Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander: Film, History, and Cultural Studies

The Popular Reception of Alexander

The Popular Reception of Alexander jon solomon A LEXANDER grossed $13,687,000 during its opening weekend in the United States in late November 2004, a disappointing sum for a film budgeted at approximately $160 million. Over a run of sixty-eight days until it was withdrawn from theatrical release at the end of January 2005, Alexander earned just over $34 million from movie-going audiences in the United States. With foresight, Oliver Stone, Intermedia Films, and Warner Bros. pre-sold the film in many markets through a host of international distributors , guaranteeing that it would at least break even.1 Opening from November to February, the film brought in over $132 million2 for a worldwide total of approximately $167 million. None of these totals includes VHS or DVD rentals or sales, cable agreements, or other merchandising . As anyone can see, the film was not a financial failure, despite its disappointing theatrical sales in the United States. Film Critics and Historians The failure to attract movie-goers to the box office in the United States cannot be attributed solely to the wide array of negative reviews by both popular and erudite critics. The year 2004 also saw the release of 36 Troy, which received equally negative reviews but earned $133 million in domestic box-office receipts. In contrast, Fox Searchlight’s Sideways received glowing reviews and five nominations for Academy Awards, but it earned only $71 million, ranking fortieth in box-office receipts for 2004 and trailing behind Christmas with the Kranks. Nor can the disappointing box-office performance of Alexander be attributed to the general claim made in the United States that the film is “not Great,” as Peter Travers punned in Rolling Stone, or “emotionally and intellectually incoherent,” as Newsweek’s David Ansen claimed.3 Indeed, a number of American reviewers would have us believe that their greatest objections were to Colin Farrell’s blond wig and Angelina Jolie’s accent, or to the fact that Jolie at age twenty-nine played the mother of Farrell, age twenty-eight.4 This kind of flippant criticism did spill over into at least one subsequent review by an Alexander historian. Ian Worthington, amid an otherwise academic review of the film’s historical accuracy, felt compelled to add that “Farrell, with dreadful blond hair (although accurate ), is simply not credible as Alexander. . . . Angelina Jolie, eyes flashing and snakes coiling around her body, plays Alexander’s mother Olympias. More could be made of her scheming nature, and a real distraction was that she is made to speak in an accent that makes her sound like Count Dracula.”5 But these complaints do not add up to a compelling reason for avoiding the film at the theater. A Google search for the words “bad,” “wig,” and “movie” produces scores of reviews for films ranging from Blow and V for Vendetta to Beyond the Sea and A Sound of Thunder. A search for “poor,” “accent,” and “movie” produces millions of hits. In fact, when teaching film to students, I never allow them to employ the “Canon of Film Non-Criticisms.” This includes attacks on such things as accents and wigs, but it begins with superficial complaints like “It was too long,” “It was boring,” and “It wasn’t like the book.” All of these complaints were launched at Alexander. Travers called the film a “buttnumbathon.” Even such an experienced critic as Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic dwelled on the film’s length: “Alexander is very long and very torpid . . . and three hours of non-originality is a bit hard on one’s behind. . . . After the three hours—though it seemed longer—I was still bewildered.”6 I have yet to discover a creditable essay maintaining that the linchpin problem with Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, or Lawrence of Arabia—three of the top five films on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films list—was that they were too long. A theatrical experience can, of course, become tedious, but not The Popular Reception of Alexander 37 simply because it runs long: it happens because the spectator is not fully engaged in the experience, a phenomenon to which we will return later. As for the second no-no, historian/columnist Victor Davis Hanson complained, “In reality, the movie proved not so much scandalous as boring.”7 The third rule of the canon, “It wasn’t like the book,” applies to...