Movies About the Film Industry, which ends today OMG! here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdaccordiontoal/the-fractured-mirror?ref=project_build
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!
PLUS, for a limited time only, get a FREE copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al when you buy any other book in the Happy Place store!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!