Disappointed that this movie didn’t distill Alexander the Great’s greatness - his pan-national military quests, his majestic charisma - down to one or two open-mouthed kissing scenes between Colin Farrell and Jared Leto, the mainstream gay media damned it with faint praise and let mainstream reviews, most of which were also poor, banish Alexander to an early video release.

While it’s sadly not surprising to see gay commentators be reductive and idiotic, it is a shame that this rich and beautiful movie had to be relegated to turkey of the season. Alexander's primary liability is a lumbering biopic style, which tries to cram in every single major event in its subject’s life and times, and throw in a few psychoanalytic clues to his identity for good measure. Stone would have been better to followed the Amadeus template, where a specific period or relationship is studied to evoke a sense of the subject’s identity and times, rather than this lumbering, checklisting Gandhi approach. But apart from this structural flaw, the film has many merits, including a level of sensual intoxication that easily overwhelms the constipation of the storyline.

Farrell plays the great conqueror, who journeyed from Macedonia to the edges of India, annexing and enriching every state and culture in between in a flabbergastingly short time (he was dead at 32). A sexually ambigious, charismatic genius, Alexander burnt down the palace at Persepolis after a drunken orgy and killed one of his best friends and closest advisors, Cleitus, in a heated alcohol-feuled argument. Plutarch claimed that Alexander descended from Zeus, who made love with Alexander’s mother Olympia, who slept with snakes to keep her boorish husband, Philip II of Macedon, away from her at night.

We see plenty of these snakes whenver Angelina Jolie, who plays Olympia, appears on screen. They coil around her tanned ankles, and she fingers them affectionately as she stares out windows and vacantly addresses her adored, faraway son in a very distracting accent. Jolie is unbelievably hot and she grabs the super-babe power essence of an ancient queen with ease, but the quasi-sexual bond she is shown to share with her son presents trouble for both her and Farrell, who don’t share any charisma and who look uncomfortable in their scenes together. It doesn’t help that Jolie is much the same age as Farrell, and so a temporal confusion occurs whenever they’re on screen together – are we in a flashback scene here, oh we can’t be, he’s in it as well and so on. The overweight and aging Val Kilmer overcooks the ham as Philip II, and many of his long banquet or trying-to-fuck Olympia scenes go nowhere. The whole childhood of Alexander is a separate story, and these weird performances from Kilmer and Jolie make it all seem even more redundant – get rid of them.

Anthony Hopkins, made up to look about a hundred and fifty, plays a narrator who records Alexander’s life at the library of Alexandria, a grand building which in this film looks more like Elton John’s bathroom or the set for an ad for Yves St. Laurent's "Kouros".

However, a great movie is here, it’s just occasionally hidden by bits of fat such as those mentioned above. Beyond the absolutely stunning battle scenes which feature charging elephants and a retreating King Darius of Persia, Stone has induced a syrupy mirage of the shadowy legend that everyone seems to want to claim as one of their own. Stone has captured what seems to me a very resonant essence of pre-Christian sexuality, with his camera falling with equal adoration on nubile women and hunky men, and Alexander’s love life cascading across a series of stunningly beautiful people with no regard for our boring addiction to socialised sexual identities.

Related Reading:
Midnight Express

Review by Mark Adnum