Beowulf Revisited
I attended the animated Neil Gaiman/Roger Avary film adaptation of Beowulf with sharply divided expectations. As you might expect, given my take on the rules of Fairyland, I was less interested in the technical quality of the graphics—which, incidentally, were generally good—than in the story line.
I’d seen the trailer, and had some cause for concern. Casting Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s mother, and Grendel’s mother as a sexpot temptress smelled suspiciously like the kind of revision that crosses the line between reinterpreting a beloved story and merely pretending to do so. Telling an entirely different story with somebody else’s character names is an easy way to score some cheap marketing, the kind of process that produces ripoff stinkers like The Magnificent Seven Returns, or the blessedly imaginary “Lord of the Rings II: Vengeance of Frodo.”
On the other hand, Gaiman has an extraordinary touch with myth, able to revisit the old tales in a way that tells an original story while preserving and respecting the narrative demands of mythology: when his gods walk the modern world, they may wear a suit, but they will not reveal themselves as ancient UFO aliens suffering a case of mistaken identity. He is also a literary chameleon, easily shifting tone to match his collaborators, living or long dead. Beowulf is a surprisingly short tale for such a milestone of literature, with an enormous gap between slaying Grendel and kin in Beowulf’s youth and slaying a dragon as a form of suicide in his old age. If anyone could flesh this saga out into a full-length movie without doing wrong by it, Gaiman is the man. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Avary’s input, although Eileene muttered darkly.
They almost pull it off.
Where they stick to the original, they capture the Beowulf esthetic in ways of which the Danes and Geats would approve. The setting is not reworked into fairy tale beauty; Hrothgar’s mead hall is rewardingly crude, as are his jarls, and Hrothgar himself, for that matter. The landscape is all gray skies and gray slate.
Where Gaiman and Avary take small deviations from the original, they are clever and skillful. An ancient revision, by which literate Christian scholars overlaid a veneer of Christian virtue on a pre-literate pagan tale, is cunningly reworked into a creeping advance of Christianity itself into Denmark, with Unferth the principle proponent. Wealthow plays a larger role but remains properly in the background, reinforcing the setting by throwing light on historical sexual mores, gender roles, and the privileges of a king. That Grendel speaks in old English is a nice touch, reinforcing his alien qualities despite being the one to use speech of the period. The battle with the dragon is more engaging in the movie, although in leaving his cave to strike the mead-hall Heorot, he steals a little too much from Smaug in The Hobbit.
The script takes a huge turn from the original with Grendel’s mother. The writers take advantage of the fact that Beowulf himself is the only witness to his encounter with Grendel’s mother; by casting him as an unreliable witness, they justify her complete transformation into a temptress, who seduces warriors to breed monster children. In the movie, Grendel is Hrothgar’s own shameful son, which prevents either from killing the other, and the dragon is Beowulf’s. With both Beowulf and the dragon dead at the film’s end, she moves on to Wiglaf, staring alluringly from the fjord into which Beowulf’s burning funereal ship has just sailed. We are left to guess whether Wiglaf succumbs.
The original saga doesn’t tell us much about Grendel’s mother, through Beowulf or otherwise, but the omniscient narrator does tell us that she is hideous, so the movie departs significantly in this respect, pursuing a Freudian sex-is-violence theme Gaiman first raised in his short story “Bay Wolf.” It wasn’t satisfying there, either. The decision to recast Grendel’s mother stretches unwelcome fingers through the movie in big ways and small.
One small but stupidly jarring way the change intrudes: Grendel’s mother has stiletto heels. Not high-heeled shoes, mind you, but actual heels grown to a spike Prada would approve, and given their own loving close-up shot. Most impractical for life in a rough cavern, and hardly something Beowulf would find appealing—he doesn’t share our cultural sense of the sexual icon. Grendel’s mother can change her shape, so why grow heels at all? You can almost imagine some studio doofus thinking, “Grendel’s mom is a hot chick? Oh, Angelina Jolie! Yeah, she’s hot. Let’s draw her walking around the cavern in nothing but spiked pumps. Woot!” Probably the same guy who felt Beowulf’s retainers should look like biker dudes instead of warriors from the Dark Ages.
One big way the change intrudes: Beowulf ceases to be a heroic saga at all. Grendel’s mother becomes the driving force behind the whole story, not the hero. Not only is Beowulf himself shown to be weak-willed, an opportunist and a liar—we might have suspected as much from his long-winded tale of sea monsters to excuse his loss in a swimming contest—but Hrothgar is, as well. We are left to guess whether Wiglaf succumbs; it is unclear whether his scowl in the closing frames is of contempt or frustration at his helplessness, but if Hrothgar and Beowulf fell to temptation, can Wiglaf, or someone like him, be far behind? The hero fails; evil survives; the hero kills a dragon, but he doesn’t kill the dragon. The warrior hero is portrayed not as master of his fate, but as helpless pawn, no better than the rest of us mortals. The litany that the song (of heroic deeds) survives is small compensation; the fact becomes deplorable when the song is a barefaced lie.
The big intrusions treat the classic tale like a more modern slasher flick, wherein the monster holds all the cards, and remains available for a sequel. The change may seem intriguing on paper. The new story could be interesting in its own right, could stand on its own, and should; it isn’t Beowulf, and does a disservice to the legend.