Beowulf & Grendel (2005)

Posted on Dec 20, 2006 under Action-suspense, Fantasy |

Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson
Written by Andrew Rai Berzins
Starring
- Gerard Butler
- Stellan Scarsgard
- Sarah Polley
- Ingvar Sigurdsson
- Eddie Marsan

As far as I know, there have been two previous attempts to adapt the epic Old English poem Beowulf to the big screen. One, 1999’s Beowulf transplants a version of the poem’s story to a “dungeonpunk” setting, with Christopher Lambert in the title role; you can find out more about my opinion of that movie here. The other, The 13th Warrior from that same year, is based on the Michael Crichton novel The Eaters of the Dead and largely constitutes a retrofitting of the myth, in effect reverse-engineering a naturalistic account which could have given rise to the myth. (It got largely lukewarm reviews, but I quite enjoyed watching it, mainly to see how the elements of the poem would be rendered in a less mythological setting; by contrast, most reviews consisted of, “I didn’t really understand what was going on; and I hear it was based on something called ‘Beowulf’.”)

This newest version (until the two competing productions currently in the pipeline see the light of day) doesn’t hew as closely to the “An Anthropologist’s Reading of Beowulf” approach used in The 13th Warrior, but also shies away from making it the Old English version of “Conan the Barbarian.” It’s a visually beautiful production, and manages to glean background and depth from the original while also adapting it to tell a story which veers off from the original in significant ways.

“Hrothgar’s party pad Heorot is now open for da bizness!”

In fact, the largest departure is the first thing we see: A young Grendel (Hringur Ingvarsson), blond and bearded at six years of age, capering across Denmark (as shot in stunning Icelandic locations) with his father (Spencer Wilding). Grendel and his kind are here termed “trolls,” and are shown largely as “variant” humans, over seven feet tall with knobbly muscles. Grendel and his father are beset upon by a troop of mounted Danes, and the father troll is shot with arrows and thrown from a cliff. A young Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgård) also sees Grendel, but stays his sword and lets him live when they ride off. Grendel finds his father’s body on shore below, cuts off the head, and packs it home with him.

This, then, is the greatest divergence of the original tale, in that it gives Grendel a motivation for wreaking havoc on Hrothgar’s hall (whereas in the original epic, Grendel acted out of sheer perversity). I have no problem with revisionism out of hand, and this twist to the tale is used to good effect. I just wish it weren’t already so common that it’s become a Hollywood cliche. It seems that every adaptation or “re-imagining” renders the traditional heroes monstrous and culpable, while painting the villains as misunderstood and wronged; it’s become almost a kneejerk assumption in big-screen versions that the good guys will be the bad guys and vice versa. It would be far more effective here if it weren’t already a shopworn tool in the toolbox of less creative writers and production executives; letting your movie remind viewers of the big-screen How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) is never a good thing.

“I knew we shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

Anyway: Thirtyish years later, Grendel (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson — father of the young Grendel, incidentally) is the spitting image of his dad, a huge beetle-browed fellow with gnarled rubber muscles, hiding along in a cave in the hills. If revenge is a dish best served cold, then Grendel has finally gotten a plate for the buffet, because Hrothgar, now king of the Danes, has just finished building his noble mead hall Heorot, meant to show his power and magnanimous character. Instead, Grendel starts attacking it nightly, killing all the Danes therein.

Of course, such a situation calls for a hero, and thus a hero comes: Beowulf (Gerard Butler), energetic and celebrated warrior among the Geats, crosses the water to offer his services in putting Grendel down. He and a dozen warriors (mostly with Scottish accents, to distinguish themselves from the Danes) arrive at Heorot with many oaths and boasts of how they will put an end to the troll when next he comes to fight.

Except that he doesn’t. As puzzling as it is to Beowulf, Grendel has no interest in the blood of the Geats; his quarrel is with Hrothgar, and thus his revenge will be exacted upon his Danish subjects. Beowulf is drawn further below the surface of the simple “good king/bad monster” situation as he tries to understand an enemy who won’t engage him, but seeks to torment and dishonor Hrothgar.

“AaaaouughaaOOOOawagghh!”
(Trust me, it’s a really funny caption if you speak Troll.)

The second major change to the original story, and one which isn’t as disruptive in itself as Grendel’s backstory, is the addition of Selma (Sarah Polley), a young and alluring witchwoman who lives at the periphery of Hrothgar’s community, too valuable as a foreteller (and as an unprotected woman) yet too mistrusted for her knowing comments and her alleged ability to know how each person is going to die. Thankfully, her role here isn’t as the customary love interest (though her relationship with Beowulf does involve sex — the movie is set in far too earthy a society not to); she functions instead as the classic outsider; being an unattached female in an overwhelmingly testosterone-addled community gives her a welcome divergent viewpoint, and her outspokenness as the intelligent woman separated from the social order gradually helps Beowulf understand more of the complexity of guilt and honor in this messy situation than he had original suspected. (Although… I’m sorry, but she sounds like an American tourist. I’ve no complaints with her performance as such, understand, but she attempts no accent, not even a light pseudo-European lilt, and thus manages to stand out from the rest of the cast in a very undesireable way.)

Further compounding that complexity is the Pagan/Christian tension in Hrothgar’s kingdom. The original poem was a pre-Christian tale set several centuries before its telling by a Christian poet, and the Christian and Pagan elements are both present and strong without exhibiting much conflict. In the movie, Christianity is a new force in the society, promulgated by the Irish missionary Father Brendan (Eddie Marsan) — not perhaps meant to be the semi-historical sea-faring St. Brendan, but certainly intended to echo him. Brendan arrives not long after Beowulf and his company, and though the promises of Christian faith would at other times have been laughed at by the doughty Danes, the troubling continued slaughter by Grendel has many Danes, and eventually even Hrothgar, grasping at any agency which will strengthen them against their enemy. (Hrothgar may have the best line in the movie, when Brendan first appears touting his faith: “Christ, eh? Heard of him. He ever have much luck with trolls?”)

“Sutton Who?”

In fact, the entire script sings. Screenwriter Andrew Rai Berzins has managed to allow men of a pre-literate era to speak in a diction which couples native intelligence and unrefined manners, all using a vocabulary which is neither too archaically formal nor too modern and flip. I’ve used the word “earthy” previously, and it fits here too, in a world in which where you eat and where you piss have great significance. And in a nice touch, Beowulf’s party includes their own scop or bard, who composes snatches of the account of the adventure while it’s still going on. (The first “embedded reporter” in the English language, perhaps?)

And all of it takes place against a backdrop that would threaten to dwarf any tale less epic. The green, harsh hills and cliffs of Iceland wear their beauty and inhospitality up front; the behind-the-scenes segments on the DVD are a litany of disasters and near-disasters caused by the climate, the weather, and the landscape, and despite the hardships for the crew, the finished film is better for it. In every scene, even when the conflict with Grendel is only in the background, the setting is an omnipresent adversary for rugged men and women to stand against and shrug off.

Now: If you know the original tale, you know that there’s an element of the story which is terribly difficult to deal with in terms of a cohesive narrative structure. (And if you don’t know the original tale, don’t admit it around here, okay? We’re all high-falutin’ edumacated types.) I’m speaking, of course, of Grendel’s mother, who only enters the story once her son is dead, and takes up the battle. (And I hope that isn’t too much of a spoiler for you, but I figure that if the original’s been around over a thousand years, I really can’t be blamed for ruining the ending for you at this late date.) This may be the one glaring flaw to this movie, in that Grendel’s mother appears on the scene with scarcely any foreshadowing; especially with a backstory which ascribes all of Grendel’s motives to the death of his father, and a half-dozen scenes which show Grendel living alone in the wilderness, the introduction of his mother only after his death can’t be considered anything other than a flaw in the script. And her physical form, referred to by some as that of a “sea hag,” complicates the character of this otherwise internally-consistent milieu. We’ve been shown “trolls” as a nearly-extinct breed of non-magical archaic humanoids, but this “sea hag” is an unexplained appearance, and it’s never indicated how she and her kind fit in this otherwise plausible world.

**“C’mon, you gotta tell me who does your hair…”**

Because of this single major flaw (as well as several more minor ones, unnoteworthy individually but annoying in the aggregate), I can’t proclaim Beowulf & Grendel as an absolute triumph. But given that the original epic is not structured in such a way that it lends itself easily to the narrative mode we expect of a two-hour motion picture, I have no confidence that either of the upcoming versions of the tale will do better justice to the original. It may well be that this is the best movie version we will ever see of Beowulf, and it’s good enough that I can accept that with contentment.