We create our own nightmares

There are two contradictory ways to look at an adaptation. One is to see how closely it sticks to the original; the other is to ask how and to what end it transforms the source. Judged by the first criterion, Robert Zemeckis’ film adaptation of Beowulf fails. So radical are its departures from the text that the film comes across more like a piece of “fan fiction” than like an audio-visual transcription of the epic.

But judged by the second criterion, the film is a success. Zemeckis is clearly telling us a different story, and the question is not whether it is “faithful” but rather whether the new story is worth-telling and is told well. The Anglo-Saxon epic is, among many other things, about the transience of life. Beowulf rescues the Danes from the monster Grendel and then from its mother, a sea-witch. He becomes king of the Geats and reigns for “fifty years.” When a dragon ravages the kingdom, he fights it but dies in the venture.

The sense of imminent doom pervades the epic. It opens and closes with a funeral — the first, of Scyld Shefing, founder of the Danish kingdom which Hrothgar was to head; the second, of Beowulf himself, whose death signifies the beginning of the end for the kingdom of the Geats. Scenes of celebration are undercut by reminders of death, treachery and loss. The epic is a grim, unsparing world, smelling of mortality, which only heroic action makes meaningful.

Zemeckis’ version does not dwell on that theme as much as on the fallibility of his hero. In that it is very much a product of its time, where deflating grand narratives and shattering traditional beliefs are the order of the day. At least two earlier adaptations of Beowulf, namely, John Gardner’s novel Grendel and the last year’s film Beowulf and Grendel, have retold the story to show how the hero is also a monster and conversely how Grendel is “more sinned against than sinning,” but Zemeckis’ film outdoes them.

His most audacious move is to make Hrothgar Grendel’s father and to make the dragon Beowulf’s son. The mother of both monsters is the unnamed sea-witch. By such an ingenious twist, he solves the structural “problem” of the epic. A “faithful” adaptation, by Hollywood standards, runs the risk of redundancy and anti-climax. Why end with defeat and hoary old age? Thus, earlier adaptations, even revisionist ones, usually focus on just the Grendel episode, arguably the most exciting and least morally disquieting of Beowulf’s three battles. Zemeckis unifies the episodes in a chain of cause and effect and makes a thematic statement in the process: That we create our own nightmares, that our past deeds have a way of creeping up on us, that Grendel is within us as much as outside us, and that we are, to use Christian phraseology, born with original sin.

Ingenious, too, is the manner by which the film anticipates and defuses objections to the liberties it takes. Zemeckis gives a naturalistic explanation for some of the fantastic events described in the epic. So Beowulf does not rip off Grendel’s arm the way he does in the epic (i.e., as one would break a piece of toast) but he applies the laws of physics, using a metal chain, a pillar as a pulley, himself as a counter weight, and the edge of a heavy door as a cutter, to dismember Grendel. The next scene shows people recounting the fight, but what we hear is the fantastic version — the very version we find in the epic, as though the poem is the copy and the movie is the original. Thus does Zemeckis reverse the relationship between source and adaptation. In another scene, he even has a bard recite lines from the epic to accompany a pantomime of the slaying of Grendel.

This isn’t mere cleverness; it touches on philosophical questions — how is myth-making also meaning-making, for instance, or can one really build an ethic on an untruth — for which credit must be given to screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman.

Visually, the film represents an advance in computer animation. The Polar Express showed what digital technology can do. Beowulf takes it even a step further: The very freckles on the computer-generated images of Ray Winstone (as Beowulf), Anthony Hopkins (as Hrothgar), John Malkovich (as Unferth), and the rest of the cast look unnervingly real — a digital, moving Madame Toussaud’s. Those who enjoy extended, dizzying, and noisy fight sequences will be glad to find that the technology is exploited to the fullest.

But there are moments, too, of unintended levity. Grendel’s mother, voiced by Angelina Jolie, wears stilettos, as if she were in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. (More serious-minded critics would find the film misogynist.) Then there is Grendel’s “motive” for invading Hrothgar’s meadhall. In the epic Grendel, “spawn of Cain,” represents the force of chaos, so he is threatened by the order which Heorot and the “song of creation” represent. The epic does not quite bother to give a naturalistic explanation for Grendel’s behavior but simply pits contrary abstract principles each against the other. In this movie, however, Grendel is given extra-sensitive ears. Viewed in the Philippine context, Zemeckis’ Grendel is merely putting an end (rightfully) to inebriated, off-key renditions of My Way at the next-door, all-night videoke bar.

One can use that, though not the charge of misogyny, against the film only facetiously, of course. By and large, Zemeckis’ Beowulf is a thoughtful adaptation, enriched by reverberations of other texts, notably the Faerie Queene, Malory, and even The Grand Inquisitor. It is not the Beowulf one remembers reading in school. It is decidedly a different text, intended for another audience and stating another theme — on the whole intelligent and well-made. In short, and in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, Eæt wæs god movie.