Robert Zemeckis' cinematic retelling of Beowulf belongs in a category of films as different as Gettysburg, Braveheart, and JFK. It is the kind of film that separates the filmgoers from the purists - those who go to films with the sole purpose of being entertained, and those who value accuracy above all else, and view faithfulness, either to history or to literary source, as the jewel in the crown rather than a mere silver lining. Early reviewers of Beowulf have had a lot of fun describing the film as "not your English literature professor's Beowulf." It is much more serious than that - this is the kind of film that would send J.R.R. Tolkien fleeing from the theater.
That hardly matters, though, since the star of this latest cinematic rendering of the eighth-century Old English epic is not the words, or even the larger-than-life characters, but the animation, which even after Zemeckis' Polar Express still seems fresh and groundbreaking. Since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Zemeckis has pioneered the concept of placing human beings and animation in the same world and making them interact with one another. In Roger Rabbit, the actors and the animation inhabited the same space, but with the advance of performance-capture technology in this film and The Polar Express, he has gone one further. He has fashioned animation and human existence together as one glorious hybrid. The result is a cinematic landscape that is both unsettlingly haunting and startlingly beautiful in equal measures.
The storyline of the classic epic serves here merely as the engine for that landscape to unfold before our very eyes. The Kingdom of Denmark, lorded over by the hedonistic King Hrothgar (a wonderfully unhinged Anthony Hopkins), is terrorized by the hideous, yet infantile, monster Grendel, whose movements and facial twinges are taken from Crispin Glover in a masterful physical performance. When Hrothgar's subjects are terrorized by Grendel in the great mead hall of Herot, the great warrior Bewoulf (voiced by that great cockney bruiser, Ray Winstone) strides in for the glorious kill. When he disposes of Grendel, he earns the wrath of his demonic mother, and later, a hideous fire-breathing dragon. The more Zemeckis thrills us with the show-stopping man-versus-monster set pieces, and the more the animation (more polished and lifelike than in Polar Express) seduces our eyes and our imaginations, the more the audience will come to realize that this may be one story that truly merited animation after all.
2008 Woodie Awards
