MovieFreak.com review:Brawny Beowulf Lost in Translation

Movie Reviews




Beowulf & Grendel

Rating: NR
Distributor: Arclight Films
Release Date: June 16, 2006
Review Posted: Jun 16, 2006

Reviewed by Sara Michelle Fetters





a SIFF 2006 review



Brawny Beowulf Lost in Translation




If nothing else, “Beowulf and Grendel” (a smash in Canada and opening in the United States today exclusively in Seattle) looks fantastic. Shot on location in the wilds of Iceland, this adaptation of the classic 9th Century Anglo Saxon poem is a visual masterpiece, images of Viking longships sailing through iceberg covered waters and panoramic vistas of snowy windswept plains simply breathtaking.



The movie itself is more of a mixed bag. The story of Beowulf (Gerard Butler, “The Phantom of the Opera”), a hero traveling across the sea to aid King Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgård, “King Arthur”) in his battle against a nefarious troll named Grendel (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, “K-19: the Widowmaker”), the film is a hodgepodge of cliché and spectacle that infuriates almost as much as it entertains. The opening twenty minutes in particular are an unbelievably tough sit, director Sturla Gunnarsson (“Gerry & Louise”) and writer Andrew Rai Berzins (“Blood & Donuts”) taking forever to find their footing.



But about the same time Beowulf and his band of fighters arrive on the Dane’s shore ready to pick up swords in allegiance to a king who once did the same for them, the movie takes a thrilling turn for the better slowly building in both majesty and power. Then the climax comes and the duo bungle it, the final moments a muddled mess of myth, pathos and humanity that’s as head scratching and odd as any I’m likely to ever come across. To say it falls apart would be an understatement, and yet as bizarre and maudlin as this final is something about “Beowulf and Grendel” refuses to allow me to completely write it off.



Part of the reason for my hesitation lays in the performances of actors Butler and Skarsgård. They do far more for this epic than this epic does for them. The former makes a fine Beowulf. Strong, masculine, sure of his strength yet filled with a sad despair in the realization that his days of being a hero or coming to an end, killing for the sake of killing nowhere near as easy as it used to be. Butler exemplifies these conflicting emotions perfectly; his sexy frame a sublime hanger for the emotional firestorm brewing deep within.



Skarsgård is even better. His King Hrothgar is a drunken, broken, scraggily wisp of a man, a once proud warrior now unable to do anything to help his people in the face of a marauding troll. Worse, it’s a menace he unwittingly helped create, a choice made in his younger years haunting all his people now at the end of his days. The actor nails all of these multifarious traits with ease, two of his scenes with Butler so robust they echo in the heart long after the rest of the picture has faded from memory.



I also like how Gunnarsson and Berzins go out of their way to deconstruct the hero myth. The truth about Grendel shakes Beowulf down to his core, and what at first appears to be a simple mission of destruction instead becomes a battle for the remainders of his soul. Creature and warrior have no reason to fight, but the more Beowulf tries to find a way to end this conflict peacefully the more fate conspires to bring him and Grendel to blows. There is a melancholic bathos to this that’s wonderfully touching, a sad moment of a lonely boy watching as a hero places stones over his dead father’s grave worthy of every tear I shed.



Unfortunately, so much of the rest of this epic is a decided mixed bag. The luminous Sarah Polley (“Dawn of the Dead”) shows up as a witch who warns Beowulf of the serpentine trap in which he’s fallen, but her part is so grotesquely laughable I wasn’t sure if I should be sorry for the actress or appalled at the atrocities she’s required to endure. Worse, the final battle is an outright catastrophe, Gunnarsson’s staging of the conflict so murky, jumbled and over-edited it was impossible to tell what was going on.



I’m left a little bewildered as to how this has developed such a devoted following in Canada and at every film festival it has played (including two sold out showing at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival). It certainly looks sensational, and the acting by the leads is definitely far above the norm, but the script is a mess and the director doesn’t handle the climactic action well at all. By no means is it a total loss, of course, but by the time it was over I couldn’t help but feel “Beowulf and Grendel” had lost something vitally important somewhere in translation.



Film Rating: **1/2 (out of 4)




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