Troy (2004) Review: Glory and Its Discounts

Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy makes one decision at the outset that determines everything else about it, and it’s worth stating plainly before getting to the swordplay: there are no gods in it. Not one. Apollo gets a statue, and the statue gets its head knocked off with a sword, and that’s as close as any Olympian comes to actually showing up. This is, on its face, a strange thing to do to the Iliad, whose entire architecture depends on Athena grabbing Achilles by the hair and Aphrodite spiriting Paris out of a duel he’s about to lose. Petersen throws all of that out and bets the whole picture on a much narrower, much riskier proposition: that the war itself, the human machinery of pride and grief that grinds through it, is interesting enough without the machinery of heaven. Astonishingly, for about half its running time, this bet pays off beautifully. For the other half, you can feel the film’s nerve failing, reaching for exactly the kind of divine intervention it swore off, except now it’s called “screenwriting.”

The opening is a piece of pure myth-logic dressed as pragmatism: Agamemnon, having strong-armed most of Greece into a loose empire, offers Thessaly’s King Triopas a way to avoid a real battle — champion against champion. Triopas sends out Boagrius, a mountain of a man; Agamemnon sends for Achilles, who shows up late, bored, and visibly contemptuous of the whole arrangement, and ends the fight in about four seconds. It’s a terrific piece of characterization disguised as an action beat. Before Achilles says a word of consequence, we already know he thinks kings are furniture and wars are vanity projects, and that he’ll show up for the killing anyway, because killing is the only thing he’s sure he’s good at.

The film is smart enough to give him a real philosophical case for that contempt, and smarter still to route it through his mother rather than a battlefield speech. Thetis, played by Julie Christie with a stillness that borders on the supernatural without ever technically being supernatural, offers Achilles the cleanest binary in the film: stay home, marry, have children who’ll love you and forget you within a generation, or go to Troy, die there, and be spoken of for three thousand years. “Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed,” Achilles will later tell Briseis, and it’s the closest thing the film has to a thesis statement — the gods are absent, but the bargain they used to represent (immortality purchased with mortality) hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just been relocated from Olympus into Achilles’ own vanity, which is a much more interesting place for it to live.

Meanwhile, over in the plot that will actually cause the war, Paris is busy being the story’s most polarizing creation. Orlando Bloom plays him soft-featured and lovesick, sneaking Helen out of Sparta under his brother Hector’s nose and setting the whole catastrophe in motion out of what plays, in the early scenes, as pure adolescent selfishness. Hector, played by Eric Bana in what’s unambiguously the film’s best and most controlled performance, is furious and then resigned, and the choice to make Hector the practical, weary moral center of the Trojan side rather than Priam or Paris is the shrewdest structural decision in the script. Every scene Bana is in tightens; every scene Bloom is in, at least early on, goes a little slack, which becomes a real problem once the film decides — and it does decide, deliberately and to the fury of a certain kind of purist — that Paris needs to become someone worth rooting for by the end.

That decision is the hinge the whole back half turns on, and it’s where Troy starts trading Homer for melodrama at a rate that should worry anyone who cares about the trade. In the actual myth, Menelaus survives the war and sails home with Helen; here, Hector kills him mid-duel to save a wounded, humiliated Paris, which solves an emotional problem (we need Hector to be heroic and Paris to be pitiable in the same scene) by torching a much bigger one (Menelaus was never supposed to die at all, and his death removes an entire strand of the actual Trojan War’s aftermath). Agamemnon, similarly, doesn’t survive to be murdered in his bath by his wife back in Mycenae — Briseis stabs him in the city’s smoking rubble instead, which is dramatically satisfying in the way a well-aimed gut-punch is satisfying, and also has nothing to do with the story being adapted. Patroclus stops being Achilles’ lover and becomes his younger cousin, a fig-leaf substitution that lets the film keep the grief and discard the eroticism, and if you’ve read the poem this bothers you more than it probably should, because the grief still works: when Hector removes the dead boy’s helmet and realizes who he’s actually killed, and when Achilles turns on his own lieutenant Eudorus in a blind fury before setting the pyre alight, the emotional mechanics of loss are completely intact even with the relationship sanitized underneath them.

None of which is to say the film is only interested in destruction for its own sake — some of its best writing is in the small, unglamorous friction of command. Odysseus, played by Sean Bean with an ease that makes every other performance in the tent scenes look slightly overworked, spends most of his screen time translating between Achilles’ contempt for politics and Agamemnon’s need for a weapon he can’t actually control. “War is young men dying and old men talking,” he tells Achilles at one point, which is the kind of line that sounds like folk wisdom and is actually just accurate description, and it’s Bean’s flat, unimpressed delivery that sells it. Brian Cox’s Agamemnon, meanwhile, is the film’s closest thing to an actual villain, not because he’s cartoonishly evil but because he’s the one character whose stated motives (uniting Greece, being remembered, having his name carved in stone) are never once dressed up as anything nobler than what they are. “History remembers kings, not soldiers,” he tells Achilles, and it’s a genuinely chilling line precisely because the film spends its whole second half proving him wrong in the most punishing way available: by having Achilles’ name outlast his by roughly three thousand years and counting.

The film’s structural masterstroke, and probably its most purely successful forty minutes, is the Hector-Achilles duel, staged not as a chaotic melee but as a horribly intimate two-hander in front of a silent audience on both walls. Achilles throws down his own helmet before they fight — “now you know who you’re fighting” — which turns the combat from generic swordplay into something closer to a ritual execution both men have agreed to attend. Bana plays Hector’s fear as something entirely separate from cowardice, which is a hard note to hit and he hits it; Pitt, whatever you make of his line readings elsewhere, is genuinely frightening here, all coiled economy and unblinking focus, and the fight choreography — no cutaways to divine intervention, no wire-work heroics — earns the comparisons to Kurosawa that got thrown around at the time. It’s the one sequence where the film’s no-gods rule pays out its full dramatic interest rate: two men killing each other for reasons that have nothing to do with either of them personally, and everything to do with the pride of men who aren’t even in the room.

Which makes it all the stranger that the film’s actual best scene isn’t a battle at all. Priam’s nighttime visit to Achilles’ tent — sneaking, unarmed, into the camp of the man who dragged his son’s body behind a chariot — is where Peter O’Toole does the best work in the picture, and it’s not close. He plays Priam not as a broken old man begging but as someone using grief as a kind of leverage, forcing Achilles to answer a question with real moral weight: how many cousins, how many sons, how many brothers has he killed in his career of “glory,” and does that record entitle him to any grievance at all against the boy who killed his? Pitt, wisely, plays Achilles’ response as something closer to exhaustion than mercy, and the scene earns its quiet the way the duel earned its violence — by refusing to cut away from two men actually looking at each other.

The horse, when it finally arrives, is handled with real restraint — no CGI excess, just Odysseus noticing a soldier’s toy and quietly building an entire strategy around twelve days of mourning he extracted from Achilles almost as an afterthought. The sack of the city that follows is the film’s ugliest and most necessary sequence, precisely because it refuses to let the horse be clever in the way the rest of the film has been clever. It’s arson and butchery, dressed as a religious offering, walked through the gates by a king who wanted so badly to believe the war was over that he ignored his own son’s warning to burn the thing where it stood. Paris gets the film’s most audacious late invention — not a coward hiding while Troy burns, but the man who kills Achilles, first through the heel and then, when that doesn’t finish the job, three more times through the chest, each arrow pulled out and each one replaced, until Achilles simply runs out of body to absorb them. It’s a death that keeps the shape of the myth (the famous heel) while stripping out its cause (a god steadying the arrow), which is the film’s whole method in miniature: keep the image, discard the metaphysics, hope the human version hits just as hard. It mostly does.

Where the film runs into real trouble is with the women, and it isn’t close. Diane Kruger’s Helen is given almost nothing to do except stand very still and be looked at, which might have worked as commentary on how the men around her have reduced her to an object of war if the film showed any sign of knowing that’s what it was doing; instead it just seems to have run out of ideas for her once the plot no longer required her to be desired. Rose Byrne’s Briseis fares much better on the page — she gets the film’s sharpest rebuke of Achilles’ whole worldview, telling him flatly that killing is his only talent and that’s his curse, not his glory — but the character is still primarily an instrument for softening Achilles rather than a person with a war of her own, and her final act of killing Agamemnon plays more like a plot mechanism than a culmination of anything we’ve watched her become.

James Horner’s score, composed under serious time pressure, does its most effective work exactly where you’d expect — the duel, Hector’s death, the burning of Patroclus — and its least effective work everywhere the film cuts to Helen and Paris murmuring at each other in soft focus, where the music tries to manufacture a tenderness the writing hasn’t actually built. This is, in miniature, the whole film’s problem and its whole film’s achievement sitting side by side: whenever Troy trusts its men to be frightened, proud, and stupid in front of each other, it’s as good as any war epic of its era; whenever it remembers it also promised a great love story, it goes soft in exactly the way its own hero warned it not to. Achilles, dying, tells Briseis she was his peace in a lifetime of war, and it’s a lovely line, delivered with real feeling — but it lands harder in retrospect, as an elegy for the war movie the film actually was, than in the moment, as a romance the film never quite earned.

And yet the closing narration, Odysseus at the pyre insisting that names outlast men the way stone outlasts flesh, is the correct note to end on, because it’s the only moment where the film’s real subject and its stated one line up exactly. Troy isn’t really about the Trojan War. It’s about the machinery by which a war becomes a story, and a man becomes a legend, and a legend outlives every fact that would complicate it — which is, not coincidentally, exactly the process the film itself has just performed on Homer. It kept the duel, the horse, the heel, the old king kneeling in the dark, and quietly discarded the parts of the poem too strange, too divine, or too inconvenient to survive the transfer. That’s not really a betrayal of the Iliad. It’s the Iliad’s own logic, applied to itself: some things get remembered, and everything else — Menelaus’s survival, Patroclus’s love, an entire pantheon — gets left on the beach.