Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis’ latest firm shove at the envelope of cinematic technology, is an oddity wrapped in a gimmick, and it’s genuinely hard to say whether such a curious juggling act is what keeps the film afloat, sinks it in the end or both. the gimmick in this case is, of course, the latest confluence of waning ticket sales and America’s hot-and-cold love affair with the (cue big reverb) Third Dimension. the oddity? it’s an animated film “for adults.”or at least it would like to think of itself that way. miles from the edgy realms of Heavy Metal, Fritz and the like, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s adaptation of Britain’s oldest epic slouches for the most part toward the considerably easier task of being an animated film for teenage boys: noisy, dark, violent and awkward in its embrace of sexuality.
more than that, though, Beowulf flubs its aspirations to maturity by playing unintentionally fast and loose with its tone. by all appearances, the film wants to be taken seriously; there are somber moments and others that carry the gravity of death and monstrous destruction. but there’s also grand miscalculations, none more egregious than Beowulf’s in-the-buff showdown with Grendel, which counterbalances its tension and brutality with blithe genital-obscurance visual gags. (sensitive though I am to inappropriate laughter at the movie theater, Beowulf earned every awkward guffaw.)
it’s admittedly no great surprise Gaiman and Avary cast a re-interpretive eye toward Beowulf’s heroes-and-villains simplicity; the millennium between the poem’s transcription and its inevitable apex of being “that movie where Angelina Jolie is all golden and naked” has seen its share of changes in how we approach concepts like good and evil, and the script makes plenty of room for shades of gray. but their deconstruction of the heroic ideal muddies as it wrestles with Zemeckis’ spectacle, which ends up casting aside the quotation marks in favor of an honest-to-god hero.
as destabilizing as that is to the film’s intellectual identity, though, it’s the spectacle that really defines Beowulf. using the same motion capture technology he pioneered on his Polar Express (and honed significantly with last year’s underrated Monster House), Zemeckis achieves a look that hovers, as the story itself does, between truth and myth, and it, too, may be thematically appropriate that both Grendel (Crispin Glover, in an obscenely perfect piece of casting) and the Dragon achieve a greater verisimilitude than any of the film’s human inhabitants. Beowulf himself looks fine throughout, but he obviously received the bulk of the animators’ attention (especially with regard to actor Ray Winstone’s considerably less chiseled physique), while most of the other characters, women in particular, parade the array of imperfections that keep computer animation from yielding passable photo-real people, including the damning “uncanny valley” effect, suggesting that the closer these figures come to humanity, the more off-putting their appearances can be. (kids are still having nightmares about The Polar Express.)
overall, however, it’s to the animators’ credit that such evident flaws somehow fail to derail the film visually. though about 20 percent of the animation can be distracting (even occasionally cringe-inducing), the remaining 80 percent redeems it confidently, and its 3D presentation strengthens it further. anyone who’s ever seen a film in 3D knows the “oh my god it’s coming right at us” drill, and Zemeckis isn’t entirely above such parlor tricks, but neither does he pander to the format; there are a few visual flourishes that draw unnecessary attention to themselves, but by and large, the film subdues gimmickry in favor of an enhanced depth of field, pushing the unreal that much further into reality.
still, Beowulf confounds. it’s tempting to suggest a more conventional mix of live action and CG would have yielded a work of greater dignity and depth. (most of the film’s performers seem to have embraced the challenge of shining through such clumsy avatars, but i’d much rather see John Malkovich’s Unferth in his real-life glory.) but without the tech-demo trimmings, would it be as fun, or even as engaging? it’s hard to say, but the questions themselves betray Beowulf as a fair deal short of satisfying.
(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)
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