Beowulf: The Movie and the Freedom of Texts

Neil Gaiman's Beowulf finally hits the theatres this weekend and expectations are high, both because this is the first blockbuster Beowulf movie ever and since Gaiman has a devoted following. As a Medievalist, an Anglo-Saxonist in particular, I'm in the first crowd, though I've seen the previews so know it's Beowulf with a twist. If you're a little rusty on your Old English literature, Beowulf is a poem written sometime between 700-1000AD (critics can't decide) and we only have a single manuscript copy, which dates from around 1000AD. It tells the story of a famous hero who fights three otherworldly creatures and reluctantly becomes king after his entire family dies. The movie adapts most of this, so it's not too crucial to know. (WARNING: movie spoilers follow.)

The poem has three major fight scenes: Beowulf vs. Grendel, his mother and a dragon. This traditionally flummoxes directors and scholars seeking to connect the first two with the last. Gaimen does manage to do it. He turns Grendel's mother into a seductress who tempts: 1) Hrothgar, 2) Beowulf and 3) possibly Wiglaf, which is where the movie ambiguously ends. (Wiglaf has been the closest thing we've gotten to a hero in the movie, though it's because he cares for people and does his job well rather than any great actions he accomplishes.) Angelina Jolie's -- err, I mean, Grendel's mother's -- motivation is to have children. (They keep getting killed by their fathers when they try to ravish the kingdom. This provides an interesting connection between the monsters and the humans as Grendel's mother explicitly says to Beowulf -- "you are not so different from my son.")

This is about all that Gaimen really keeps and my major problem with the movie is that once I stopped thinking, "this isn't Beowulf at all..." I couldn't get into the story they were telling: it all revolved around fighting and there wasn't even any stirring dialogue. "I am the ripper, the terror, the slasher. I am the teeth in the darkness! The talons in the night! My name is strength! And lust! And power! I AM BEOWULF!" doesn't really do it for me...

Which is part of the movie's point, I think. Noble dialogue would have suggested that there as some nobility to be found and the movie wanted to destroy the notion that there are men and there are heroes -- even Wiglaf is revealed throughout to be insufficient. And what I liked about the movie was how it deconstructed the notion of the hero, fully reflecting a modern spirit of skepticism.

Hrothgar wasn't the noble, flawed yet thoughtful king from the poem; he was instead a drunkard who wears a toga/sheet that threatens to slip off as he yelps, "This hall is made for fornication!" Hrothgar declares they need a hero and Beowulf answers the call, but he is revealed to be deeply flawed as well: he exaggerates stories of how many sea monsters he killed with Breca, claims to have killed Grendel's mother when he in fact had sex with her and only becomes a great king because of this deal with Grendel's mother. In short, he challenges the claim that hero tales should be accurate, suggesting that the lie is the point. It allows us to try to be more than we are. One character will later claim that "the time of heroes is dead" -- "the Christ God has killed it, leaving humankind nothing but weeping martyrs and fear and death." This sums up the entire movie for me since Gaiman's point is to show that everyone is flawed (even before Christianity) and insufficient to the tasks they have at hand for them. One of Beowulf's closing lines is to request to be remembered as a man, not a hero or a king. This plays on the expectations that we have of heroes and salvation, suggesting in the end we only do what we can do.

So while this isn't Beowulf at all, it's a fascinating commentary on our own time. The coolest part of the movie (aside from the scenes that just made me giggle because they were so poorly written -- I expected something more from Gaiman...) was this scene where a rat scampers across the roof beams of the mead hall, chats briefly with another mouse -- who is immediately carried away by a hawk. What makes this so neat is it's an inversion of the famous sparrow through the mead hall image quoted by Bede in a 7th century text. He recounts the conversion of Northumbria as follows: one of the pagan advisors listens to stories about this new Christian religion and advocates accepting it because it offers more information about the afterlife than their own religion does. The counsellor describes the soul as a sparrow, driven by the winds. The sparrow briefly flies through a mead hall before dashing back out into the unknown. The mead hall represents life and the snow eternity in this metaphor. Gaiman turns this hopeful conception on its head: instead of a sparrow, we have a rat. Instead of the storm, we have the loss of a friend because of a hungry hawk. It unsettles the notions of the expected order of the universe while emphasizing the uncertain cruelty of the world. And captures the spirit of the movie perfectly.

In short, the movie wasn't one that I would have seen were it not for the Beowulfian premise. It was an action movie that tried to be more, but became tangled in its own ambition. I think for what Gaiman wanted to do, he picked the wrong poem. Trying to make it work required him to sacrifice both the poem and his own vision. On the other hand, it was my first experience with 3D Imax, which is seriously the way to see movies! The CG still needs some work when images are panned, but the depth of field is realistic. This movie was a good one for this adaptation because it does try to blur the boundaries between the theatre and the screen -- the trees jump out at you, the scene in the hall is blocked at times by posts as if you're pacing the outside wall and so forth. But again, what they try to do and what they accomplish were so much at odds...